“Yes,” I said. The word caught for a second. “When I’m ready.”
“Good.” She kissed my forehead the way Mom used to, like it was a blessing. “Go with your brother-in-law. I will not wait up because I will be unconscious in eleven minutes.”
She disappeared back inside with a little wave. Hoyt pushed up to his feet and offered me a hand I didn’t need but took anyway.
“Come on, sailor,” he said. “Let’s go turn on your lights.”
I followed Hoyt in my own truck. The drive took less than ten minutes, but it seemed like miles. Distance enough that I could breathe. C dock sat farther from the streetlights, tucked behind a line of taller pilings where the bigger boats moored up in storm season. Hoyt’s boat rode easy, the masts clean lines against the sky. He stepped aboard first. I leapt up after, my legs automatically accommodating the familiar rock of hull underfoot. The deck smelled of sun-warmed rope and fiberglass. A different kind of home.
Hoyt moved through the cockpit by habit, flipping switches, checking gauges. Shore power hummed alive. Cabin lights clicked on one by one, throwing warm pools across the teak.
I stood in the companionway and let my eyes adjust. Everything was tidy—of course it was—but not precious. A blue blanket folded on the settee. Two mugs in the galley rack. A paperback face-down by the little berth and a pencil trapped in its pages.
Hoyt ducked his head out of the forward hatch. “She’s all yours.”
“Thank you.” The words seemed inadequate, but they were all I had.
He took them as if they were more than enough. “I’ll help you haul in your stuff.”
“I’ll get it,” I said. “You go relieve Caroline from pretending not to wait up.”
He laughed. “She lasted two minutes past her prediction. She is definitely out.”
We stood there a little awkwardly, two men on a lit boat in a dark marina, and then he reached out and pulled me in for a hug I didn’t know I needed until the second it started. Solid. Brothers, if not by blood. He thumped my back once and stepped away.
“Good night, hermano,” he said.
“Night.”
He headed up the dock, whistling under his breath, a tune I couldn’t place. I watched him go until he hit the shadow line and disappeared.
I retrieved the bag with my essentials and went below. I didn’t unpack. Didn’t do anything to settle in. Instead, I turned off all but the little reading light near the aft berth, and sat on the edge of it with my feet braced on the floor. The boat rocked, close and sure. The sounds I could hear here were mine to inventory: water, wind, a fender creak, the occasional distant laugh. No monitor. No baby startle. No house bones. Only a perimeter I could monitor without moving. Doors I could see from where I sat.
I set my phone face down. I didn’t need it to tell me anything right now. I stretched out and closed my eyes. For a long time, I breathed with the water. When my body startled, it had a place to land.
For the first time in too many months, the dark felt like a room instead of a field.
I slept.
Four
MADDEN
The taco place had taken over the spot where the old bait shop used to sit. Someone had painted the cinder block walls a saturated turquoise and strung a tarp for shade. Box fans hummed under the eaves, rattling the paper lanterns and the hand-lettered menu boards. The line spilled past a cooler of bottled sodas. The smell of grilled fish and warm corn tortillas wrapped the whole corner like an invitation.
Astrid waved me in from a picnic table half under the awning. “You found it!”
She’d staked out a spot with a view of the ordering window and the walkway, sunglasses in her hair, elbows planted like a general guarding a strategic position. Three students clustered around her—early to mid twenties—sunburned noses, university T-shirts, waterproof watches. The exuberance of people who didn’t yet know where their limits were.
“I smelled it from two blocks away.” I slid onto the bench and tried to ignore the itch between my shoulder blades that said half the patio had glanced up when I walked by. Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe that was just the voice in my head that had learned to listen for whispers.
Astrid gestured between us. “My ducklings. Maya, Tyler, Priya. This is my friend, Madden Reilly. She’s local stock, even if she ran off to the big city.”
“Local stock,” I echoed, wry. “I’ll put that on my resume.”
Maya—pale and freckled, with a sunhat big enough to shade a small village—pushed a paper cup toward me. “Horchata. It fixes everything.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” I glanced around again as the first cold sip hit me with twin blasts of sweet and cinnamon.
