“I just want us to talk about it sometimes. About them. About the past. Rather than pretend it never happened.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I can do that.”

She leaned over the center console and hugged him. He hugged her back, his eyes stinging. He was going to miss her so much next year.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

The next week Sawyer was at the bar for his customary Friday-night hangout with Jake and Law. It had been a blessedly quiet week. The Labor Day long weekend with its mermaids, majorettes, DUIs, Charles Collins encounters, and painful heart-to-heart chats was behind him. Clara had started her last year of high school, and aside from a “soul-crushing amount of calculus homework,” everything was fine on that front.

He usually looked at Friday nights as a chance to chill out, but tonight the guys were on his case—about the canoe. He’d moved on from YouTube and gotten it out of the shed it had spent several years in and set it up in the garage—and asked Jake to help him finish it.

“But why now, all of a sudden?” Law asked.

“No reason,” he lied. Well, it wasn’t a total lie. Obviously it had to do with Evie’s return—the boat had been for her initially. But he honestly couldn’t articulate why her appearance had suddenly triggered an intense desire to finish it.

Law had been a couple years ahead of Sawyer in school, so maybe he didn’t remember how intense Sawyer’s relationship with Evie had been.

“This is about Eve Abbott, isn’t it?” Law asked.

Dammit.

“Why have you been dragging that thing around all these years? Your life was total chaos there for a while. You lived in an apartment when you and Clara first moved out. What did you do with it then?”

“He stored it at my parents’ house,” Jake said.

“Well, damn, Sawyer. You—” Law’s attention was drawn by something behind Sawyer that inspired a gleeful grin. “Maybe we can ask her about it.”

Sawyer’s heart rate kicked up as he turned on his stool.

She walked up to the bar wearing a beach cover-up. Her hair was up in another of those maddening, unstable-looking topknots, but it was damp. The heat was making little wisps curl up along her hairline.

She looked like an ad for sunscreen. If ads for sunscreen featured angels sent to earth to dazzle all the grubby, beer-swilling mortals.

She came up to the bar and issued a bland “Hi” to all of them. Her eyes did not linger any longer on Sawyer than on the others. Had he been expecting them to?

In addition to looking like an ad for sunscreen, she smelled like one, all sea breeze and coconut. He tried not to sniff too overtly, but he must not have succeeded because Law shot him a quizzical look.