Page 68 of The Beach Shack Legacy

Joey stopped drawing.

“Yeah,” he said. “We would.”

“Like—all the time. Every day. We’d have to work together for real, not just mess around like at the Shack. Decisions. Money. Bad days.” She dug her heels into the sand. “You’d have to put up with me being disorganized and I’d have to put up with you doing spreadsheets in the tide for the rest of our lives.”

“That’s accurate.”

“Can you do that?” She was mostly joking. She was not entirely joking. “Can you actually do that? With me?”

Joey thought about it, really thought about it, because Joey didn’t answer a question like that with the easy thing.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you?”

“I don’t know either.” And that was the truest thing either of them had said all morning.

Stella put her arm across his shoulders, where it had gone a hundred times before, and he let it stay there, and he went back to building—not numbers this time, just sand, piling it up wet against his ankle into a mound, patting it smooth, his hands needing to be doing something and this being something they could do that cost nothing and proved nothing and was just for the doing of it.

Her phone buzzed. It was Bea. Three in a row.

where are you two

mom said you disappeared

what’s going on

Stella looked at it a while. Then she typed back.

beach. life-changing information. bring nothing, tell no one.

The three dots came up and went away and came up again.

I’m sorry WHAT

Just come

be there in nine seconds

She was there in closer to five minutes, which from the top of the hill was basically nine seconds, and they heard her before they saw her—“MOVE, seagull”—and then she came down the last of the sand at a controlled fall and dropped onto her knees beside them, breathless, shoes already gone somewhere, and grabbed Stella’s arm.

“What’s the emergency? Who died? Nobody died, you’d have led with that? What’s the—why do you both look like that.” She looked from one to the other. “You look like the day after Christmas and also like you’re going to throw up. What happened.”

So they told her.

And there was something in the telling Stella hadn’t expected—that saying it out loud, start to finish, to somebody who hadn’t been in the room, made it real in a way it hadn’t been ten minutes ago when it was just the two of them stunned at the waterline. Bernie’s giving us the newsstand. She heard herself say it. The words held. They didn’t dissolve when they hit the air. Joey filled in the parts she left out, the oven, the door through the wall, Margo and the money, and Bea’s face went through about nine things in a row and landed, finally, on pure open joy, no fear anywhere in it, none of the too-good-to-be-true that had them both by the throat, just delight, because Bea had never in her life met a good thing she didn’t trust immediately.

“You’re getting a bakery.” She said it like she was informing them. “You’re getting a whole—Stella. STELLA.” She grabbed both her hands. “This is the best thing that has ever happened to anyone. Why do you look scared? Stop looking scared. This is—” She turned to Joey. “Why does she look scared, this is incredible.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” Joey said.

“There’s a lot you never know. That’s not a reason.” Bea sat back on her heels, radiant, and then her face did one more thing, a narrowing, and she pointed a finger at the two of them. “Wait. Does anyone know? Mom? Tyler—does anyone know?”

“No,” Stella said. “And you can’t tell them. Bea. Look at me. You cannot tell anyone.”

“I can keep a secret.”

“You cannot keep a secret. You told the entire Shack about Meg’s surprise party in the parking lot before the party.”

“That was one time and the party was terrible and deserved to be spoiled.” But she put her hand up, solemn. “I promise. I will not tell. This is too big to tell. I would never.” She lasted about four seconds. “Can I at least be there when you tell everyone? I want to see Mom’s face. And Aunt Meg’s, oh my—” She stopped herself, physically, a hand over her own mouth. “No. Secret. Sorry. Secret.”