I try to ignore Lucky’s gift—just a simple gesture of good faith, not a grand gesture of love—as best I can as we finish up closing the shop. And I keep ignoring it as we walk over to the historic district to meet Grandma and Aunt Franny. I shouldn’t be thinking about Lucky at all. After all, Victory Day in Beauty is a holiday bigger than Fourth of July. All our town’s fireworks budget is saved up for this, the last big hurrah of the summer. The waterfront in the historic district is completely jammed with tourists and locals. Everything smells of sugar and barbecue smoke, and there’s a really loud, really white, really annoying jazz band playing in a grandstand stage at the end of Goodly Pier.

“This will be good to get your mind off things, shutterbug,” Mom says as we stop to survey the crowds by the pier and wait for Grandma and Aunt Franny, who are supposed to meet us here by the food truck area.

Oh, sure. It’s easy to tell myself I’m not nursing a broken heart of my own making and carting around a chest filled with fluttering rabid bats when I’m surrounded by throngs of garishly dressed, smiling strangers, baking in the summer heat and waving patriotic sparklers.

Forget Lamplighter’s Lane. This is the true portal to hell, right here.

Below us, Redemption Beach is crammed, and the crowds in this area are only going to get worse, because the beach and the Harborwalk are the prime viewing spots for tonight’s main event.

The annual flotilla.

Anyone with a boat to show off has it lined up in front of the Yacht Club right now. The big yachts from Regatta Week are leading things off—irony of ironies, Coast Life magazine is one of the festival sponsors, and their logo is on every banner down here. Regardless, fancy or plain, all the boats are awaiting things to get dark enough for the grandmaster to fire the signal, releasing the flotilla of boats into the harbor, all of them decked out in thousands of white fairy lights, where they’ll parade around massive torches.

Torches. Lit on fire. On the water.

Why? Who even knows, but people seem to love it. I’m not sure when this tradition started, but Beauty has been doing some version of it since my mom was a child. Evie says the chief of police’s boat crashed into a torch and caught on fire two years ago. Really wish I could’ve seen that.