Elle giggled into her hand.
“Any preference on pizza?” I asked her.
Her eyes widened. “Me, too?”
“Of course. You two are friends now, right? Friends eat pizza together.” I winked at Ari, and she gasped, clasping her hands together.
Elle glanced down at her, lips twitching. “I guess they do. I’m not too fussy as long as it’s either cheese or pepperoni.”
Another gasp escaped Ari. “I love pepperoni!”
“Great,” I muttered. “I’ve found her soulmate.”
Elle’s laugh rang out in such a way that it made my stomach flip. “I’m also partial to cookie dough and lemonade.”
“Yay!” Ari jumped up and down. “Dad? Can we have pizza?”
“Of course, we’re having pizza. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise, would I?” I winked again. “Elle, if you don’t mind watching her, I’ll run out and grab it.”
“Oh, pleaseeee!” Ari grabbed her arm and hung off it.
We were going to have to talk about it.
Elle smirked, looking back at me. “Go ahead. We have a lot of shells to find.”
My heart swelled three sizes—a bit like the damn Grinch.
“I’ll see you soon.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN – ELLE
“Good?”
I looked down at the shell Ari was holding up and nodded. “Perfect. That’s big, too. It’ll go at the top.”
“Ooh, yay!” She set it carefully in her bucket and looked around a little more. “Do you think we have enough?”
“Let’s see.” I reached down for her bucket and tilted it so I could see. It was a quarter full with various shells and seaweed and other little ocean bits. “Oh, we have enough! Shall we go decorate our castles?”
“Yes! Yay!” She ran back up the beach to the town we’d inadvertently created and dropped herself on the sand beside it.
I followed, albeit more slowly than her. My fall earlier had accidentally found us the perfect spot for sandcastles, and we’d quickly established a ten-castle town that needed, according to Ari, a thousand and one decorations.
I rejoined her at our little castle town and sat just outside the outer moat. Well, I called it a moat, but there was no water in it. After fifteen trips to the sea, she’d finally accepted defeat and realized that the moat wasn’t going to hold water.
We were pretending now.
I watched as she draped seaweed over three castles, gently moving them so that they sat just the way she wanted them.
“Elle?”
“Yes, honey?”
She meticulously arranged a shell on the side of one castle. “Dad explained about your tape.”
Oy, vey.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I’m sorry someone was mean to you.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “It’s okay. I have some really nice people who are helping me.”
“Here? In Creek Keys?”
“No,” I said slowly. “At home, in New York.”
“Oooh.” She put a shell down and looked at me. “You live in New York City, don’t you? What’s that like? Your videos look really cool.”
“It’s… busy. There are a lot of people there.”
“I bet it’s better than Creek Keys.”
“Not exactly. I like it here. It’s quiet and sunny and relaxed.”
“I think I want to live in New York. I want to be just like you!”
I looked over at her. “No, you don’t.”
“I do! I really do!” She crawled over to me and sat down right in front of me. “You have the best life. You have pretty hair. Pretty clothes. You get to play with puppies. I really want a puppy, but Dad says no.”
I knew that.
“I work a lot. My videos take hours to edit and pull together. I can spend hours on the phone talking business. It’s not as glamorous as it looks.”
“No way. Your life is so cool. You do the best stuff.”
Oh, Lord. I was about to give this poor baby girl a lesson in reality.
“Ari, you have to realize something,” I said, pulling my phone out of the pocket of my shorts. I pressed my thumb against the screen of my phone to unlock it. “What you see here, on the internet, isn’t real.”
“How isn’t it real?”
“It just isn’t.”
“Any of it? How can all of it not be real? Some of it has to be real.”
I shrugged one shoulder as I opened Instagram and showed her the screen. “Sure, some of it is. But almost every single image you see here of all these people everyone thinks is perfect, is fake. They’re photoshopped. They’re filtered. They’ve been brightened and lightened and edited because that’s what they think people want to see.”
“But they’re real pictures, right? They’re actually in those places.”
“Sure, they’re real, but it’s not their real life.” I locked my phone again and, resting my arms on my knees, looked her in the eyes. “You don’t see them waking up at six-thirty and going to the Starbucks drive-thru with yesterday’s mascara, hair that looks like a rat’s nest, and a yogurt stain on their sweatpants.”
She laughed. “They don’t do that.”
“Of course they do! Before you met me, would you think I did that?”