Free First Time in Forever by Sarah Morgan

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