Laughter through tears, all around the deck, as she raised her glass.
“To Tessa and Dusty and Olive. To family lost and found. And to this beach, which brought us all back together.”
“To Tessa and Dusty and Olive!” The glasses rose and clinked, and Eli drank and tasted salt that wasn’t from the champagne.
Kate stood next, pulling Eli’s attention like steel to a magnet.
She looked toward Tessa and cleared her throat.
“My sister Tessa has been called a lot of things in her life. A wild child. A wanderer. A human party.”
Tessa raised her glass in cheerful agreement.
“But here’s what I know about Tessa Wylie Mathers.” Kate’s voice was warm and strong. “She is the bravest person I’ve ever known. Not because she’s fearless—although she is—but because she gave life a chance when a lot of women would have said that love had passed them by.”
She wiped a tear, and so did Tessa.
“She found Dusty, she found Olive, she found this place again, and she planted her feet in the sand and said, ‘I’m staying.’ And for a woman who spent a lifetime running to the next horizon, that is the most courageous thing she’s ever done.”
Kate looked at her sister, and then at Eli. In that moment, he knew she wasn’t just toasting Tessa. She was grieving what she couldn’t have—the courage to stay, to plant her own feet, to choose love over logic.
Their gazes connected across the deck, long enough for him to see everything she was feeling and for her to see that he felt it, too.
“To my sister,” Kate said, her voice catching on the last word. “Who taught me that the bravest thing you can do is let someone love you. Even when it’s terrifying.”
The glasses rose. Eli drank. The champagne tasted like…hope.
Did he dare have that?
His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket, and he glanced at Jonah and Meredith, wondering if she’d just texted him something like…stand up and tell that woman you love her!
Pulling it out, he read it under the table. No secret message from a loved one, but a text from Marcus Webb, who managed the environmental status of all open Acacia job sites.
M. Webb:Boss - heads up. Tropical Depression off Lesser Antilles just upgraded to Tropical Storm. Expected to pass southern tip of Florida and into Gulf at hurricane status. Current models show probable track is a direct hit to the Panhandle, possibly Destin area, likely a cat 3 or 4. Projected landfall 7-10 days. Will send updates. We need to address site prep for Lakeside and any coastal projects. This will be significant.
Eli stared at the screen. The music played. The lanterns flickered. Tessa was pulling Dusty onto the dance floor, laughing.
A hurricane…heading for Destin, for the Summer House, for Lakeside, for everything he’d built on this stretch of coast. There’d been a few storms to hit Destin in the last couple of decades, but nothing like Opal, in 1995. That hurricane had changed the coastline forever.
Homes destroyed, beaches reshaped, lives upended. That had been the families’ last summer. They’d never come back,and not just because of the storm—Roger’s arrest, the silence imposed on two mothers who loved each other, thirty years of broken bonds.
And now, thirty years later, the families had finally healed. And a storm was coming to test the foundation again.
He pocketed the phone. Not now. Not tonight. Tonight was Tessa’s.
The trio played something slow, and Vivien nudged him with her elbow.
“Go ask Kate to dance,” she whispered.
“Viv—”
“Go.” Her eyes were fierce with the particular love of a sister who’d watched her brother lose too much already. “Don’t be dumb.”
He smiled, the words from her old diary entry echoing. “You’ve accused me of that before.”
“Frequently.” Her smile softened. “Whatever’s happening between you two, you deserve one dance.”
He stood, straightened his jacket, and crossed the deck to where Kate sat alone at her mother’s table, Jo Ellen having been pulled into a conversation with Maggie and Crista.