"Jack, make sure she eats something before she sits down," Maeve instructed. "She gets shaky when she's nervous."
"Already on it."
He was. He'd been planning the lobster roll intervention since the truck. There was a particular window — after arrival, before the event started — where Clara could be convinced to eat if you didn't present it as a suggestion but as a fait accompli. Hand her food. Don't ask. She'd eat it while complaining that shewasn't hungry, and thirty minutes later she'd be grateful.
A year of paying attention. He knew her rhythms now. The way she needed coffee before conversation. The way she drew with her left hand braced against the table like she was anchoring herself. The way she said "I'm fine" when she wasn't and "I'm okay" when she was, and the distance between the two was everything.
***
The signing started at two.
Jack stationed himself at a comfortable distance — close enough to refill Clara's water glass, far enough that she didn't feel watched. He'd learned this positioning from Maeve, actually, who'd pulled him aside at some point during the winter and said,She needs to know you're there. She doesn't need you hovering. There's a difference.
He'd thought about that for days. Still thought about it.
Ben had arranged the display while Tyler worked the register. Lena stood behind the table taking photos and threatening anyone who looked uncertain about purchasing.
The line was real. Not massive — this was Beacon's End, not New York — but real. Townspeople and summer visitors and a handful of readers who'd drivenfrom Portland. Jack watched them approach the table one by one, watched them tell Clara that her work meant something, watched Clara pause and breathe and hold herself together with the determined composure of someone who was absolutely not going to ugly cry in public.
She was magnificent. Not the word she'd use — she'd say she was surviving, or faking it, or managing. But from where Jack stood, she was magnificent. A woman who'd drawn her way out of the dark on a kitchen floor, sitting in public with her name on a book, letting strangers tell her it mattered.
He brought her the lobster roll between signers. She looked at it, then at him.
"I'm not hungry."
"Eat it anyway."
"You're very bossy."
"Only when I know I’m right.”
She ate it. He refilled her water. A reader approached who wanted to talk about the shipwright character, and Jack fielded the conversation while Clara collected herself — answered questions about carpentry with the easy charm of a man who could talk to anyone about anything, which was a skill he'd honed over seven yearsof landing in new towns and needing to be useful immediately.
"Is the shipwright based on you?" the reader asked, grinning.
"He's absolutely based on me. Clara denies it."
"He's a fictional character from the 1800s," Clara called from the table without looking up.
"With my emotional arc."
Clara's pen paused. She glanced at him — a quick look, sideways, through her hair — and the corner of her mouth twitched. Not a smile. The ghost of one. The version she wore when she was trying not to encourage him and failing.
He lived for that look.
Then Clara's parents were at the front of the line.
Jack spotted them before she did. Her father in the short-sleeve button-down he wore to everything that wasn't church. Her mother clutching the book like someone might take it from her, eyes already red. They'd waited. Stood in line behind strangers. Like fans.
He stepped back. Farther than his usual distance. This moment wasn't his.
But he watched.
He watched Ida set the book on the table with trembling hands. Watched Clara's father clear his throat and work his jaw the way men did when they were trying to keep it together and losing. Heard him say — quiet, like he was handing her something fragile —Your grandmother would've been proud.
Jack looked at the ground.
Not because he wasn't allowed to see. Because something in his chest had cracked open and he needed a second.
