This Is What Happy Looks Like(50)

A wave lifted them gently, then lowered them again, and a few seagulls wheeled overhead. The sun off the water was uncomfortably bright, and Ellie squinted against the glare, unsure what to say. It was true that she was upset about Graham. She thought she’d been managing just fine from a distance. But seeing him today, being near him—it was like the pull of a magnet, powerful and inevitable. Even now, treading water under the high globe of the sun, she felt her equilibrium had disappeared. She’d walked out of the deli hours ago, but some essential part of her—something too important to lose—had been left behind.

“It’s okay,” Ellie told her eventually, her voice very small. “It’s not your fault.”

Mom let out a breath. Her arms were moving fast beneath the water, ghostly and pale. “He’ll be gone soon anyway,” she said. “It’ll get easier.”

Ellie opened her mouth to answer, but found she couldn’t speak. It was meant to make her feel better, she knew, but suddenly all she wanted to do was cry.

Mom’s words echoed in her head again: Three whole weeks. That was how much time had been wasted. That was how long it had been since she’d kissed Graham.

Three whole weeks.

Farther out on the water, an enormous yacht glided by, moving slowly against the blinding blue of the horizon, and Ellie thought of the newspaper clipping about her father, and the fact that he’d be in Kennebunkport this weekend with his family, probably on a yacht not unlike that one. She imagined he’d be staying in some sort of oceanfront mansion, flitting between elegant cocktail parties at night. He’d be spending the days out fishing with his two blue-eyed sons, who looked like catalog models but—given what Ellie had read about them—probably couldn’t get into the Harvard poetry program if they tried.

She swallowed hard, stung by the unfairness of it. It wasn’t just that she was working all these hours to scrape together money for a course she probably wouldn’t be able to go to anyway. It was that this was just the start of it. Next would be college: all those applications for loans, and Mom up late at night with a calculator, crunching the numbers. There were the ever-present worries about the house and the shop, the endless conversations about budgets and the drawers full of coupons, all things that wouldn’t be an issue if Paul Whitman were still in their lives.

When Graham had asked her how much money she still needed that night, the question had felt like a bullet. For him, a thousand dollars was probably what you tipped the hotel staff after a week at a resort. He probably earned that much in interest every single day. To him, it was pennies. It was peanuts. It was chump change.

But to her, it still seemed an impossible amount. It may as well have been ten thousand dollars. It may as well have been a million.

There was a lump in her throat as Ellie tore her eyes from the yacht. Bagel had started to paddle for the shore, and they both watched him go, the diamond of white on the back of his head bobbing as he swam.

“I think he’s got the right idea,” Mom said, giving a little kick in that direction. “I’m getting fried. Want to head in?”

Ellie dipped her chin in the water, shaking her head, then leaned back so that she was floating again, her hair fanning out all around her.

“Not yet,” she said. “I think I’ll meet you back later.”

“Okay,” Mom said, starting to swim in. “Don’t float away.”

The water lapped in Ellie’s ears as she bobbed there. Overhead, the seagulls were talking to one another across the great expanse of the sky, and the sun lowered itself toward the beach. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed out there, letting the waves carry her, her body light despite the heaviness of everything inside her.

After a while, she flipped herself over and began to swim back to shore, where she wrapped herself in a towel and sat down on her favorite rock—a flat slab that rose above the inlet like a miniature cliff—feeling the salt from the water dry on her face, the sun warm across her eyelids. She curled her toes around the edge of the rock and hugged her knees. Peering down, she was surprised to see a small round disk wedged between the stones, and when she reached for it, she felt a laugh bubble up in her throat.

It was a sand dollar. Not exactly the kind of dollar she needed.

She held it flat against her palm, examining the rounded edges, and the light tracings of a star in the middle. Out on the water, another expensive boat slid into view, and Ellie squinted out at it, the first, faintest pattern of an idea taking shape in her head. She sat up straighter, her waterlogged mind waking up again, working through the possibilities as she spun the sand dollar absently in her hands.

Starting tomorrow, her father would be only an hour away.

The whole thing seemed suddenly simple, like the most obvious idea in the world. There on the rock, a sense of certainty—of inevitability—was hardening inside her like cement, and she was so busy untangling the thread of a plan that she didn’t hear someone coming through the trees. But at the sound of footsteps on the rocks, she whirled around, and her heart lifted at the sight of Graham.

From across the beach, he smiled. He was wearing khaki shorts and a blue polo that made his eyes look bright against all the gray, and there was something in his hand that she was certain must be a rock shaped like a heart.

“You look deep in thought,” he said, still standing at the edge of the beach.