Page 102 of Rhodes

I have been working on not being smug about it ever since.

This morning the light comes in gray around the edge of the blind. She's on her stomach beside me with the sheet twisted around one leg, propped on her elbows, with her phone in her hands. She's been awake a while. I can tell because she's brighter and more alert than anyone should be without coffee.

"You're staring."

“My eyes are adjusting. A man can't stare if he can't see."

"I'm not buying it."

"I might have been admiring. Hard to say."

She doesn't answer that.

She doesn't know the half of it. The sheet's got one leg and none of the rest of her. The way she's propped on her elbows puts a curve in her back I keep coming back to.

"How long have you been awake?"

"Long enough. The report came back, and it's better than I hoped."

"Read it to me.”

That's the closest we've come to talking about Cowbell since Cowbell, and neither one of us is going to be the one who says a word that means something. She told me what she had room for, and I told her okay. What we do instead is this, where she comes down the hall, I don't ask her for one thing past breakfast, and the whole arrangement renews itself every night without a single person putting a name on it.

Her cold feet are hooked under my shin right now, and she's bursting at the seams to share with me shoreline report in the voice she saves for winning. There is nothing on this earth I'd trade for this right here.

"Listen to this part again." Tallulah shoves her hair off her face and props her head up on her elbow while holding her phone. "The eastern bank isn't failing simply because the marsh is dying. The wave energy is stripping away nutrients, killing the marsh, and leaving the bank exposed to erosion. That's it. Waves keep chewing the toe of the bank, so the whole thing slumps forward, but the platform behind it is still high enough. If Grandbank accepts this, then this is fixable, and we aren't losing value."

"That's exactly what you said in February."

"I know I did." She grins without looking up. "But now Rockville Coastal put their license number on it. And Grandbank and my dad will listen to them over me."

She scrolls, her finger finding the elevation line on the screen and traces it like she's touching the actual mud.

"I still can't believe they turned this around in five days. They just went out there Thursday, and now we have a full twenty-page report that couldn't be more favorable for my argument." She talks faster the deeper she gets. "See, right here. Platform elevation stays above mean high water across the whole reach. That's the ballgame. You put a reef sill along the toe to knock the wave energy down, you plant behind it, and the bank rebuilds itself, reversing the projected loss if we do nothing."

I reach over and grab my water cup off the nightstand, take a sip, and set it back.

"Read me the sentence again," I say. "The one you like."

Her whole face changes as she scrolls back up to find it. I love seeing her light up like this.

"‘Site conditions remain favorable for a living-shoreline approach and are fundamentally intact. Oyster-bed restoration remains viable if wave energy can be adequately redirected.’"

She lets the phone drop against her chest. “‘Fundamentally intact.’ That’s a licensed firm saying it in writing.”

She looks up and smiles at me. I would pay good money to see that every morning. I watch her instead of the phone. This is the version of her I'd keep if I could pick one. Up on her elbow, arguing with a document that already agrees with her.

"There's one catch." She waves it off before she even says it. "A sill long enough to cover that whole reach would need a serious amount of cured shell. Way more than I've got. But that's a next-year problem. Or a phase-two problem. It doesn't change that this can work." She shrugs.

I stare at the ceiling for a second. She was right the whole time, and now she's got professionals saying so. Which means this stops being about whether the bank can be saved and starts being about whether Granger wants quick money or a long-term strategy. I'm betting their plan makes a hell of a lot more money.

She tosses the phone onto the blanket, the report still glowing, and falls back, stretching.

"I've got class starting at ten, then my meeting tonight." She says the last part lightly, without any difference if she were telling me she had lab or a study group. This makes me happier than I want to admit. I don’t want her feeling weird about her meeting with me.

"Come here," I say. "You're forgetting something."

Her mouth curves. "Am I?"