“I heard,” he answers, telling me he’s never far. “We’ll bring her to you.”
“We can do it later,” I say. “Tomorrow. Or next week. I just wanted to tell someone her name before I forgot it so that we can make a plan.”
“We’ll do it whenever you’re ready,” he says. “No pressure. ”
We sit without speaking for a while and watch a gull bully another gull for a shell it can’t even eat. Somewhere below, Zeus sniffs his way around the lower deck. Spencer walks beside him, hands in his pockets, patient with Zeus’s slow pace and careful on the step down. He is not going anywhere today. He told Storm he would stay as long as we wanted him to. It is a simple sentence that rearranged the house.
“It is strange,” I say quietly. “Really strange.”
“What is?” Conrad asks.
“Having a father around who cares,” I say. “One who doesn’t break things or get drunk or…sell you. He reads a paper. He complains about property taxes in that mild voice that makes it sound like he’s talking about the weather. And then he asks if I want tea and he brings me treats.”
Conrad turns his face toward mine. “Does it make you feel safer or angry?”
“Both,” I admit. “I don’t know what to do with something that looks like safety and doesn’t ask me to pay for it. It’s hard to trust it.”
“You do what you just did,” he says. “You tell the truth. We can handle both.”
Spencer looks up and catches us watching him. He gives me a short nod and a warm, tired smile.I nod back and feel something in my chest loosen.
We go inside when the heat edges up. The afternoon settles into a soft, domesticity I would have called impossible a month ago. Storm takes the chair at the bend in the hall and reads on his phone, one ear always tuned for a change in sound.
Maverick cooks and narrates the weather, the neighbors’ brightly painted kayaks, a pelican that can never land on the same post twice on the first try. He pulls me to the stove to taste sauce and brushes a light kiss over my temple. The ordinary touch makes my throat tighten.
“Walk with me after dinner,” he says. “Just to the end of the deck. We can count the porch lights two houses over.”
It’s so incrediblyordinary. Nothing about this life suggests these men are billionaire hoteliers, that I was abducted and held on a cargo ship a couple of weeks ago, or that there is still someone out there seeking to do me harm.
If I tried really hard, I could almost convince myself none of it was true.
I smile at Maverick.
“That I can do,” I say.
We eat at the big table by the windows with the glass doors open to the sound of water and the far-off noise of someone else’s evening. Spencer joins us and tells a short story about a stubborn heron that used to visit this deck years ago. He calls itthe old man.
We laugh. Storm smiles with his eyes. Atticus asks a question about boat names and whether captains are sentimental. Conrad serves me more pasta when I am not paying attention and pretends he is just rearranging plates.
After, I write Tamsin’s three present-tense sentences in a small notebook Maverick left by my pillow.
The house smells like garlic and salt.
The dog is asleep with his bad leg stretched out and his good leg twitching.
Conrad is checking the locks even though he knows they are fine.
They look almost silly on the page. They work the way they’re supposed to anyway. They make room in my head for the chaos to settle and the truth to thrive.
When the dishes are done, Maverick offers his arm like a ridiculous gentleman and escorts me to the back deck. The sky is a deepening blue that makes everything wood and white look softer. We count porch lights and we count breaths and we count steps to the far railing. I stay behind the fence line. I do not press against it. I am careful with my body because it has carried me through worse than a line of boards.
“Tomorrow you describe a face,” he says as we turn back. “Tonight you only have to look at mine.”
I look. His expression is open and easy, but not light. He knows better. He brings comfort the way he brings a joke—on purpose, when it is needed, with more care than he will ever admit.
“Thank you for the peaches,” I say, just to have a small thing to offer for everything that he’s doing for me.
“Anytime,” he says. “Tomorrow you can insult my coffee.”
