An evil grin was on Matt's face as his friend punched the engine into overdrive, fast enough that Josh's eyes watered and the skin on his face blew back like he was a basset hound.
Hell yeah, this was more like it.
Adrenaline.
Speed.
Danger.
They whipped in a tight circle to avoid a sailboat and were turning back toward the bay when Matt practically cut the engine cold.
“What the hell-”
The word stalled in his throat when he looked up.
His mom was standing on their beach. And she was clearly yelling.
Fuck. What were the odds? She never left the diner in the middle of the day.
Lucky him, she had to pick the one time he actually had a girl in the boat. Bending his head down so that his hair flopped over his face, he avoided eye contact with Hannah.
He didn't want to see her laughing at him. How the hell was he ever going to live this down?
Feeling suddenly clumsy, he untangled his limbs from the rail and crawled back across the bow. “Give me the wheel,” he grunted and Matt jumped out of the way.
“I'm so f**ked if my mom finds out I was driving your boat,” his friend said. Matt chewed his nails, barely a step up from the thumb sucking he'd done until he was six.
“It was my idea,” Josh said. “I'll take all the flack.”
Still, even though he didn't want his friends or Hannah to think otherwise, his stomach was twisting and he was fighting the urge to throw up. At the beginning of the summer, his mom had made it really clear to him that driving her boat came with responsibilities. He was pretty sure breaking the law wasn't one of them.
He took extra care to bring the boat into the dock without bumping it, and as soon as he started tying it up, his friends bolted. Getting out last, Hannah stopped beside him.
“Do you need some help?”
Not lifting his face to look at her, he shook his head. “Nope. I'll see you later.”
He could see Hannah's feet in her black sandals, her toes painted purple. For a long moment, she stood there silently, almost as if she was waiting for him to say something else. Or, maybe, to look at her again.
He wished she'd leave already and let him die of humiliation alone.
“Um, your mom's coming, so I guess I'd better go now. I'll see you around.”
He swallowed hard past the huge lump in his throat. Why had he decided to go bow riding today? Why couldn't he have just taken everyone out for a cruise on the lake, played it cool?
His mother's footsteps were loud and fast as she walked down the long wooden dock to chew his ass out. Blocking the sun with her shadow as she stood over him, her first words were, “You could have died.”He looked up at his mother, noted the way her voice shook, knew instantly how afraid she'd been of something happening to him. But didn't she get it? He wasn't a little kid anymore. There was no way he would have fallen out, and even if he had, he knew to swim deep to avoid getting chewed up by the propeller.
“I didn't die. I'm fine.”
Her expression changed from fear to anger in a heartbeat. “That's all you've got to say to me? No, 'I'm sorry, Mom, I won't do it again.' No, 'Oh gee, I don't know what I was thinking.' Just that you lived through it?”
Knowing he'd better start acting sorry, he said, “I don't know what I was thinking. It won't happen again.”
“You scared the shit out of me, kid.”
“I know.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “Seems like just yesterday you were a little boy.”
He stepped away from her and picked up the towels he'd left on the end of the dock. This was exactly what he wanted her to get. Needed her to understand.
“I'm not a kid anymore.”
She took a deep breath, then sighed. “I know. And that's why I'm going to have to treat you like a young man instead of a boy.” She held out her hand. “Give me the keys.”
He stilled, his fingers instinctively closing over the keys.
“I told you, I'm not going to do it again.”
“I believe you. But you need to learn a lesson. And since I'm your mom, I'm the one who's going to have to teach it to you.” She plucked the keys out of his hand. “The boat is off limits for one week.”
Outrage shot through him. “What the hell am I supposed to do in this stupid town without my boat?”
“My boat,” she countered. “And now it's two weeks.”
First she'd embarrassed the hell out of him in front of Hannah. Now, she was punishing him for one stupid little transgression?
“You suck.”
She took a step forward, pushed her index finger into his chest. “Right now, so do you.”
Anger caught him, pushed out the words, “I wish I were still in the city with Dad.” He wanted her to feel as bad as he did. “No wonder he didn't want to stick around with you. No wonder he divorced you.”
But when he finally got what he'd been going for, saw the hurt in his mother's eyes, instead of victory there was only a twisted emptiness. Not knowing how to say he was sorry — not really wanting to either — he ran off the dock.
It would be better for all of them if he started planning his escape to New York City. Only this time, he'd be staying there. For good.
Andrew intended to go back to his rental car, drive into town, find a room at the Inn. Sit down and make a plan to get his son to trust him. But when he got down to the grass at the end of the porch stairs and looked out into the woods that separated his camp from Isabel's, as if pulled by a magnet, his feet started heading that way.
The well-worn path between Poplar Cove and Sunday Morning Camp had grown over and stray branches scratched him through his slacks and long-sleeved button-down shirt. He was dressed all wrong for the lake. As a kid he'd never worn anything other than shorts and T-shirts. He felt like a stuffy old person as he slowly made his way through the woods, the kind of guy he would have made fun of as a kid, a total greenhorn.
He stumbled over a thick dead log and cursed out loud as he caught himself on one of the many poplars his grandparents had named their camp for. His words didn't make much of an impression in the forest, not like they had for three decades in the courtroom.
He thought back two months, when young Douglas Wellings, thirty-five and cocky, called him into the boardroom.