Chapter 4: The Pier

The two o'clock sail had sixty-one passengers on it.

Every one of them had watched me get married.

They threw birdseed, which the ferry keeps in a bucket for exactly this.

Alana cut the top two tiers of Desmond's cake into sixty-one slices and passed them down the rows with a plastic fork each.

"It's a wedding, honey," she told a man in a Clemson cap. "Everybody eats."

I stood in the middle of the deck, away from the rail.

Gran had told me to keep my eyes on the horizon, so I did.

Knox was in the wheelhouse above me with the door open.

He steered with one hand.

From where I stood I could see his shoulders, and that he had not once looked at his phone.

I dished out the cake slices as they went by. Sixty-one passengers, sixty-one slices, one left over.

I wrote V.H. SPARE in marker on the foil around the leftover slice, and Alana put it in the freezer for me.

"You think of everything," she said, and squeezed my arm.

The loop took forty minutes, and I stayed on my feet for all of them.

At 2:52 the ferry came back around the point and the pier appeared.

The line for the three o'clock sail was already forming at its foot.

At the front of the line stood three men in black tuxedos, holding flowers.

They had arranged themselves, without being asked, in the order I had ranked them.

"Folks," Knox's voice said on the loudspeaker, perfectly level, "we're docking. If you're watching the pier, you're not wrong."

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