Outside, the wind knocks once against the glass like a friend who doesn’t need to come in to feel welcome.
I stand, switch off the lamp, and climb the rest of the way up to the lantern room. It’s retired now, but the lens is still there—old glass and curved brass that throws back the last of the light like memory does.
I lean my forehead to the cold pane and say the quiet truth out loud because some truths don’t count unless they get air.
“I’m not sixteen,” I whisper. “And I’m not running.”
The dark takes it, tucks it away. The lighthouse accepts the vow like a secret it was built to hold.
Downstairs, the espresso machine settles with a final sigh. Tomorrow, it will hiss like Coral Bell Cove’s current gossip. Tomorrow, a man with a grin and a vulnerability he tries to hide will show up with a hammer and a peace offering. Tomorrow, I will let him climb my ladder and stand under my eave and pretend the current between us isn’t loud enough to be measured in megawatts.
Tonight, I will sleep with the window cracked and the sound of the bay threading through the room. I will dream, if I’m unlucky, of hands catching my waist and of a note tucked into a book I swore I’d never open again.
I slide under the quilt and trace the familiar patchwork with my fingers until my breath slows. The last thing I see before sleep takes me is the pale reflection of the lens, a circle of ghost-light over the bed, like a promise that the dark is only ever half the story.
Chapter Two – Crew
The sunrise cracks open, and the horizon spills light across Otter Creek Farm. The barns catch it first—rust-red and gold—then the pastures, then the porch where I’m standing with a cup of coffee that tastes like regret and a shoulder that feels like it belongs to somebody older.
The Wright family doesn’t sleep in. Never has. Even after I left for the pros, even after I told myself I was done with all this—dawn still finds me.
The air smells like hay, salt, and diesel from the tractor idling somewhere out of sight. Birds start their music. The farm is alive again, same as always.
“Let’s get moving,” Marcus, the team-approved physical rehabilitator, calls from inside the barn gym, his voice cutting through the quiet like a whistle.
Right. No point standing around pretending I’m part of the scenery.
I drain what’s left of my coffee and step inside. This barn’s been converted into half gym, half storage. One side has hay bales stacked to the rafters. The other is filled with equipment that looks like it was ordered off a “Rehab or Die” subscription box.
Marcus is already setting up resistance bands, his clipboard tucked under one arm. He’s built like a linebacker and patient like a monk—which makes him the only person on earth qualified to deal with me right now.
“You’re late,” he says.
“I’m three minutes early.”
“Late for a guy with nothing else to do.”
I grunt, grab the nearest band, and start the warm-up. The stretch burns all the way down my arm. The muscle stilltrembles, still protests like it doesn’t believe me when I say we’re getting better.
“How’s it feel today?” he asks.
“Like betrayal.” Every time I think about the blindside hit that took me out, resulting in a torn labrum, my stomach drops, and I have to work to keep my mood above water.
He smirks. “That’s progress. Yesterday, it was murder.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get nostalgic in a second.”
Without rising to the bait, he just checks my form, adjusts the band tension, and makes a note. The quiet between us is easy—the kind that only happens when a man has seen you at your lowest and doesn’t hold it against you.
I keep moving through the drills. The farm hums outside—tractor engines and distant laughter from the chicken coop where my dad’s probably wrangling Mom’s newest batch of “emotional support hens.”
By the time we finish, sweat runs down my neck, and my shoulder is on fire. Marcus tosses me a towel.
“Good work,” he says. “Don’t push past the threshold.”
“Define ‘threshold’.”
“The part right before you do something stupid.”
