Page 91 of The Cottage on Blueberry Bay

Jacob’s boat.

He decided to leave him alone. Meredith hadn’t mentioned anything about selling the boat since that night of the fire, which he’d taken as a good sign considering she was starting to sell Jacob’s things. She’d had an art appraiser at the house that morning all the way up from Boston.

As he watched his son sneak through the fields, his phone dinged from the kitchen table where he worked that morning.

Meredith’s name lit up the screen, and his heart skipped a beat. He wanted to ignore the feeling he got every time he thought of Meredith, but the feeling started happening more and more.

He opened the text.

Remy and I want you, Ginny, and Kyle to have these.

She had texted him photos of Jacob’s paintings—flowers, birds, different parts of his garden, and then some of Blueberry Bay’s landscapes, the water and ocean scenes.

He looked out the window of the kitchen at the cottage. The visitor’s car with Massachusetts plates had left.

He looked back at the pictures. The gesture had been so unexpected and so kind, he left the house at once and knew exactly what he needed to do.

He found Kyle on the boat with all his cleaning supplies and buckets of water and his earbuds blasting.

“Looks good!” Quinn yelled at Kyle, who froze the minute he heard his voice.

Kyle then let out a breath. “You scared me. Let someone know you’re coming.”

Quinn rolled his eyes at his son. “When was the last time you took this out?”

Before Jacob’s death, Kyle had been taking out the boat—a contentious point between his client and him. Jacob had wanted to give Kyle the boat. A man whose whole life had been damaged and haunted because of a boating accident had wanted to give a teenage boy a boat.

The whole thing drove Quinn insane.

He remembered why he came.

“Do you really want to buy this boat?” Quinn asked.

Kyle sat down, dropping the sponge in his hand into a bucket of sudsy water. “Yeah.”

“What if you buy it but go to college, too,” Quinn said. “You can play football and go somewhere local.”

Kyle shrugged. “I just don’t belong in school. I belong out there.” He pointed to the water.

“Just get a degree first, then you can do whatever you want.”

“Like you?” Kyle laughed. “What did your degree get you? You hate your job.”

Here we go, Quinn thought to himself. The never-ending argument.

“Your mother wanted you to go to college.”

“You don’t get to use her to make your point.”

That one stung. “I just want to make sure you use all your potential.”

“Well, all she ever told me was she wanted me to be happy,” Kyle said. “And fishing makes me happy.”

Quinn put his hands on his waist, holding back his irritation. “Just get a degree and you can fish all you want.”

“Why is that piece of paper so important to you?” Kyle asked.

He didn’t want to bite the hand that had fed his family for decades, but the truth was, history wasn’t a liar. “Because living in a bubble, being ignorant to everything out there, you’ll end up like the rest of us.”

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