The Last Shore Thing

The voicemail I left Inez was about four minutes long and I only remember half of it because I was pacing the boardwalk by the end. It went something like this.

"Okay, so you know how I said a fresh start was exactly what I needed? A new town, a new job, no drama? Well, the universe heard that and laughed. Do you remember me telling you about Elliott? From the conference three years ago? The one night, and then the argument about the expense report, and then the whole thing where he got the Henderson account I wanted? THAT Elliott. He works for Kira now. He's here. In Osprey Shores. And guess who shares a house with me for the rest of the week while she's in Tampa?"

I kicked a piece of driftwood down the beach. Some gull screamed at me. I screamed back, and I'm not proud of that.

"There's one bathroom, Inez. ONE. And he takes forty-minute showers. I counted. Who takes forty minutes? What is he doing in there, communing with spirits? And the bedroom doors don't lock. Nothing in this house locks. The landlord said it's 'character.' I said it's a fire hazard. Anyway. Call me back. I need to complain more but my phone's at twelve percent."

I hung up and stood there looking at the water. It was gray and it smelled like low tide and old rope. Off-season beach towns are a specific kind of lonely. Half the boardwalk shops had paper over the windows. The Drowned Anchor was open though, because of course the one bar in town is called that and of course Elliott and I would end up there together before the week was out.

The house itself was on stilts, kind of. Three of them. The fourth was a cinder block situation Kira swore a contractor was "looking at." The floors tilted toward the ocean like the whole building wanted to leave. There was a porch swing that swung by itself in the wind, which sounds spooky but really it just squeaks and makes you jump every single time.

That first full day, I came down for coffee and Elliott was at the sink in jeans and nothing else, hair wet, tightening the faucet with a wrench. Twenty-seven years old and built like he did push-ups out of spite. I said good morning like a normal functioning adult and my stomach did this flip, this actual stupid flip, and I hated it so much I burned my tongue on the coffee.

Which brings me to the letter.

I found a legal pad in a drawer and I wrote it that night, addressed to myself, which Inez would say is the healthiest thing I've done all year. I never sent it anywhere. It's still in my suitcase.

*Dear Alanna. You are twenty-six years old and you are writing a letter to yourself about a man's shoulders. I need you to sit with that for a second. This morning you saw Elliott Sander without a shirt and your stomach flipped and you said "good morning" in a voice I have never heard you use, a voice like a hotel front desk at two a.m. You are an insurance adjuster. You assess damage for a living. You are very good at estimating what things cost and what they're worth, and yet you cannot price out why it bothers you that he remembered how you take your coffee. He remembered. Black, one sugar.

He didn't ask. He just made it that way and set it down and went back to the sink and you stood there as a fool clutching a mug with your name already on it in Sharpie. Here is the worst part. It's not the shoulders. It's that for three years you have been trading barbs with this man over email like it's a sport, and the barbs were the point, and now you're in a house with him and the barbs have to be spoken out loud and they come out softer than they read. You hate that. You hate that you noticed he hums when he fixes things. You hate that you know what his laugh sounds like in a small kitchen instead of over a conference line.

Do not do anything about this. Or do. I can't actually stop you, I'm a piece of paper. Signed, Alanna, who is doing fine, thank you for asking.*

I folded it up and put it under my socks. Then I went to bed and lay there listening to the porch swing squeak and thinking about literally anything else.

The next morning was the toilet.

I want to set the scene. I woke up, shuffled down the hall, and discovered that the toilet had made its choice overnight. It was clogged. It had been clogged aggressively. And Elliott had already left for his site visit, because he left a note taped to the bathroom mirror, and I still have that note, because I took a photo of it for my records, which I told myself was for a future complaint to Kira but really it was because I couldn't stop laughing.

The note said: "Your problem now. I fixed the sink. Also there's a plunger under the sink. Also I win."

So he'd fixed the sink. Genuinely fixed it, the drip was gone, and he'd left the toilet for me like some kind of chores-based declaration of war. And then, because this man cannot let anything go, he TEXTED me a photo of the toilet. A photo. Of the toilet. Captioned: "Your problem now. I fixed the sink!"

I sent back a single middle-finger emoji. Then I plunged that toilet for ten minutes like it had personally wronged me, because in a way it had. It was the principle. You don't fix the sink AND weaponize the toilet. Pick a lane.

He texted back a thumbs up and then, forty minutes later, a photo of a seagull eating a bag of chips on the boardwalk with no caption at all, which somehow annoyed me more than the toilet.

That night he came home late. I heard his truck pull in around nine, and then I heard the screen door, and then I heard him navigating the tilted hallway with the grace of a man who had clearly stopped at The Drowned Anchor on the way home. He's not a sloppy drunk, he's a loud one. I heard him drop his keys twice.

And then, at about ten, my phone rang. Voicemail. From him. I still have it. I've played it maybe six times, which is a number I'll deny under oath.

"Alanna. Alanna Malone. Okay, so this is, hi, it's Elliott. Obviously.