Progress.
They left the lobster bake after dark, pleasantly full and slightly sunburned and buzzed on Tim's dad's cider—a smaller batch than the festival supply, equally illegal, somehow stronger.
The boat ride back was warm and slow, the water calm, the sky thick with stars. Clara drove; Jack sat on the bench behind the helm and watched her. The ease of her hands on the wheel. The way she read the dark water by instinct, navigating around rocks she'd memorized a lifetime ago.
"I've been thinking," Jack said.
"Dangerous."
"About the gallery railing."
Clara glanced back. "What about it?"
"The design. The balusters are basic turned spindles—functional, fine, nothing wrong with them. But the view from up there is incredible, and the railing blocks a lot of it." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "If we replaced the spindles with a cablerail system—stainless steel cables, horizontal—you'd keep the safety but open up the sightlines. You could stand up there and see the whole horizon without anything breaking it up."
Clara was quiet for a moment. "That sounds expensive."
"Materials, maybe two hundred bucks. Labor's free." He paused. "I was thinking we could do it before the fall storms hit. September, maybe. The existing posts are solid enough to anchor the cables, so it'd be?—"
He stopped.
September.
He'd said September. Had planned a project that wouldn't start for two months. Had used "we" like it was a given—like of course he'd still be here, still working on Clara's lighthouse, still waking up in her bed and making her over-salted eggs and learning the wrong way to tie a cleat hitch.
The word hung in the salt air between them.
Clara didn't pounce on it. Didn't turn it into a conversation about commitment or timelines or what any of this meant. She just said, quietly, "Cable rails would look beautiful up there."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I've always thought the spindles blocked too much of the view."
They looked at each other in the dark, the boat's running lights casting soft green and red across the water. Something passed between them that neither of them named.
"September it is, then," Jack said.
Clara smiled and turned back to the water. Jack sat back on the bench and looked up at the stars and let himself think the thought he'd been circling for days:
Next summer, I could build her a proper dock.
He didn't flinch from it. Didn't immediately drown it in qualifications or exit strategies or the familiar litany of reasons why he couldn't stay.
Just let it sit there. A quiet, terrifying, wonderful thought.
Next summer.
Clara cut the engine as they drifted into the lighthouse cove, letting momentum carry them the last few feet to the dock. The silence was immediate and total—no music, no voices, just water lapping against the hull and the distant rhythm of waveson the rocks.
Jack moved to the bow to grab the dock line. Actually managed a halfway decent cleat hitch. Looked up to find Clara watching him with an expression that was equal parts impressed and amused.
"That was almost competent," she said.
"High praise from Captain Hawkins."
"Don't push it." But she was already crossing the deck toward him, and something in the way she moved—deliberate, unhurried, her eyes not leaving his—made the air between them shift.
She stopped in front of him. Close. The boat rocked gently, and she put a hand on his chest for balance. Didn't remove it.
