Riptide by Dawn Lee McKenna Page A

anything else. Although she hadn’t slept, she didn’t feel the lack of it. Once her coffee was made, she grabbed it and her cell phone and went outside.  
    Coco ran off to do her business in the trees, and Stoopid pell-melled across the gravel to announce that he had spotted Maggie, or that it was daytime, or that the sky had fallen. Maggie sidestepped him, gave him a rote “Morning, Stoopid,” then went and fed the girls. After the chickens had been fed, Coco followed Maggie up to the deck, and Maggie sat down to check her cell phone, again, purely out of habit.  
    She’d missed two calls from Wyatt, but couldn’t bring herself to listen to his voice mails. He’d called and talked to Gray last night, asked after their wellbeing, but Maggie hadn’t been able to talk to him. The man she’d loved her whole life was lying in the morgue at Weems Memorial. She just couldn’t make herself talk to the man she’d probably end up loving next.

M aggie spent the rest of the day going through the paperwork that she and David shared on wills, wishes and insurance. She talked to the insurance company about making arrangements for David’s cremation, as per his wishes, declined to answer her cell phone, and politely refused to speak to those people who decided to try one of her parents instead.
    She also hugged her children a great deal, called the fire department three times to see if they had any news on the cause of the explosion, and was left with nothing other than that they were working diligently. She knew little about fire or explosions, but she did know a bit more about boats, and she and her father sat on the deck and discussed possibilities at length. The trawler carried a lot of diesel, but diesel was slow to ignite. Propane was much more sensitive, but David only had a large enough tank down below to fuel the galley.  
    Neither of them could recall if they’d seen any fireworks after that first, muffled whump . That moment inserted itself into Maggie’s mind hundreds of times that day, and she tried to make herself notice the sky in retrospect. But all she saw was David’s smile, and his wave, and all she could think was Jump! No matter how many times she remembered it, he never did.
    Late in the afternoon, Gray came out into the little dining area near the front door, where Maggie sat with an uneaten sandwich and a cold cup of tea. Georgia was in Sky’s room, helping the kids fold some laundry she’d found to do. Maggie looked up as Gray sat down across the cypress table his father had built.
    “Sweetheart, the kids want to come back to the house with us,” he said quietly. “There’s just too much of David here right now. But they don’t want to leave you here.”
    “I know I should go with them, Daddy,” she said. “It’s not fair to ask them to stay, and it’s selfish to be away from them. I’m just so afraid that I’m finally going to come apart, and I can’t stand for them to see it.”
    Gray nodded. “Why don’t you call Wyatt, Maggie?”
    Maggie shook her head. “No.” She blinked back a sudden heat in her eyes. “Being with Wyatt didn’t feel like cheating before, but it does now.”
    Gray took a deep breath, then sighed and grabbed both of her hands up in his.
    “Let me tell you something you’re not ready to believe right now,” he said. “But I want you to remember it for when you are ready to believe it. David loved you and he wanted you to be happy. If that meant you being with Wyatt, well, he might not have liked it, but he wanted it for you. You do him a disservice if you ignore that.”
    Maggie blinked again and looked away, out the living room window.
    “I know you’re in pain, Maggie,” he said firmly. “But I know you hear me, too.”
    He stood up, then came around and placed a hand on her shoulder, kissed the top of her head. She squeezed his hand.
    “We’ll get some things together for the kids,” Gray said. “Your Mama left a pot of soup on the stove for