First Time in Forever. Sarah Morgan

he’d never seen a more uncomfortable pair.

      He remembered Rachel at the same age, lighthearted and playful. She, too, had refused to be separated from her favorite toy, only in her case, the toy had been a puffin and she’d had a habit of leaving it everywhere.

      He’d chased around the island more times than he cared to remember hunting for that damn puffin. On one occasion Scott Rowland, the island fire chief, had delivered it to the house after someone in the library had found it and recognized it as belonging to Rachel. Anticipating the day the puffin would be found by a tourist, not a local, Ryan had persuaded his grandmother to buy a spare, and he’d hidden it in his room as a precaution. His closest friend, Zach, had found it when they’d been sprawled in his room one day playing video games. It had taken Ryan six months to live down the fact he’d had a stuffed puffin in his room. Every week when he’d played football there had been a puffin in his locker. He’d dragged his skateboard out of the garage one morning only to find someone had painted a puffin on it. That had been the summer Ryan had given up skateboarding and taken up basketball. For one whole semester, the team had adopted the puffin as their mascot. By the time Zach had gotten bored with the joke, Ryan had enough stuffed puffins to give Rachel a whole colony of the things.

      He’d gone to bed at night dreaming of living somewhere that didn’t have Puffin in the name.

      “So, Brittany is in Greece.” He kept the conversation neutral, avoiding any topics that were likely to make her jumpy. Since he didn’t know what those were, he figured it was best to stick to talking about her friend. “I remember when she was ten years old, she was playing at being an archaeologist, and she dug a deep hole in Kathleen’s garden. When Kathleen asked what had happened to her flowers, Brit told her it was what was underneath the soil that was important.”

      Emily reached for her coffee. “You knew Kathleen well?”

      “Very well. There is a group of women on the island, including Hilda, who you met earlier, who have been friends forever. They grew up here, went to school together and then married and had their children around the same time. They’ve seen each other through triumph and tragedy. Island life fosters friendships. They were as close as family.” He saw her expression change. “You don’t believe friends can be like family?”

      “Oh, yes.” There was a faraway look in her eyes. “I do believe that. Sometimes they can be better than family.”

      So, her own family had let her down.

      He filed that fact away. “Over the years their meetings changed. When they had young children, it was a toddler group, a way of getting out of the house and breaking up the Maine winter. When the children were older, they turned it into a hiking club for a short time, and there was one summer when they took up kayaking. In the winter there was yoga, art—that was when the episode of the nude life drawing happened—and right now it’s a book group.” After he’d left home he’d stopped reading for a while. He put it down to all the times he’d read Green Eggs and Ham to Rachel.

      “Where do they meet?”

      “They used to meet in each other’s houses, but now that’s too much work for one person to cope with, so I let them use one of our function rooms, and provide the food.”

      “You own this place?” Curious, she glanced around. “It’s busy. You’re obviously doing something right.”

      “Took a lot of effort to design something that satisfied everyone. We needed it to work for the community.” And he’d needed it to work for him. “The buildings and the marina were already here, but we made improvements, increased the number of member moorings and guest moorings, offered boat maintenance and a valet service. The first thing I did was employ a club manager. We had this huge building that was basically unused, so I converted it into apartments and kept the top one for myself. Then we developed this place and called the whole thing the Ocean Club. I worked on the principle that people who have just spent time at sea are happy to crash at the first decent place they find. We’re full most nights in the summer.”

      “You’ve lived here all your life?”

      “No. Like most people, I moved away, just to check there wasn’t anything better out there.”

      “And was there?”

      He thought about what he’d seen. The life he’d led. His shoulder throbbed, and he forced himself to relax because tension made it worse. “It was different. I grew up on this island. My grandfather was a lobsterman. My father took a different route. He spent time in the merchant marine and then joined the crew of the schooner Alice Rose, sailing around the coast.”

      “I don’t know anything about boats.”

      Ryan wondered once again what she was doing on this island, where sailing was the main preoccupation. “That’s a schooner.” He pointed, and she turned her head reluctantly, leaving him with the feeling that if she could have found somewhere else to look she would have done so. “See the two masts? Some have more, but two is common. They have shallower drafts, perfect for coastal waters, and the way they’re rigged makes them easier to handle in the changing winds along the coast, so they need a smaller crew.”

      Lizzy craned her neck. “It looks like a pirate ship.”

      Remembering Rachel saying the same, Ryan smiled. “My father became captain. He taught seamanship and navigation and then decided the teamwork needed to sail the Alice Rose should be transferable to the corporate world, so he persuaded a few of the big companies in Boston to send their executives up here. The rest of the time he offered coastal cruises to tourists and twice a year he ran bird-watching trips around the islands. He believed that the best way to see the sea, the islands and the wildlife was from the deck of the Alice Rose.”

      Lizzy put down her empty glass. She had a ring of chocolate milk around her lips, and the breeze had whipped color into her cheeks. “Was he a pirate?”

      “No. The opposite. He was a pioneer of sustainable ecotourism, which basically means he loved nature and tried to make sure that everything he did helped the island. He donated part of his profits to local conservation projects, particularly the protection of the puffins.”

      “What’s a puffin?”

      “It’s a seabird. They used to nest on these islands a long time ago. Conservation experts have been finding ways to bring them back.”

      “This is their home? That’s why it’s called Puffin Island?”

      “Yes, although now the puffin colony is on Puffin Rock.” He pointed to the small uninhabited island just visible in the distance. “They lay one egg a year, and young puffins usually return to breed on the same island where they hatched.”

      “That’s fascinating.” Emily glanced at him, curious, and he noticed the dark flecks in her green eyes. The dark smudges under those eyes told him that whatever her trouble was, it was keeping her awake. Presumably it was also affecting her appetite given that all she’d ordered was coffee.

      “I guess they have a sort of homing instinct.” He’d done the same, hadn’t he? In the end he’d dragged himself back here, to the place where he’d been born.

      Lizzy’s eyes were huge. “Can we see them?”

      “You can take a boat trip. Humans can’t get too close because otherwise they scare the puffins. Where is home to you?”

      “New York.” It was Emily who spoke, and he noticed she glanced at Lizzy and gave a brief shake of her head. He wondered what the child would have said without that warning glance to silence her.

      Without looking at him, Emily reached for a napkin and carefully wiped the milk from Lizzy’s mouth. It was a natural response, something he’d done himself when his sister was very young, but something about the way she did it made him think it was new to her.

      “You said you met Brittany at college. What were you studying?”

      “Applied math and economics.