“I—I’d better go,” Annabelle stammered. “I was just coming for a little walk while I was waiting for my ride.”

“Have a good night,” Connor said.

As if that was possible now. And as soon as she got up, he reached for the beer can Caroline held out to him and swallowed down a gulp.

On her way back to the dunes, Annabelle had to pass a cluster of girls. Ruby. Genevieve. A couple of other summer girls she didn’t know.

Annabelle wished Mia were there. The old Mia, who would link arms with her and pull her into that cluster where she could just be one girl in a group. No more obvious than anyone else.

“Hey, Annabelle,” Ruby called.

Her voice was kind. Like maybe she’d been upset to see that Connor had a girlfriend, too, so she knew how Annabelle felt? Or maybe she’d known better, but she felt sorry for poor innocent, little-girl Annabelle?

Either way, that kindness pulled tears into the corners of Annabelle’s eyes.

“I’ll see you later,” she said, rushing away from Ruby and the other girls, toward the beach exit.

When she looked back one last time, Caroline was back in her seat in the sand, and her head rested on Connor’s shoulder.

No swimming, no Mia, no Jeremy, and now no Connor. And Annabelle was as clueless with boys as she was with everything else. She couldn’t read a guy like Connor any better than she could read her history textbook.

Chapter 26

When Annabelle finally made it home, she heard Mom and Mitch out on the deck, laughing.

“And then the oysters started to come out completely frozen—hard as rocks—when the whole reason they wanted the wedding at the Charthouse was the promise of fresh fish!” Mom was saying.

“What did you do?” Mitch asked. “Told the servers to take those oysters right back to the kitchen and top off everybody’s wineglasses to keep them happy while they waited for food. Then I told the grooms that serving a light fish course after the entrées was more cosmopolitan, and I told the kitchen they had thirty minutes to figure out how to thaw the oysters or else I’d tell every couple I meet with that their fish isn’t so fresh after all. I made sure those oysters came off the bill, too.”

Mitch chuckled. “You’re a genius.”

Mom the genius and Mitch the strategizer, problem-solving their way to success.

Mom had been successful way before they moved to Gray Island and she started her event-planning business—she’d gotten lots of promotions at her old PR firm. One time, at a party for Mom’s old job, Annabelle had overheard a man with a bushy mustache saying that if Mom hadn’t gone part-time for a while when Annabelle was really little, she’d be running the whole department.

And Mitch had been profiled in a magazine piece about Gray Island “movers and shakers” last year—there was a whole article with pictures and everything about how he’d left his New York City finance job and built up his financial planning office here because he saw a need on the island and had the guts to take a chance.