Page 12 of Late Nights & Love Lines
“What do you mean you don’t play anymore?” Music is a part of her.
“The piano I had at home was destroyed.” She shrugs. “I started playing again in college but then, well, I grew up.”
There’s so much to unpack in that statement, unease spreads through my veins—music is in her soul. I knew that the second I found her hiding at the pavilion with a keyboard when she was eleven.
Random memories, snippets in time flood my mind faster than an avalanche. All the innocent moments I’d been drawn to her over a handful of summers—a need to ease the pain that surrounded her—it hits me again now.
“What about now?” I ask in an attempt to tame my wild thoughts and keep us on track.
“Some things in life are best left as a memory.” It’s a nonanswer, and when she raises a brow at me, it’s clear that’s all she’ll give me. “Are you going to keep standing at the window, or would you like to come in so we can have a proper conversation? Apparently, I’m your interim nanny.”
My shoulders shake with silent laughter. She’s blunt—she always was. It’s refreshing to see that some things never change. “What are the chances that Pappy is behind this?”
Rowan frowns. “It’s an almost certainty.”
Shaking my head, I gnaw on my bottom lip. “It does feel like a scheme he’d dream up.”
Her face softens. “So you don’t believe in coincidences either?”
“No,” I say, more harshly than I intended. “Believing in fairy tales is what landed me in this position in the first place.”
“Okay.” She glides toward the door without another word.
Is that it? She’s just walking away?—
I’m scratching the side of my head when Rowan walks around the building and plops down in the dirt, exactly as she did when we were kids, resting her back against the building. The instant she peers up at me with those big brown eyes that always tugged at my heart, I know I’m in a lot of fucking trouble.
“It’s good to see you, Peach.”
We spentan hour going over logistics, but it passed in a flash. Her scent is still imprinted in my mind, and now I want fucking roses everywhere I go. What would it take to line the paths with rosebushes?
God, I’m an idiot.
The trail we’re following opens up to the ocean, and she stops so suddenly I nearly crash into her.
“You okay?” I ask, surreptitiously scanning the sand in front of her for something ready to strike. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for if I’m being honest. A crab?
“Yeah.” We stand side by side, close enough to feel her shoulders unfurl like a yoga mat as she exhales deeply. “The beach is my happy place. I’m never as calm as I am here. I wish I were able to visit it more often.”
I’m still studying her face when a chorus of “Daddy!” wakes me from the surreal bubble I’m in.
Kade kicks up sand as he sprints toward us. Miles runs beside him with his hands outstretched as though he’s ready to catch his little brother when he inevitably falls.
“Miles is protective,” Rowan observes.
“He’s a peacemaker, but yeah, he loves his little brother.”
She eyes me curiously but says nothing as my boys wrap their arms around my legs.
“We saw sharks, and dinosaurs, and snails, and kites. I swam in a big wave and I’m going to be a surfer when I grow up.” Kade’s excitement for life is infectious. “Right, Miles? Right?”
“Right, buddy,” Miles says with an indulgent quirk of his lips. He’s much too old for his eight years.
“Are you having fun?” I ask Miles.
His pasted-on smile, a permanent fixture lately, lifts at the corners. I wish I could get my happy little man back—the one who didn’t fake his emotions to make everyone around him comfortable. “Pappy promised me three scoops of ice cream if I kept Kade from diving into the waves without him.”
“That sounds about right. At least he knows that at seventy-plus years old, he’s in no position to dive into the waves to rescue a curious six-year-old.” I grin at my little boy.
