This Is What Happy Looks Like(63)

He looked over at the curve of Ellie’s shoulders as she sat there on the bench. For her, a thousand dollars was clearly an insurmountable obstacle, enough to send her off on a stolen boat to seek out her estranged father. How easy it would be to write her a check, to hand her a thick stack of bills, to surprise her by sending the payment to Harvard without saying a word. But this wasn’t a movie, and he knew her well enough to guess that she wouldn’t consider him a hero, and she wouldn’t throw her arms around his neck in gratitude. There was a fragile pride to her that would never allow her to accept that kind of charity. This was something she had to do herself.

“What if…” Graham began to ask, keeping his shoulders square to the windshield. “What if he says no?”

Behind him, Ellie slung a hand over the side of the boat, letting her fingertips catch the spray of the water. “Then I’m not going,” she said, her voice flat. “But how could he say no?”

What Graham didn’t say—what neither of them said—was that he would almost certainly say no if last night’s episode were to land him in the gossip columns just as he was revving up his fund-raising campaign. Graham realized now why she’d been in such a rush to leave. She was trying to outrun the news.

She stood up and sidled around him, reaching out to take the wheel. He stepped out of the way to let her drive, and she shifted the boat into a higher gear, the nose lifting out of the water as the engine dug in and they picked up speed.

When he looked over the side of the boat, Graham could see the dark shadows of fish beneath the surface. If things had turned out differently, he might be out here with his own father right now, their lines dangling, an easy silence between them as they waited for something to bite.

The shoreline was rougher here, the looming estates had given way to smaller fishing cabins, and he thought of all the other pairs of fathers and sons that might be gathering their gear at this very moment, ready to spend the holiday in quiet company. They all seemed so peaceful, so serene, these homes that dotted the shoreline. How nice it would be to have a house up here—nothing fancy, just a little cabin set back along the coast, a place to visit when he grew tired of the plastic landscape of Los Angeles, a way to keep this particular piece of the world with him even after he was gone.

“Hey,” he said, twisting around and pointing toward the shore. “Do you know what town this is?”

Ellie turned to look, then shook her head. “How come?”

“It just looks nice is all.”

“Look it up,” she suggested, and he felt for his phone in his pocket before remembering that he’d left it back at the hotel. He hadn’t done it intentionally, and he’d only realized this as they were gliding out of the harbor, but it wasn’t the worst day to lose his tether to the rest of the world. There was nobody he wanted to hear from at the moment, not Harry or Rachel or Mick or anyone else. Without it, he’d thought he might feel unhinged, but all he felt was free.

“I don’t have mine, remember?” he said. “Can I borrow yours?”

It was balanced on the dashboard in front of her, and she nudged it in his direction. He pulled up the map feature, waiting for the radar to register, a slow dance of pixels arranging themselves across the screen. The wind lifted the hair from his forehead, and he squinted out at the church steeple that rose from the trees along the coast, the idea of his future home growing more solid in his mind.

He was about to tell Ellie what he was thinking when they cut across the wake of another boat, their own vessel popping up like a skipped rock, and the phone went flying out of his hands in slow motion, pinwheeling end over end until it landed soundlessly in the water. The surface was too busy with foam to see even a ripple, and in seconds they were past it, the little square of metal probably halfway to the sandy bottom.

“Uh,” he said, his back still to Ellie.

“What?” she asked from behind him.

“Your phone…”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid it’s swimming with the fishes,” he said, stepping over to her with what he hoped was a sufficiently apologetic look. “I’m really sorry. It just slipped.”

She groaned.

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“That’s not very helpful at the moment,” she told him. “I was using that to navigate.”

He looked out the front of the boat. There were a few sailboats in the distance, and a motorboat toting a water-skier, and to the left, nearer to the shore, the harbors were speckled by buoys, each one capped by a resting seagull. The town he’d so desperately wanted to move to only a moment ago had slipped behind them, lost for now.

“We’ll be able to see it from here, though, right?”

Ellie shrugged. “It’s not like a train stop,” she said. “The towns aren’t labeled. I’m not sure how we’re gonna figure out which one it is.”

“I’m sure it’ll have a bunch of big houses.”

“I guess so,” she said, but the corners of her mouth were turned down, and her eyes gave away her worry.

“We can always ask someone.”

“How?” she asked. “By smoke signal?”

“We’ll wave them down.”

She glanced at her watch with a sigh. “It’s only eleven,” she said. “It’ll probably still be a while, anyway.”