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Amanda’s favorite beach on Martha’s Vineyard was along the coastline of the nature reserve Menemsha Hills, on the western edge of the island in Chilmark. Later that week, when the temperature spontaneously jumped up to the mid-seventies, Amanda headed out of her mother’s law offices early and walked straight to the Sunrise Cove to beg Sam to find a way out of work that evening. “Please, Sam. It’s the perfect night to watch the sunset...”
Sam’s smile was electric. He hustled around the front desk of the Sunrise Cove, the very inn Amanda’s grandparents had operated tirelessly, kissed her gently, and whispered, “Didn’t I tell you? I don’t have to work tonight. I just came in to give Natalie a heads-up about what was happening in Room 22.”
Amanda’s heart leaped into her throat. “What is happening in Room 22?”
Sam waved a hand. “The young woman in the room is in a wheelchair, and the wheels keep getting stuck on the rugs around the inn. I had the rugs put in the back room this afternoon to make things easier for her.”
The goodness of this man.
“You two have fun tonight!” Natalie called from the doorway that led toward the back office. “Oh, to be young again.”
Sam laughed and waved a hand toward Natalie as Amanda tugged him back out onto the front porch of the Sunrise Cove. There, she lifted her chin, closed her eyes, and kissed him with a bursting love, the kind that seemed to take up every square inch of her body and mind and make her float a full inch off the ground. Since she’d first seen him at the Sunrise Cove last year, Sam had never been far from her mind. He’d also proven himself an essential part of the inner mechanisms of the Sunrise Cove Inn itself, thus making everything much, much easier on the Sheridan family as a whole. It couldn’t have pleased Amanda more.
“So, let me guess. You want to go out to...”
“Menemsha Hills...” Amanda finished his sentence. “Of course.”
“You’re so predictable, Amanda Harris.” Sam curled her dark hair around his finger as a sneaky smile played out across his face. “Luckily, I had a hunch this would happen and already packed up a bottle of rosé and a few other snacks.”
Sam had recently purchased a second-hand dark blue convertible from an older gentleman who lived part-time on the island and frequented the Sunrise Cove Bistro. When seated in the driver’s seat with his sunglasses on, Sam looked like the most handsome man on the island (in Amanda’s eyes, at least). There beside him in the passenger seat, Amanda dropped her head back as the soft May breeze blew through her curls. The car’s speakers howled with an old song from the seventies, which Sam sang along to, nearly getting every word correct.
“You’re outrageous,” Amanda told him, bubbling with laughter.
“You signed up for this, baby,” Sam shot back.
“I really did, didn’t I?”
The drive out to Menemsha took about a half-hour, stretching south and west toward the Aquinnah Cliffs. Throughout, Amanda and Sam half-argued about what to listen to, swapping between the oldies’ station and the current station, where Amanda’s favorite songs played upward of three times an hour.
“If you’re going to make us listen to this, then I need you to sing every word.” Sam cried, cranking the volume as they sped toward the beach.
“Sam! You know I can’t sing.”
“Those are the rules, baby.”
“Stop calling me baby,” Amanda teased, her smile widening.
In truth, she adored being called that. Her ex-fiancé, Chris, had hardly ever given her a nickname, which had made her feel unwanted and not special in the least. Eventually, Chris left her at the altar in front of all her family and friends, which was much worse than never getting a nickname. To Amanda, it was in the top-ten worst bridal stories she’d ever heard, up there with a friend whose ex-fiancé had left her a month before the wedding for her sister. Well, at least it wasn’t that bad.
Sam parked the convertible on the outer edge of the natural reserve, then pressed a button on the roof of the car to bring the top back up.
“Just in case it rains,” Sam said as Amanda laughed.
“I’ve never seen a more beautiful day in my life. There’s no way it’ll rain.”
“We live an island life,” Sam countered. “You know that weather can change in the course of five minutes. The only thing we can do is expect the unexpected.”
