“Even with Eugene and his singing bowls?”
“Especially with Eugene and his singing bowls.” I took another sip of tea. “What about you? What makes someone leave undercover work for…this?” I gestured at the scene—generations of Grimm Islanders, Eugene now standing and swaying with his bowls, the crowd taking selfies with the whale in the background.
“Would you believe me if I said it was the emotional-support iguanas?” he asked.
“Not even a little bit.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I thought he wouldn’t answer.
“I got tired of being someone else. Undercover work, it’s like…you put on these personalities like clothes, and after a while, you forget which one is really you. Here, I’m just the sheriff. It’s simple.”
“Simple,” I repeated, thinking of the evidence box under my counter, of cold cases and old murders and secrets that fermented for decades. “Right.”
The whale was finally moving toward open water, guided by the coast guard boats that had arrived with spotlights and the kind of equipment actually designed for marine mammal emergencies.
The whale was barely a distant shadow when the claiming began—that peculiarly human need to own a miracle by proximity.
Eugene stood at the dock’s edge like a prophet who’d just parted the Red Sea with tuning forks, his crystal necklaces catching the last light as he explained to a growing audience how the whale had responded to the sacred frequencies he’d channeled. His hands moved through the air, conducting an invisible orchestra of cosmic connection that only he could hear.
Twenty feet away, the Methodist youth group had formed a prayer circle, hands clasped, heads bowed, their voices rising in genuine gratitude. There was something moving about their absolute faith—these teenagers who’d witnessed an extraordinary event and turned instinctively to prayer, believing with the kind of certainty that adults rarely managed anymore.
Tommy Morrison, meanwhile, had gathered his own congregation of teenagers, his voice cracking with the intensity of his conviction: “I’m telling you, when it looked at me—right at me—it was like it knew, you know? Like we understood each other.” His hands gestured wildly, recreating the moment for his audience, the whale growing larger and more mystical with each retelling.
“Everyone needs to be the hero of their own story,” Dash observed, but there was something in his voice that suggested he understood this human failing intimately—the need to matter, to be the protagonist rather than merely another face in the crowd watching someone else’s drama unfold.
“What’s ours?” I asked without thinking, then felt heat creep up my neck.
But Dash just smiled, that rare full smile that made my stomach do complicated things. “Haven’t figured that out yet. But it probably involves your coq au vin burning.”
“Oh no!” I checked my phone. We’d been gone almost two hours. “Julia will never forgive me.”
But when we got back to my house, the kitchen smelled like heaven—wine and herbs and butter all melded into something that suggested French countryside kitchens and long, leisurely dinners. The coq au vin had achieved that perfect state where the sauce had reduced to glossy perfection and the chicken was falling-off-the-bone tender.
“Julia knows her business,” I said, plating the dish with the kind of care usually reserved for tea ceremonies or neurosurgery.
We ate at my kitchen island rather than the formal dining room, Chowder watching hopefully from his bed, still wearing his smoking jacket, which was now slightly askew, giving him the appearance of a gentleman who’d had one too many at the club.
“This is incredible,” Dash said, and there was something reverent in the way he savored each bite, as if he understood that good food was about more than mere consumption.
“It’s more elaborate than what I usually bother with,” I admitted. Over three weeks of dinners, I’d defaulted to the kind of simple, efficient meals that someone who cooked professionally all day would make—quick stir-fries, perfect omelets, the occasional pasta. Nothing that required sixteen steps and setting things on fire. “After spending all day making scones and assembling sandwiches, I usually don’t have the energy for anything more complex.”
“But tonight you channeled Julia Child?”
“Tonight I had time, and frankly, I was showing off.” I gestured at the perfectly caramelized chicken, the sauce that had reduced to exactly the right consistency. “You’ve been bringing increasingly sophisticated takeout—that Thai place from Charleston last week, the French bistro before that. My professional pride couldn’t let that stand.”
“So this is a competition?” He was trying not to smile.
“This is me reminding you that I can do more than brew a perfect Earl Grey.” Though the truth was more complicated—that cooking for him felt different than cooking for customers, that I’d wanted to create something memorable, something that might linger in his mind the way his presence had started lingering in mine.
We fell into the comfortable rhythm of conversation that had become our pattern—comparing our mutual horror of reality television (except The Great British Bake Off, which we both watched religiously). He revealed his collection of historical fiction first editions. I confessed my abandoned dream of singing jazz.
“You sing all the time,” he pointed out. “I’ve heard you. You hum when you’re making tea, sing when you’re nervous.”
“That’s different. That’s just…sound. Performing is about being seen.”
“And you don’t want to be seen?”
It was a loaded question, one that hung in the air between us like the lingering scent of cognac and caramelized onions. I thought about the past ten years, how I’d wrapped widowhood around myself like armor, visible but untouchable, playing a role that had become so familiar I’d forgotten it was a performance.
