Until "help" became control and "interest" became theft and "together" meant "you give, I take."
How was she supposed to know the difference? How could she trust her own judgment when it had failed her so catastrophically before?
Jack looked up, catching her expression. "You okay?"
"Yep," she lied with another bright smile. "These pancakes are pretty bomb. If the carpenter gig doesn't pan out, you can always fall back on breakfast chef."
"That's good, I like to keep my options open." He poured more syrup on his stack until it looked like a diabetic sugar bomb that no amount of insulin could defuse. "So, can I get a little roommate privilege and ask how the residents of Tidal Lock are faring?"
"Nice try, no spoilers. You can find out when everyone else does."
Jack laughed, accepting her refusal with a grin that made her toes curl.
Sam would've pushed. Would've demanded to know what she was working on, make her explain every silence, and would've turned her desire for privacy into a character flaw that needed fixing.
Jack just... let her be.
And Clara didn't know what to do with that.
After breakfast, Clara retreated to her drafting table with her coffee and stared at the half-finished panel from yesterday.
Marina confronting the sea witch. Dialogue that wasn't working. A story that was supposed to be escapist fantasy but kept bleeding reality at the edges.
She picked up her pen. Set it down. Picked it up again.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the notification—a comment alert from her Tidal Lock page. Then another. And another. Three in the span of a minute, which was unusual for a Tuesday morning.
She thumbed it open. Someone had shared last week's update on an indie comics blog she'd never heard of—"Hidden Gems: 5 Webcomics That Deserve a Bigger Audience." Tidal Lock was number three. The write-up was short but earnest:"Deceptively simple art, devastatingly sharp writing. C.H. Winters is doing something special and almost nobody knows about it yet."
The comments were already rolling in. New readers. People she didn't recognize.
Clara stared at the screen for a long moment, something between pride and panic fluttering in her chest. Then she closed the app and set the phone face-down on the desk.
It was just a blog post. A tiny blip. It didn't mean anything.
She had a deadline.
Through the window, she could see Jack working on the east side shutters. He'd dragged a ladder over from the shed, his expression in work-mode. His t-shirt rode up as he climbed, revealing a strip of lower back that Clara absolutely did not notice.
Stop staring at your temporary houseguest like a creep and get to work, Hawkins.
She forced her attention back to the panel. Marina's expression needed to be defiant but vulnerable. The sea witch needed to look amused but dangerous. The dialogue needed to?—
"Dammit," Jack's voice drifted through the open window. "Who installed these things, a drunk orangutan?"
Clara smiled despite herself. She'd asked that exact question when she'd tried to fix them herself last year and nearly taken a header off the ladder.
She watched him work—couldn't help it, really, since her drafting table faced that exact window and moving it would disrupt her entire organizational system. Jack attacked the shutters, removing rusty screws one by one, examining the wood for rot, making notes on a piece of paper he'd tucked into his back pocket.
He worked like his father had probably taught him. Slow. Thorough. Doing it right instead of fast.
Sam had been the opposite. Everything was about speed, shock and awe, getting to the next thing. He'd once told her that taking your time was just another word for wasting it, that people who moved slowly got left behind.
At the time, she'd thought it sounded ambitious and exhilarating. Now it just sounded exhausting and sloppy.
Clara turned back to her panel and tried to focus. Drew three lines. Erased two of them. Drew them again in slightly different positions. Erased them again.
This was pathetic. She had a deadline. She had a story to tell. She had a sea witch who needed snarky dialogue and a lighthouse keeper character who?—
