Finley had ordered the lettering, but that was before her leukemia came back. The last Willa knew, the name was still rolled up in a box somewhere. Seeing it here now is another painful jolt to her already battered heart.

A dark head appears in the companionway, and Cam steps up into the cockpit from the cabin. He’s shirtless, and bathed in the rays of a brand-new sun, he looks golden. His sleepy brown eyes wander a lazy path up from Willa’s ruby toenails, and a warm shiver raises goose bumps on the backs of her thighs. His grin holds the smugness of someone who knows the effect he has on girls—even girls who have no intention of falling at his feet. “Hey, little Willa.”

Campbell Nicholson is a literal genius who dropped out of Cornell after his freshman year with no real explanation. Now he spends his days holding a SLOW sign at highway construction zones and his nights getting stoned with his friends, just like he did in high school. Willa can only dream of having the kind of privilege Campbell tosses so casually aside. She doesn’t understand making that choice. Just like she can’t understand why her mother takes one low-paying job after another instead of wanting something more. If Willa learned anything from Finley it’s that you get only so many trips around the sun. Why would you waste them?

Willa cocks her head, trying to play it cool. “What are you doing on my boat?”

His grin widens. “Come aboard and I’ll show you.”

Willa ignores the hand Cam offers as she steps off the dock, but in the cockpit he stands so close she can feel the warmth radiating from his skin. She fists her fingers to keep from touching him.

“So, you saw the name, right?” Campbell asks.

Willa nods.

“Finley asked me to do it,” he says. “Also, the outboard had a little stutter I wanted to check before you left. I think it’s fixed.”

These tiny moments of sweetness are the ones that make Willa want him, even when she knows he is not for her. “Thank you.”

Cam ducks through the companionway and beckons her to follow. “There’s more.”

Down in the cabin, he’s looped strings of tiny white lights around the handrails above the bunks. And on the low half walls that separate the main cabin from the v-berth at the front of the boat, Campbell taped little doodles of Taylor and Willa with Shakespeare quotes written beneath.

For Taylor: What is past is prologue.

For Willa: Though she be but little, she is fierce.

She touches her fingertips to the doodle, tracing the black Sharpie bun on the top of her black Sharpie head. He’s even drawn the baby curls that won’t stay in.