His words were the sharpestarrows.
"I mean it, Owen. I'm so sorry. Tell me how I can make it up toyou."
"No more secrets," he murmured. "And you could say yes when I ask you to marryme."
"Yes," I said. "Yes now, and yesalways."
Epilogue
Reef Knot
n. Joining two ends of a single line to bind around anobject.
Owen
Fifteen monthslater
"What is this unholy mess?"I asked from the doorway as I shook out of my sleet-soaked coat. A nor'easter was blowing intonight.
Cole glanced up at me but quickly returned to the measuring cups and mixing bowls on the countertop. "I thought you'd be out for another two hours," hereplied.
"You didn't answer my question," Isaid.
"You didn't stick to your schedule," he answered, pushing his glasses up his nose. His fingers were dusted with flour, leaving a white smudge on his darkframes.
Once I'd shucked off my cold, wet outerwear, I padded into the kitchen to get a look at the chaos brewing there. "It smells good," I remarked, glancing at the sheet trays cooling near the oven. "Whatever itis."
"I made gingerbread," Cole said as he poured sugar into a mixingbowl.
I took another look around the kitchen. "For the entiretown?"
"For a gingerbread house," he replied. "I'm constructing a scale replica of the house. And the lighthouse." He tapped the measuring cup against the bowl before turning on the mixer, the shine of his wedding band catching my eye. I couldn't fight the grin that surfaced every time I noticed it on his finger, or the obscenely sweet photo of our first dance that was framed and hung above the fireplace. "I'm making frostingnow."
We were a few days away from our six month anniversary. We'd intended for our wedding to be a small affair, but I discovered my definition of "small" deviated from Cole's by fifty percent. In the end, it was a bit larger and more lavish than I would've selected for myself but getting married wasn't about me alone. If there was one thing I'd learned since Cole drifted into my life, it was thatwemattered more thanI.
"Um," I started, running my hands through my hair, "if you needed something to do, you could've helped me haul in traps. Were you bored orsomething?"
Cole still accompanied me on the boat most mornings, but not all the time. There were days and nights when he was too deep in his work to look up, and I respected the ebb and flow of his mind's machinations. When I left this morning, he appeared lost in his coding. No cakes insight.
"I was working and now I'm baking," Cole answered over the whirring mixer. "It's the holidays, and I wanted to do something festive. Since we spent last year in Palm Springs with mymother—"
"Where we didnotdehydrate into jerky," Isaid.
He glared at me over the mixer. "Since we spent last year in Palm Springs," he continued, "I wanted to start a tradition of our own thisyear."
"You were bored," Imurmured.
Cole was between projects, and having that kind of time on his hands often led to him falling down curious rabbit holes. He tried his hand at gardening last summer. It yielded a handful of tomatoes and one amusingly girthy zucchini before he abandoned it to start building a new app. That product met with massivesuccess.
The Talbott's Cove Effect. That's what Cole called it. Everything he created here was ahit.
As much as he loved being here, there were still moments when it was difficult for him to cede control to the people back in California. Those moments occurred only when he was locked in a power struggle over issues and details I didn't understand. Reliably, Neera talked him off thoseledges.
She visited us in the Cove every month or so. She'd fly in for a weekend, and she and Cole would spend two hours working at the kitchen table. Then the three of us would hit the water. For reasons I still didn't understand, the lady enjoyed sorting lobsters. She was good at it, too. It only took a quick overview of the process and she sorted more quickly—and more accurately—than herboss.
Cole traveled to Silicon Valley from time to time, but he spent the majority of his time here in Maine. We'd flown out there—on a goddamn private jet, no less—a few months after everything hit the fan with his so-called disappearance last year. His company was introducing a new product, the one he'd developed while working as my deckhand, and he wanted me to join him for the launchparty.
Before we'd arrived, I wanted to hate everything about California and his world there. It was fucked up, it was immature, it was irrational. The good news was that it didn'tlast.
