“Becca doesn’t mind a beer here or there. She’ll sometimes break her own rule and put wine into her Stanley mug.”
I laughed. “Good to know.”
Summer sipped her wine and looked out at the water. The moon was barely there tonight, just a thin silver sliver sitting low on the horizon. The stars were out, not nearly as bright as they were back home, but enough.
“Can I tell you something?” she said.
“Always.”
She kept her eyes on the water. “I’ve been thinking about kids lately.” A pause. “More than lately, actually. It’s been on my mind for a while.” She said it carefully, like she was afraid of my response. “I want to be a mom. I think I’ve always known that but I’ve been so focused on everything else that I just kept putting it somewhere in the future.” She finally looked at me. “I don’t want to keep putting it in the future.”
I looked at her. She was serious.
“Sooner rather than later,” she said.
“How much sooner?”
She smiled, bobbing her eyebrows up and down. “I’ve been thinking about names.”
I took a slow drink of wine, not jumping out of my chair and freaking out. I should be, but oddly enough, I wasn’t panicking. “Have you?”
“Coral,” she said.
I choked on my drink. “Coral.”
“Coral Banks Anderson,” she said, completely serious.
I stared at her. She stared back at me with those dark eyes that had been ruining my life since the first summer. She wasn’t joking.
“Coral,” I said again.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It fits.”
“What does it fit?”
“Us. The ocean. This place. It’s pretty.”
I thought about a little girl with Summer’s eyes running across this beach in the early morning and the name Coral felt as natural as anything else about this place. I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever you want.”
She burst out laughing.
“What?” I said.
“Your face,” she managed. “You hate it.”
“I agreed,” I said. “I said yes.”
“You said whatever you want like I’d just told you I wanted anchovies on the pizza.”
“I was processing,” I said.
She stared at me until I put up both hands in surrender. “Fine, I hate it.”
“Okay,” she said. “What would you want? If you had a say.”
I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d want something that meant something. Something with weight to it.”
She was obviously thinking about it again. “I like old names. Strong names.” She swirled her wine slowly. “Something that doesn’t sound like it belongs to a boy band.”