Three Blinks

"She asked you what?"

Inez Delgado slams a coffee pot down on the counter of the Skillet hard enough that two fishermen at the end look up from their eggs.

"Keep your voice down."

"I will not keep my voice down. This is my diner." She leans across the counter, apron dusted with flour, dark curls escaping a bandana. "Lily Carter shows up after ten years of total radio silence, crawls through your hedge like a raccoon, and asks you to stand at her wedding?"

"Best man."

"Oh, well, if there's a title." Inez pours you a refill you didn't ask for. "What did you say?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Diane yelled from the porch that the movers needed her. Lily said, 'Think about it,' and went back through the hedge." You stare into your coffee. "I've been thinking about it for nine hours."

"And?"

"And I'm saying no."

Inez narrows her eyes. She's known you since kindergarten. She knew Lily too, back when the three of you were a matched set, riding bikes to the point with towels around your necks like capes. She was the one who found you at the end of that last August, sitting on the dock at six in the morning, waiting for someone who never came by to say goodbye.

"You're saying no," she repeats.

"Yes. No. I'm saying no."

"Uh-huh." She wipes the counter. "Do you want my opinion?"

"No."

"My opinion is that she owes you about four thousand apologies and a fruit basket. My other opinion is that you have been in love with that girl since you were eleven years old, and if you stand next to her while she marries some guy from Chicago, I'm going to have to scrape you off this counter with a spatula."

"I'm not in love with her."

Inez looks at you for a long moment. Then she pats your hand, the way she pats the hands of old men whose wives have passed. "Sure, Ethan. Eat your pie."

You go to the yard because the yard doesn't ask questions.

Lantern Point Boatyard sits at the end of a gravel road where Hollis Cove runs out of land. One big weathered shed, a slip, a crane older than you, and a rooftop deck your grandfather built so he could drink coffee and watch the boats come in. The sign over the door still says his name. You haven't had the heart to repaint it.

Walt Henley is in the shed, bent over the bow of the Juniper with a scraper.

The Juniper is a 1958 mahogany runabout, eighteen feet long, and she's been half-restored for about as long as you've been alive. Your grandfather bought her as a wreck. You and Lily named her after the street when you were ten, because you were ten and that's how naming works.

"Heard the Carter girl's back," Walt says without looking up.

"Does everybody know?"

"Town of nine hundred people." He blows varnish dust off the planking. "Diane told the post office. Post office told the world."

You pick up a sanding block. You sand. It does not help.

"She's getting married," you say.

"Heard that too."

"She wants me in the wedding."

Walt straightens slowly, one hand on his back. He's seventy-four and built like a dock piling. He looks at you over his glasses the way he looked at your grandfather when Pop said he could fix an engine without the manual.

"And?"

"And she left, Walt. She didn't even say goodbye."

"Mm." He goes back to scraping. "Your grandfather didn't talk to me for six years once. Over a boat, if you can believe it. Then one day he showed up at my door with a bottle and said, 'You were right about the transom.' That was it. Six years."

"Did you forgive him?"

"Course I did." Scrape, scrape. "Didn't mean I wasn't still mad. You can do both. Most people do."

That night you don't sleep.

Your bedroom is the same one you had growing up. Your parents moved to Arizona three years ago and left you the house with a lecture about the furnace. You've painted, bought a new bed, and moved the desk, but the window is where it always was: on the second floor, facing the Carters' house across the hedge.

Facing Lily's window.

The light in her room has been on since ten. Then off at eleven. Then on again.

At 11:52, it goes dark.

You lie there staring at the ceiling, telling yourself that's the end of it, when the curtain on your wall lights up white.

Once. Twice. Three times.

You sit up so fast you hit your head on the reading lamp.

Three blinks. A flashlight in the window across the hedge. You know that code better than your own phone number. You made it up when you were eight, after Diane took away Lily's phone for a week.

Three blinks means you up?

Two blinks back means yes. Meet me.

One long beam means goodnight. Not tonight.

Your flashlight is still in the drawer of your nightstand. You don't know why. You've told yourself it's for power outages.

You hold it for a long time. Then you point it at her window and click it twice.

The dock at the end of Juniper Street is public, technically. Nobody uses it after dark except teenagers and raccoons. The boards are gray and soft at the edges, and the lake is black glass all the way to the horizon, with a thin line of moon laid across it like a road.

Lily is sitting at the end with her feet over the water, wrapped in a quilt you recognize from her childhood bed. Blue squares, yellow stars.

"I didn't think you'd come," she says.

"I didn't either."

You sit down. Not next to her. A body's width away, close enough to feel the warmth coming off the quilt.

For a while neither of you says anything. A loon calls somewhere out past the point.

"I don't have the right to ask you," Lily says finally. "I know that. I knew it when I was driving up. I knew it when I saw the hedge. I've known it for ten years."

"Then why did you?"

She pulls the quilt tighter. In the moonlight her face looks younger and older at once.

"Because you're the only person who knew me before," she says. "Before Chicago, before work, before Brody. Everybody in my life now met the version of me that has it together. You met the version who ate a worm on a dare and cried when the Juniper sprang a leak."

"You ate two worms."

"I ate two worms," she agrees, and laughs, and wipes her face fast with the corner of the quilt. "I just... I want one person standing next to me on that lawn who knows who I am. Even if he hates me a little."

"I don't hate you, Lil."

The words are out before you can stop them. They sound true. That's the worst part.

She turns to look at you. "So is that a yes?"

You think of Walt. You can do both. Most people do.

"Yes," you say. "It's a yes."

Lily makes a sound like a laugh and a sob crashed into each other, and then she's throwing the quilt over both of you, up on her toes with her arms around your neck, her hair smelling like lilac and lake water, and you're holding her for the first time in ten years.

"Thank you," she whispers into your shoulder. "Thank you, Ethan. I don't deserve you."

You don't argue. You don't let go, either.

You walk back up Juniper Street together, the quilt trailing behind her like a cape. At the hedge gap she squeezes your hand once and ducks through.

You're halfway up your back steps when headlights sweep across the yard.

A black SUV, long and spotless, rolls into the Carter driveway behind the moving truck. The engine cuts. The driver's door opens.

A man steps out. Tall, dark suit despite the hour, phone in hand. He stretches, looks at the Carter house.

Then he turns his head, slow and deliberate, and looks straight up at your bedroom window.

As if he already knows exactly which one is yours.