to hug her, wanted to ask her what she should do now.
She couldn’t look at a baby without feeling that profound sense of loss, because something deep inside her told her that she’d never be a mother now. She was thirty-five, and she’d had one chance at being a mom, and her body failed her.
She glanced at the happy mother, cooing to her baby. She wouldn’t be able to stay here, watch this, see the life she would never have.
Laura knew she couldn’t ask the woman to leave. It wouldn’t be fair. It wasn’t the baby’s fault. Or the mother’s.
In a rush, Laura packed up her things. She threw on her ankle-length cotton cover-up sundress and began walking. The buzz saw would be better than the baby crying. If she listened to the baby much longer, she knew she’d burst into tears.
After she’d walked a bit, she could hear the buzz saw again. She gritted her teeth. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
She thought about marching in there and giving Mark Tanner a piece of her mind, when she suddenly saw a gray tendril of smoke rising up from his workshop. An acrid, unmistakable smell filled the air.
Was that...a fire?
SOMETHING WAS BURNING. At first, Mark thought it might be just his imagination, just sawdust flying from his saw as he hacked into the planks before him. Then he thought it might be someone grilling, except the fire smelled decidedly closer. He cut the buzz saw and turned around to find that the manila folder his brother brought had landed near his gas generator, and somehow had managed to catch alight. Smoke poured from the folder and heavy bits of sawdust that coated his small workspace.
Mark spun around, looking for something to douse the fire. He tried to kick sand on the flames, but that only seemed to add more sawdust to the fire, fueling it, making the flames grow.
He rushed into his kitchen, looking for a towel or a blanket, anything he could use to suffocate the flames. But before he could, a blur in a dark cover-up rushed past him and dumped a cooler full of ice on the fire, as well as two cans of some soda, and the small flames went out in a sizzling hiss.
She also happened to douse his saw, too, which now had pieces of ice covering the blade. And the flying soda cans knocked over one of the boards on his sawhorse, which clunked against his nearby worktable and sent Timothy’s bronze booties flying in the air. They landed with an awkward thump in the sand. The picture of his boy as a baby also came loose, fluttering down to the ground.
“Hey!” he cried, lunging at the photo and the bronze booties. If they were dented, so help him... “What are you doing?” He scooped up the small bronze shoes from the sand, clutching them protectively in his hands.
“Helping you,” she said, putting a hand on her hip.
She wore a muumuu, that was the only way he could describe it. The ankle-length sundress exposed only her elbows and left absolutely everything to the imagination.
She was too young to be so...dowdy, he thought. He knew she had a good body; he’d seen her legs earlier and knew the woman kept in shape. So why was she wearing a blanket out on the beach? Must be shy. Or timid. Or worse, conservative. Very, very conservative. Straitlaced, clearly. Even her outfit annoyed him.
She thrust her oversize sunglasses upon her head, pushing back her short dark bob and glared at him, her eyes looking greener than the Caribbean in the sunlight.
“Help?” he cried, sweeping his arms wide to encompass the disaster before him, even as he noticed that one of the soda cans opened on impact, sending a spray of sticky liquid onto his bare feet and all over the expensive blade of his saw. Great, just great. “Why don’t you just punch me in the face next time? You’ll create less damage.”
An annoyed wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows. “Don’t tempt me,” she shot back, clutching the new empty cooler beneath one elbow, her green eyes shining like emeralds with just barely contained anger. “Maybe I should have. You were running around in a panic instead of dealing with the fire.”
Oh, good grief. He wasn’t panicked. He was calm and collected. He never panicked. What was she talking about?
“I wasn’t panicking,” he said. “I was going to get something to put the fire out.”
“By running around like a chicken with his head cut off.” A knowing smirk tugged at her mouth.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
Now she was making him argue like a five-year-old. Unbelievable.
“Glad I was walking by because you clearly needed help. I saved your boat.” She nodded toward the husk of his boat. He glanced down and noticed that she’d also splashed one end, which carried the hint of char on one board, where the fire had lapped dangerously close to his baby.
He dropped to his knees to inspect the board and make sure it hadn’t been damaged. If he had to start the frame all over again... But, no, the damage was surface only, just a small smudge mark he could all but wipe off with his finger.
“I know you meant well, but I didn’t ask for your help.” He knew he was being ungrateful, and he didn’t like it, but she was like a cow skipping through a china shop, destroying everything in her wake and then demanding he thank her for the damage. He knew the woman was trying to help, but now he had to worry about his saw and whether the soda had damaged it.
But first, he inspected Timothy’s shoes, connected by a single string, and thankfully saw no damage. He gently placed them back on the nail, hanging by the particle-board backstop of his worktable. Then he picked up the saw. He unplugged it from the extension cord and wiped it down with a work rag nearby.
If it was damaged, he didn’t know how he’d replace it. And without a saw, what would he do? He’d never finish the boat on time.
Then he heard a sound. A high-pitched crying. A baby. His phone! Somehow, in the chaos, it had been flung into the sand. He grabbed it, noticing that the impact had started an old video of Timothy from when he was just a baby. He was crying, fussy for his nap.
Mark clicked off the video and wiped off the screen, which was covered in dots of sticky soda.
That’s when he realized she was still standing there. What was she doing? Hadn’t he made it clear she wasn’t welcome?
He glanced up and saw that she seemed frozen in place. She glanced at Timothy’s bronze baby shoes and at the phone he still held in his hand, her face a mixture of grief and pain. He felt all those emotions he saw fighting for control behind her sea green eyes. He knew them all—pain, grief and an aggressive, bottomless loss of hope. But why did hearing a simple video of Timothy make her feel this way? What had happened to her? Or was she just unhinged for some other reason?
“Laura,” he said, and then stopped. What was he going to ask her? Are you okay?
She turned then, eyes brimming with tears, and he knew with a certainty that whatever had triggered this grief was still fresh. Before he could say any more, she dropped the cooler and sprinted away from him.
He felt a sudden urge to go after her, but then what? Maybe she wasn’t grieving. Maybe she was just a crazy person. Maybe he was projecting his own feelings on her. What did he know?
Still, he felt guilty. Guilty because somehow he’d made her cry. And guilty because he knew she suffered in some deep, damaged way that only someone who’d lost something truly dear to them would know. It didn’t sit right with him. He felt the need to make it up to her.
“Well, damn,” he muttered beneath his breath as he swiped up the cooler she’d dropped. “Now I’m going to have to do something nice.”
It went against his gruff, no-nonsense, let’s-not-spend-time-talking-about-our-feelings self. He’d never