Davis

Seven months into dating Sloane, I can officially say I know what true peace is.

I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. Other than love her.

And it doesn’t matter.

Because when I’m with her, everything in me stills, and the only thing that matters is loving her.

And it’s so easy to love her.

Like right now, as we’re sitting on the balcony over Crusty Nut, watching the pirate treasure hunt dig in the town square across the street. I’m toying with her hair, happy to be touching her any way I can, with no other place on earth I’d rather be and nothing else I’d rather be doing.

Levi and Ingrid are with us, watching from overhead as two of their three kids partake in digging for treasure.

“You do this Pirate Festival every single year?” Ingrid’s asking Sloane.

Sloane nods. “Every single year.”

“What happens to the square after it’s all dug up?”

“Landscape crew comes in and fixes it all up. There’s new sod every year. It’s excessive, but everyone has so much fun with it, and we donate a lot of the profits to Sarah’s favorite environmental funds.”

“You think I could go dig without getting mobbed?” Levi asks.

“No,” Sloane and Ingrid answer together.

Levi slides me a look. “But you could.”

Sloane squeezes my thigh. “Not this year.”

That’s unfortunately true.

I had to hire a security team of my own—temporarily, that’s for fucking sure—because it turns out when you crash a concert to tell the world you love a woman after not being seen publicly for fifteen years, the attention comes back.

Has to die down soon.

Not like there aren’t other celebrities making bigger news happen.

Ingrid sucks in a breath and sits straighter, and Levi loops an arm around the back of her chair. “Chuck’s got him.”

She presses a palm into her eye. “I know, but it’s Hudson.”

Hudson.

Their youngest.

He makes Tillie Jean and Cooper Rock together look like angels.

“Was Giselle better with him?” Sloane asks.

“She was,” Ingrid says. “We’re still looking for the right fit.”

“Sorry about that. Again.”

“No, no! Don’t be sorry. She’s so happy now. Don’t ever be sorry someone’s happy. Did she send you pictures from her last trip? Look. How fun is this?”

Giselle did, indeed, take a vacation after we found the treasure.

She went home and fell in love.

Nobody saw it coming, probably least of all her.

But it means she didn’t come back.

And now Levi’s straightening.

I look out over the square too, find Hudson—he’s turning eight this summer—and I see what’s about to play out the split second before it happens.

One minute, Hudson’s bending over to pull a string he’s just dug up from the ground, and the next?—

“No!” Sloane shrieks.

“Oh, fuck,” Levi mutters.

“Cussing jar, Dad,” Zoe, their oldest, says without removing her nose from a book at the next table.

And glitter explodes all over Hudson and his sister Piper beside him.

“ Rawk! Contraband glitter! Rawk! ” Long Beak Silver crows.

“ Stinky Booty, you are dead when I get my hands on you ,” Tillie Jean yells beneath us.

“Cooper’s here?” Levi asks.

“No,” Sloane says. “At least, not physically. Clearly he is in spirit. But the Fireballs are in LA right now.”

“ Rawk! Stinky Booty goes to the slammer! Rawk! ”

“I love that bird,” Levi says.

“No,” Ingrid says as Zoe flips her book shut and says, “Really? Can we get a bird? I want a parrot. We should get a parrot. Mom, wouldn’t it be awesome? We could train it to tell us when Hudson’s trying to sneak out of his room and onto the roof again.”

“No,” Ingrid repeats.

“Taking Mom’s side,” Levi says. “We can visit the bird.”

I scoot closer to Sloane, watching her watch them with a soft smile. “Your dad’s right,” she says to Zoe. “I’ll introduce you to Pop. He owns Long Beak Silver, and I’m sure he’d be happy to let you visit anytime you’re in town. The first time you get parrot poop on you, you’ll change your mind about wanting your own. Or the first time he steals your car keys and puts them on a roof.”

Levi and Ingrid’s security crew is pulling Hudson and Piper to the side to wipe them off.

The rest of the digging has paused while Tillie Jean stalks into the middle of the square. “Do not pull any strings that you find, people. Not if you don’t want to get glittered.”

“Did Cooper really invest in biodegradable glitter?” Ingrid asks Sloane.

“Yes,” I answer for her. “He wants to change the world one prank at a time.”

“And it’s truly biodegradable?”

“Confirmed with lab work.”

“Huh.” Ingrid leans back again and looks down on Shipwreck. “How’s the museum doing?”

“It is so crowded ,” Sloane replies, which makes me smile.

The Rocks issued a statement a few months after we found the treasure, and they laid it all out there.

That Shipwreck was founded by Walter Bombeck pretending to be Thorny Rock. That the real Thorny Rock founded Sarcasm. That they’d split the treasure, and both halves have been found and will be on display at the museum.

“Raised ticket prices, and it’s still sold out through next March,” I tell Ingrid.

“And it’s paying for itself, even with the increased security to handle guarding a real pirate treasure.”

“Some bigger museums have reached out to ask if they can display parts of it.”

Sloane smiles at me, and my heart does what it always does when she smiles at me—it breaks into a happy dance.

Impossible to not smile back at that. “They want some of the canned vegetables Sloane used as weapons to keep the treasure from falling into the wrong hands too.”

