Page 65 of The Shell Collector
“I’m still in shock that I’m sitting here with you.” His eyes scanned hers. “You look like you’re doing well.”
She shook her head.
“How are you?”
“Surprised. Kind of wondering if I’m going to wake up.” She pulled her legs underneath her. “I’m doing good now. Amazing in comparison to how I was two years ago. Last year was the worst.” She pressed her hands together. “But now, most days I’m pretty good.”
“We’ve been through a lot.”
“Yeah. How areyou,Paul?”
“Healing. Still kind of a work in progress.”
She chuckled. “You always were.”
“Ha. True.”
“Sorry. Just playing.”
“No. It’s nice. Yeah, I just take it a day at a time. I struggled for a while. Really struggled. Got some help.”
“That’s hard to picture. You’ve always been so together. Controlled. Just like Jack.”
“Thank you. I wasn’t as tough as I thought I was, though. I shifted my focus from my loss to a way to help others. That’s when I finally found some relief.”
“That’s good.”
“My sadness kind of turned out to be a gift.”
There’s that talk of gifts again. Why is it so easy for everyone else to realize theirs?
She rubbed her hands together. She wondered if he’d noticed she didn’t wear her ring anymore. “I don’t know how I’d have gotten through it if I hadn’t had Hailey and Jesse. They were the only thing that kept me getting out of bed every morning and putting my feet on the ground.”
“So you live here now?”
“We moved here a couple months ago. I bought the house right on the other side of the dune.”
His eyebrow lifted. “The tiny one tucked in the trees, next to the mega-mansion?”
“That’s the one.”
He shook his head. “You’re not going to believe this. I put an offer on that house too.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. They told me there were other offers coming, so I made a full-offer bid, but they accepted another one. I guess it was you.”
“That’s so crazy that we were trying to buy the same house. What do you think the odds are of that happening?”
“About a million to one. Especially since neither of us ever lived in this town before. But that place felt so right.”
“You felt it too?” She’d thought she’d been grasping at straws.
“Did you notice the Marine sticker on the surfboard?”
“Saw it. Yep.” She laughed. “There was a postcard with Denali on it too. It was so strange.”
“I didn’t see that, but I did feel a connection when I walked inside. It wasn’t the decor.”
