Page 214 of Just One More Thing

“We should probably go tell Granny,” I say. “Before Mrs. Kravitz somehow gets the news through her seagull spy ring and beats us to it.”

He laughs. Wet and rough and completely happy.

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s go.”

He takes my left hand—the one with the ring now catching the sunrise every time I move it—and leads me back down the path to the dock.

The dock is new too, I realize. Solid. Built to last. Like everything Jake does.

He helps me into the boat, unties the line, and starts the engine. As we pull away, I turn in my seat and watch the island get smaller behind us.

Moke’s Island.

Our island.

I look down at my hand again. At the ring that looks like it came out of a gumball machine twenty years ago and somehow found its way back to me.

Then I look at Jake. Wind in his hair. Hand on the wheel. Eyes on the water ahead. The smile on his face.

I move over and lean my head against him.

He glances down, then shifts his arm around me without taking his eyes off the water.

And somewhere between the island and the shore, with the sun rising, the ring on my finger, and every summer that built us, I feel it all settle into place.

Every flashlight blink across the water.

Every shell in a pocket.

Every pinky promise.

Every moment that looked small at the time and turned out to be the beginning of everything.

The life I nearly missed.

All of it was leading here.

To him.

To us.

CHAPTER 48

JAKE

“SHE SAID YES!”

I shout it as we round the channel marker into the bay. To nobody. To everybody. To the water, the sky, the whole damn town.

The buoy bell dings. I like to think in celebration.

Mo laughs and tucks her face into my shoulder, and I pull her tighter against my side. I’m never going to get tired of that sound.

Then the shoreline comes into view.

They’re all there.

Packed along the edge of The Green with homemade signs and banners and the kind of energy this town usually saves for fireworks, football, and public scandal. Somebody rigged a bedsheet between two palm trees that readsE + J4-EVERin letters big enough to see all the way from the town of Oyster Bay.