“Wow. Are you a philosopher now?”
“Maybe I am, Amanda. Open yourself up to the secrets of the universe.”
Sam leaped out of the convertible and retrieved the tote bag of rosé, plastic cups, and little snacks. Amanda leafed through the back trunk, which was already swirling with chaos despite the fact that he’d had the car for little more than two months, hunting down a picnic blanket.
“Ah-ha.” She dragged out the scratchy orange and yellow blanket from the back corner, smacking it against the side of the car to get the dust off.
“There’s that thing! Looked everywhere for it,” Sam cried.
“How the heck do you manage the Sunrise Cove so well?” Amanda shot back.
“I give all my organizational skills to your family’s business,” Sam returned. “Nothing left for me and my belongings. But you know, a bit of chaos makes things a little more interesting. Don’t you agree?”
Amanda’s smile was crooked, drawing up toward her left ear. “Do you even know who you’re talking to?”
“I know, I know.” Sam waved a hand. “This is the woman who makes grocery lists in order of where the items are located in each aisle. This is the woman who made an hourly schedule for what snacks to eat at the Super Bowl Party. This is the woman...”
Amanda leaped up to place a kiss across his lips, ending his tirade. Her heart pounding with longing, she opened her lips against his and closed her eyes. The scratchy blanket caught the wind and flapped against their legs. In the distance, a seagull cawed out ominously.
“This is the woman who loves you,” Amanda finished, dropping back down to the sand below.
Sam wrapped his fingers together at the base of her back and held her for a long time, gazing into her eyes. “And this is the man who loves you back.”
After a full beat of simmering tension and longing, Amanda stepped back, punched him gently on the upper arm and teased, “Oh, you’re a man now, are you?” before she then scampered down toward the stone-lined beach. Sam remained hot on her heels, hollering out for her to slow down. But Amanda felt an unwavering sense of energy. She could have run ten miles, even twenty, without slowing down.
She’d never felt this way with Chris. Chris had been a necessary part of her “goal-oriented plans” for her twenties. He’d fit perfectly into the puzzle of “the rest of her life.” Sam, on the other hand, had been a blissful surprise, waiting in the wings of her life as she’d fallen into a state of devastation. She’d told Audrey recently, “Sam taught me that you don’t always have to have a plan.” To this, Audrey had laughed and said, “That drives you crazy, doesn’t it?”
Amanda fluttered the orange and yellow blanket across a stretch of sand and dropped down to cross her legs and lift her chin toward the orange orb of sunlight as it dropped itself toward the western horizon line. Across the Vineyard Sound and the Atlantic, the next stretch of land was Rhode Island.
“When was the last time you were on the main land?” Amanda whispered. “It feels like this whole other world. Like I was someone else when I lived over there.”
Sam puffed out his cheeks. “It’s been since February for me.”
“That’s right.” Amanda remembered that Sam had helped his younger brother, Xavier, move to Providence in February, where he’d begun his first semester at a community college. “Do you miss him?”
“I miss him in a very strange and faraway way,” Sam replied contemplatively, splaying his hand across the sand and digging with the tips of his fingers. “He was always getting into so much trouble. That DUI case that your mom helped us with was one in a very long list of problems.”
Amanda dropped her head against Sam’s shoulder. The water beneath the sun glittered with springtime nostalgia. She could already half-imagine missing this night in the near future when they were lost in the throes of summertime bliss.
“Was it hard for you?” Sam whispered then, drawing his hand across her shoulder.
“What?”
“Falling in love again.” Sam’s words were mere whispers, sweeping across the outer edge of her ear.
Amanda and Sam had never spoken so concretely about their love versus her previous long-term relationship with Chris. Incredibly, Amanda didn’t immediately want to change the subject. Instead, she tilted her head and engaged with her emotions. Perhaps honesty was better in all cases. Perhaps this was what you needed to do to survive.
