Louisa glanced from Maggie to Cody and back again. “Sorry; I got held up with the Tacione family.” She opened the brown paper bag and pulled out Centre Street Bistro to-go containers as she talked. “Mrs. Tacione brought her five sisters to the island for the first time, and you know they aren’t super wealthy, but I promised her we would make them feel like they were.” Louisa was beaming now. “You should’ve seen their faces when they walked into their rental cottage. I got them an amazing deal with my friend Leo and—” She stopped and met Cody’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”

He smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “Just admiring how good you are at what you do.”

Her mouth spread into a slow smile, her lips soft pink and utterly kissable. He tossed Maggie a glance and saw that the old woman had dozed off again, so he stood, wrapped his arms around Louisa, and kissed her right there in the middle of Maggie’s living room.

Kissing her had become his favorite thing to do, but there was something different about it now, as if something inside him had shifted in the moments before she arrived.

A single word kept running through his mind—a word that carried more weight to it than he’d expected, a word that filled him up like an overflowing pool. A word that summed up everything he’d been searching for since the day his family left Nantucket all those years ago.

Forgiven.

He wanted that. He’d given it to Louisa—it was time to give it to himself. And to accept the forgiveness of a God who offered grace for mistakes like his.

As the kiss melted into a deep embrace, he prayed for the strength to follow through.

It’s what his father would’ve wanted.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

SOMEHOW, AFTER THAT NIGHT IN MAGGIE’S HOUSE, Louisa felt like she and Cody grew even closer, as if every barrier that had been keeping them apart had suddenly fallen away.

She’d spent her life wishing for his forgiveness, but she had no idea how freeing it would actually be to have it.

They spent less time talking about the memorial and their parents and everything that had been broken between them before and more time focusing on what was in front of them now. How much better it was to have something to look forward to, instead of always being focused on what had come before.

Some nights, he showed up just as she was finishing her work and stood in the doorway of her office, watching her. It made working impossible. He’d never been much of a talker, but he was an observer, and being the object of that observation turned her insides wobbly.