Page 61 of The Beach Shack Artists 3
Joey laughed. “Absolutely not. Let them sweat.”
They all laughed, a little too loud. A family walking past smiled at them indulgently, probably remembering their own teenage summers of sugar and solidarity.
As they stood to leave, tossing their empty containers into the trash with finality, they wandered slowly back toward town.
The string lights were just starting to glow overhead, the last light fading from the sky. Somewhere behind them, a skateboard clattered, a gull shrieked, and someone’s boombox played a love song from three summers ago.
“They’re ridiculous,” Stella said, breathing in the familiar brine of the sea.
“But they’re ours,” Bea finished.
And that still made all the difference.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Tyler had always been good at avoiding things. Slipping out during family arguments, hiding behind his camera during difficult conversations, finding excuses to be anywhere but in the middle of Walsh family drama. But sitting in his truck at 6:45 a.m., watching the sun come up over Heisler Park, he kept thinking about Stella. About how she’d been stepping up while he’d been stepping back.
Stella’s arrival had taught him something he should have figured out decades ago—avoiding wasn’t making anything better, and it certainly wasn’t making anything go away. He had a teenage daughter now. Time to grow up. Time to stop avoiding anything. Not a single thing.
They hadn’t been together like this in twenty years—just the three of them with no fights, no agenda, no one storming out or coordinating logistics. Tyler climbed out of his truck and walked toward the bench that faced the Pacific, where the old wood still had faint initials carved into the sides from middle school crushes and summer boredom.
He’d texted the night before.
Tomorrow. Just us. 7am. Bring coffee, not expectations.
Meg hadn’t responded to his text, but she showed up anyway with a thermos and that tight, tired look that meant she’d already been up for hours, probably overthinking everything. Anna arrived late, naturally, with a paint-stained hoodie and a bag of still-warm croissants, like a peace offering she hadn’t realized she was making. Tyler had brought donuts, because apparently everyone had decided food was required for this conversation.
They settled on the bench that faced the water. Tyler waited, letting the ocean do the talking—waves pulling in and out, gulls overhead.
He cracked first.
“Yesterday was kind of a disaster.”
Meg snorted into her coffee. “Define ‘kind of.’”
Anna broke off a piece of croissant. “I think the health inspector defined it pretty clearly for us.”
They laughed, and it wasn’t comfortable, exactly—but it was real.
“I was thinking last night,” Meg said, setting her cup down. “We’ve spent most of our adult lives in a cycle. One of us messes up. One disappears. One tries to hold everything together. And then we swap roles and call it growth.”
Anna made a noise of reluctant agreement. “I always figured you wanted to be the responsible one. Like you liked it.”
Meg shook her head. “No. I just figured someone had to be.”
“And I figured if I stayed out of the way, no one would notice I wasn’t doing anything.”
Anna frowned at him. “That was your plan?”
“Worked for a while,” he admitted.
The silence that followed felt deeper, heavier. Tyler watched Meg’s face, saw her processing, saw Anna picking at her croissant without really eating it.
Meg looked out at the water. “So what now? Do we just... try again? Pretend we’re not dysfunctional and take over the family business like some heartfelt ending to a Hallmark movie?”
Anna laughed, but Tyler heard something underneath it. “I don’t want to pretend. I want to stop needing to.”
Tyler ran a hand over his jaw. “We can’t rewrite the past. But we can stop defaulting to it.”