“We took it so slow,” Amanda whispered, closing her eyes as a salty breeze flashed across her cheeks. “So slow that I sometimes questioned if you liked me at all.”
“You were like a cat,” Sam returned sheepishly. “I couldn’t get too close to you too quickly. I was terrified you’d run as quickly as you could away.”
“I really might have.”
Amanda’s heart swelled, threatening to make her ribs crack. “It all happened the way it was meant to,” she added after a long pause. “I truly believe that.”
Sam popped the cork from the bottle of rosé and poured them two glasses, which sparkled in bubbling pinks. Amanda’s head flashed with images: Chris cracking open a beer before he watched a sporting event on their large TV. Amanda, making list after list of her potential plans for their future— Rutgers University, married by twenty-two, and her first house by twenty-three.
Now that she was twenty-four, there could be no more lists. No more dreaming. Not even: Sam Fuller, carrying an infant child across his chest.
Whatever will be, will be.
Sam crunched on a chocolate-covered peanut and passed her the bag. Amanda allowed the morsels to melt across her tongue, watching as the waves frothed across the sands. A little girl far down the beach tossed stone after stone into the water as though she wanted to prove something. Imagine us coming here with our children. Imagine us, here together for the next fifty years.
“I guess I should just tell you how happy I am,” Amanda whispered. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy before. And sometimes, it terrifies me. I’ve lost so much. I’ve watched my parents get divorced. I’ve watched Audrey have the baby of a man who wanted nothing to do with her. I’ve watched my ex-fiancé run all the way across the world, as far away from me as he could get.”
Sam set his jaw, his eyes catching the last light from the glittering sun. “Do you feel like you can trust me, Amanda?”
Amanda swallowed the lump in her throat. With her eyes locked on his, she whispered, “Yes. I think I can trust you. Do you feel like you can trust me?”
“More than anyone.”
When the last of the sunlight diminished westward, headed across the great continent of North America, Sam and Amanda gathered their half-bottle of wine, empty packaging, and their blanket and headed back to Sam’s convertible.
“I told you that it wouldn’t rain,” Amanda teased as she folded up the blanket and placed it gently in the trunk.
“You think you’re a meteorologist, huh?”
Amanda laughed as she danced around the side of the car and dropped into the passenger seat. As she settled in, buckling her seatbelt, her eyelids fluttered closed, and her shoulders dropped back. She felt languid and sleepy, as though she was a little girl about to be carried into the house by Richard Harris, her father.
“Where are we headed?” Sam asked gently as he started the engine. “The Sheridan House?”
“That sounds good,” Amanda breathed.
“Just close your eyes,” Sam murmured, drawing a hand over her knee as he eased the car out of the beach parking lot. “We’ll be home in thirty minutes.”
“No. I should stay awake. Keep you company.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Sam said with a laugh. “I got my oldies’ station on. I’ll be all right.”
“You’re such an old soul,” Amanda said, her eyelashes drifting across her cheeks.
During those blissful and dark moments of sleep, Amanda’s mind took her into a sort of abyss of dreams— chasing Audrey through the hills of Martha’s Vineyard; lacing a sailing rope through her fingers as she and Sam sped out across the Sound; listening to the laughter of Grandpa Wes and Kellan as they watched a bird from the window.
This is real life.
If you don’t stop to look around for a moment.
You’ll miss it.
The sudden bright flash of light erupted over Amanda’s face. Next came a terrifying honk and the sound of shattering glass. As Sam smashed his foot against the brake and cried out, Amanda was yanked forward, caught painfully with the seatbelt. Glass wavered across her fingers and her thighs. She blinked through the terrifying light of the vehicles, trying to make sense of what was before her.
Glass. Bent metal. The smell of burning oil.
“Sam!? Sam!?” Amanda heard herself scream her boyfriend’s name with pure terror. “Sam, are you all right?”
Have I lost my love all over again?