My thoughts were spinning on a hamster wheel, going nowhere, and I knew I had to say something. “I wasn’t happy either,” I blurted out.
He nodded, as if I hadn’t started two-thirds of the way through a story he didn’t know.
“I just—it looked so perfect. On the outside. And I thought that mattered more. It—it was okay that we didn’t talk that much or that we—well, he said we were fighting a lot, but we kind of weren’t by then. We’d stopped bothering. It was—” I looked down at my lap and then held up my phone. “It was like Instagram. You post all the good stuff and don’t let anyone see that it’s held together with tape and safety pins and not really anything special at all.”
When I finally looked back at Joe, I was sure I’d said too much. But his face was sympathetic. “Sounds like you’d been stuck for a while.” I nodded. One side of his mouth curled into a small grin. “I can’t picture you not talking much.”
I let out an embarrassed laugh that almost turned into a cry, but didn’t. “Tells you how bad it got, when I was okay with that.”
“You stopped looking happy in your Instagram pictures a couple years ago.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were still smiling, but it wasn’t the same as earlier pictures.”
Suddenly vulnerable, I resisted the urge to open the app and go through my feed. If he could see through me when we’d just met, could everyone else see it too?
He took his phone from his back pocket and pulled up a picture of me from the previous summer at the beach. At the time, I had thought it was the perfect shot. But I remembered how annoyed Brad was that I made him take so many to get it. “Look at that versus this one.” He scrolled down until he came to a different picture of me in Greece, the blue of the Mediterranean behind me, my smile radiant. Then he went back up to the picture of me at the Inn. “Or this one.”
My eyebrows went up. “Are you saying you make me happy?”
“I didn’t mean—” he stammered slightly, and I put a hand on his arm.
“I’m teasing. Let me see again.” He handed me his phone, and I studied the pictures, swiping between them. He wasn’t wrong. I was smiling in the one from last summer, but not like I used to. “Does that mean everyone knew my marriage sucked? And no one told me?”
Joe shook his head. “Photographer’s eye. I capture emotions for a living.”
“You’re also admitting you went through my whole Instagram feed.”
“Purely photographic research.” He grinned. “What’s your excuse?”
“I’m ridiculously nosy.”
The silence that followed made me realize that if we just sat there smiling at each other alone out on the water, we were going to quickly find ourselves in territory I wasn’t ready to be in. I broke the moment by turning toward the vast expanse of ocean leading to the horizon. “How will we know when there’s a whale?”
“Either we’ll see a tail or spray from a blowhole. Sometimes they jump.”
“We came all this way, and we might see some water spray up?”
“If we see that, we’ll see tails, too, probably.”
“And we just watch the water?”
“We just watch the water.”
I scrunched up my nose. “Okay, I get why you didn’t want to do this.”
“Who says I didn’t want to do it?”
“You said it was touristy.”
“It is—if you go out on one of those cruises. This is two people enjoying a nice morning on a sailboat.”
“You’re not bored?”
He looked at me, and I almost changed my mind about what I was willing to do this soon. “I’m not bored.”
I was in over my head. I looked back at the water because if I kept looking at him, things were going to happen. And I saw a fin. I grabbed Joe’s arm. “Is—is that a shark?”
He followed my gaze and laughed. “No. Dolphin.”
“How do you know?”
“Dolphins swim up and down so their fins bob. The fins are also curved. And they travel in pods.” He followed the line behind the dolphin’s fin and pointed toward a dozen or more tiny fins bobbing farther away but heading in our direction. “They like boats. They might stick around for a while.”
I looked down in wonder as it swam alongside us, clearly visible in the water next to the boat. It surfaced, looking at me as it swam along, Joe at my side. “Did you see that?” I asked, whacking his arm repeatedly. “The dolphin looked at me!”