Page 100 of Island Girl

She didn't know what they were saying. She didn't need to know. Some conversations were too sacred to overhear.

An hour later, Ray and Heather came back inside. Ray's eyes were red and swollen, but there was something different about him. Something lighter. Like a weight had been lifted that he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight.

He walked to the bar, Heather beside him. He looked at Justin.

“Two Cokes,” he said. Then he looked at his daughter. “You want fries?”

“Sure.” She smiled. “I want fries.”

They sat together at the bar, father and daughter, eating friesand drinking Coke and starting the long, slow work of rebuilding what had been broken.

Paula sat down next to Merritt, wiping her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don't know how to thank you.”

“You don't have to thank me. I just opened a door.”

“You did more than that. You gave them a chance.” Paula looked at her brother, at the way he was leaning toward Heather, listening to her talk, drinking in every word. “He's going to be okay. I really think he's going to be okay.”

“Yeah,” Merritt said. “I think so too.”

She looked around the bar. At Crocker in the kitchen doorway, his eyes suspiciously bright. At Justin behind the bar, pretending not to be moved. At Ray and Heather, sitting side by side, two people who had been separated by war and time and fear, finally finding their way back to each other.

This was what Shorebirds was for. This was what Crocker had built. A place where people could fall apart and put themselves back together, one night at a time.

Merritt picked up her guitar and started to play again. Something soft. Something hopeful. A song about coming home.

And across the bar, a father and his daughter listened together, and the distance between them grew a little smaller with every note.

CHAPTER 32

Aweek after Heather sang the lullaby, Merritt could already see the change in Ray.

He and Heather had fallen into a rhythm. Every evening, she'd arrive at Shorebirds before he did, claiming the stool next to his usual spot. When he walked in, his face would soften in a way Merritt had never seen before. They'd sit together for hours, eating cheeseburgers and fries, talking in low voices, sometimes laughing, sometimes just sitting in comfortable silence. Father and daughter, learning each other as adults.

Still riding the high of watching them rebuild, Paula told Merritt that Heather's mother, Julie, would arrive on Wednesday.

“She's really coming?” Merritt asked, unable to keep the excitement from her voice. They were sitting on Paula's porch, the three of them, Heather between them with her legs tucked underneath her.

“She called last night,” Heather said. “I told her everything. About the lullaby, about Dad sitting at the bar with me every night, about how different he seems. She cried for twenty minutes.”

“Good tears or bad tears?” Merritt asked.

“Both, I think. Sixteen years of tears all at once.” Heather smiled, but her eyes were bright. “She said she had to see him. She said she couldn't stay away.”

Paula reached over and squeezed her niece's hand. “I've been waiting for this for so long. I'd almost given up hope that they'd ever be in the same room again.”

“Does Ray know she's coming?” Merritt asked.

“No.” Paula shook her head. “We talked about it, and we decided it should be a surprise. If we tell him ahead of time, he might panic. He might run.”

“But if she just shows up…”

“Then he won't have time to overthink it. He'll just have to be in the moment.” Paula looked at Heather. “That's what you said, right? That he needs to stop running from things and start facing them?”

“That's what his therapist says, anyway.” Heather took a breath. “I'm nervous. I know that sounds crazy. They're my parents. But I haven't seen them in the same room since I was four years old. I don't even know what that looks like.”

Merritt thought about her own parents, about the quiet way they'd loved each other through her mother's illness, about the grief that had nearly broken her father when she died. Love looked different for everyone. Sometimes it was gentle. Sometimes it was messy. Sometimes it survived things that should have destroyed it.