He pressed his mouth to hers and she melted into him. The soft touch of his lips moved slowly at first and then quickened, opening her mouth further, his tongue searching for hers. She moaned softly. A tingle spread up her spine and her breath caught. He slowed his lips, releasing her mouth, taking it again.

‘Don’t forget, I’m coming back,’ Danny whispered.

‘I couldn’t possibly forget that.’

Thirty-nine

Nicole and James stood outside the boatshed.

‘You ready?’ she asked.

‘No. You?’ He smiled.

He held the old wooden door open.

Nicole hadn’t been able to bring herself to enter Charlie’s home after his death, but it seemed somehow fitting now with James beside her.

She’d shared everything she could with him over the past week. Everything she knew about Charlie from her own experience of him. Everything in Ivy’s letters. And he’d asked questions that she’d answered as best she could. He’d taken in everything she’d told him, and Nicole could tell he’d had trouble processing the information, forming it into a coherent picture of his father.

She’d enjoyed James’s quiet company. Enjoyed having someone to eat meals with, someone to talk to about Charlie and Ivy, both of whom she missed terribly.

On James’s second-last day at the cove, it was only right that they visit the boatshed together.

Dusty boxes crowded the entry and the two of them twisted to slip through the narrow gaps.

‘Does that say Ivy?’ James brushed decades of grime from the top of one of the cartons.

Nicole leaned forward.

The few times she’d been in when Charlie was sick, she hadn’t noticed anything other than Charlie.

‘Yeah. I think so.’

They looked at each box. ‘Ivy kitchen’, ‘Ivy books’, ‘Ivy linen’.

‘She must have left him all this, and he hung on to it.’ Nicole moved from cardboard relic to cardboard relic.

‘For a really long time.’ James whistled.

‘What do we do with it now?’

James shrugged.

‘You’re his son. It’s yours, I guess.’

‘But these are Ivy’s. I kind of feel it should all be yours.’

‘We don’t have to decide today.’ Nicole shook her head.

They moved further in, to where Charlie did his living. On the bed was the Scrabble box with a small piece of paper attached.

‘For Nicole’, it read. She turned the note over. ‘Now you’ll never beat me.’

She laughed out loud. ‘He was a formidable opponent, you know.’

‘Something we have in common, then.’

‘Really? Maybe we can play sometime.’

Underneath the Scrabble game was a well-read copy of Tide and Nicole let out a gasp. She opened the cover.

‘Don’t give up your day job.’ She read Charlie’s inscription to her, a tear sliding down her cheek.