She laughs. “Shush. They do not.”

They do. I’ll show her the email later.

“Is Sarcasm doing anything to compete more in the pirate tourism world now?” Ingrid asks.

“Nope. They said fu—eff you all, we’re keeping our Unicorn Festival, and we’re going to do it bigger and better than the Pirate Festival because we’ve always been better. Direct quote.”

“From Annika’s sister,” I supply.

“Is the museum displaying the mortar ball?” Ingrid asks.

Sloane’s grin grows to epic proportions. “It’s been defused and we should get it back in the next few weeks.”

“They figure out who was buried under the stairs in that cabin?” Levi asks.

Sloane squeezes my thigh again.

“They did,” I confirm. “Thorny Rock’s oldest grandson. The real Thorny Rock.”

“One of your relatives,” Ingrid says.

“Yep.”

“Do they know why?”

Sloane and I share a look.

“We have a theory,” I finally say.

“It’s very logical,” Sloane adds.

Levi grins. “Usually is with this guy.”

“Spill,” Ingrid says. “I’ll believe whatever you tell me. Oh my god. Davis. You need to write a book. You need to write a book about all of this.”

I pull a face as Sloane straightens. “That’s what I told him too. But he’s not ready to hear it.”

I love that phrase.

He’s not ready to hear it .

She said it to my mom at Christmas the first time when Mom asked if I was going to do anything with the land my camper’s still sitting on, and I said no.

Sloane told her I was going to build a house there someday because heritage is important enough to me that I went on a freaking treasure hunt, but that I wasn’t ready to hear it.

She was right.

We’ll build a house on that land one day.

It means something. Just like my cabin where Cooper found the first half of the treasure means something.

I’m coming around.

Slowly.

“Thorny Rock—the real Thorny Rock, the one who founded Sarcasm—had four grandkids,” I tell Levi and Ingrid. “One died in childhood. One moved to Copper Valley—that would be where my family line came from—and the other two stayed in the area up here. The treasure wasn’t where it should’ve been. Either of them. Sloane came up with a theory that Thorny and Walter never told anyone where they were stashing their halves of the treasure, but each of their families had clues. Same clues we had. So we think at least one of Thorny’s grandkids found his half of the treasure, and when the other one found out—she killed him to keep him silent.”

“He wasn’t well-liked,” Sloane adds. “We went back through all of the old letters that Davis’s mom inherited, and figured out who was who, and it’s very likely no one missed him at all.”

“Or a justifiable homicide,” Ingrid muses.

Levi cuts her a look, and she grins at him. “I read a lot. I’m very happy in my own real life though. Probably because I’d never have a reason to justifiably homicide you. So long as we never get a bird.”

“They’re so gross,” Zoe mutters. “Uncle Davis, if you write a book, I’ll edit it for you. You look like the type who’ll use your contractions in the wrong places and leave dangling participles and end sentences with prepositions.”

“ Rawk! Contraband glitter! Rawk! ”

All of us lean over the railing and look at the square again.

Three tourists are now coated in glitter.

Tillie Jean’s rubbing her temples, then pausing to rub her pregnant belly, then rubbing her temples again.

She glances up, catches us watching her, and visibly sighs. “My brother will never see hell unleashed like the hell I will release on him when he retires in a few months.”

“You sure you want to do that to Waverly?” Levi asks.

They hold eye contact.

It’s the I know something kind of eye contact that makes both Sloane and Ingrid sit up and gasp.

“You know, don’t you?” Tillie Jean says.

“That she’s going on tour next year? Yep.”

“The other thing .”

“Babies,” Ingrid breathes.

The sharp look Levi gives her—the do not tell the world Waverly’s pregnant look—confirms what all of us apparently suspect.

Bet that’ll be an interesting tour now.

“Babies are so— oh my god ,” Zoe gasps.

I look at her.

She claps a hand over her own mouth. “I don’t know anything. Don’t look at me like you’re doing mind tricks on me. And I didn’t mean it about your grammar. Oh my god, baby .”

Sloane leans over and stares at Tillie Jean, who ducks eye contact and fans herself. “Oof. Gotta get out of this heat. Pop. Pop, get your parrot on glitter patrol. I’m over it. Where’s my husband? I want a lemonade.”

Sloane smiles, then leans back into me. “I like our home.”

I kiss her head. “Me too.”

“And our friends.”

“Most days.”

She snorts with laughter.

I didn’t know I was an everything is my favorite kind of guy until I started dating Sloane.

But I am.

Her laugh is my favorite. Her smiles are my favorite. Her hands are my favorite. Her mouth is my favorite. Her screaming my name and scraping her nails down my back is my favorite.

Everything about her is my favorite.

“I’m glad you were the fake bride who stuck,” I murmur to her.

She laughs again. “Same.”

“Maybe we’ll do a real ceremony one of these days.”

She peers up at me, and there’s no are you seriously proposing randomly in front of your friends? that you might expect.

Instead, there’s a bit of shiny eye going around. “Just tell me where to be and when.”

Yeah.

She’s my calm.

She’s my center.

She’s my everything.

My absolute favorite.

And the only woman in the world that I will ever love this much.

For all eternity.