He parked. Sat in the truck for a minute. Watched the lighthouse through the windshield — the gallery railing he'd repaired, the post he'd sealed, the building thathad somehow become the closest thing to home he'd had in seven years.
Then he went inside and pretended to be fine.
Clara was at her drafting table. She looked up when he came in, smiled, asked how town was.
"Mrs. Conley says hi," he offered. Set the cookies on the counter.
"Mrs. Conley always says hi. I think she says hi in her sleep."
He should have laughed. It was funny. Classic Clara — dry, quick, the kind of throwaway line that usually made him grin.
He didn't laugh. Just smiled with half his mouth and started unpacking the lumber.
He felt Clara watching him. Felt her clock the difference — the missing real smile, the missing comeback, the missing version of Jack who would have volleyed something back and kept the rally going.
She didn't ask. Just turned back to her panel.
That night, Jack cooked dinner. But he didn't whistle while he did it — the off-key habit Clara pretended to hate but always smiled at. He made the pasta. He set the table. He ate. He cleaned up.
Then he said he was tired and went tobed early.
He wasn't tired.
He lay in Clara's bed with her grandmother's quilt pulled to his chest and stared at the plaster cracks in the ceiling — the ones he'd planned to patch before winter — and thought about his dad. About Joel.
His dad, who'd built the porch Jack learned to hammer on. Who'd taught him to measure twice, cut once, sand with the grain, never against. Who'd died of a heart attack in his own shop at fifty-four, sawdust still on his hands.
And Joel. Joel, who'd been the good brother. The one who stayed. Who became a nurse, lived ten minutes from home, showed up for Sunday dinners and fixed things around the house and never once complained about the weight of being needed.
Joel, who'd died in a storm three years later. Thirty-three years old. The kind of loss that broke what was already cracked.
Jack had left Lockport six weeks after Joel's funeral.
He'd told himself it was temporary. A trip to clear his head. A few weeks on the road, then he'd come back and help Josie with Mom and figure out what his life looked like without a father and a brother in it.
Seven years later, he still hadn't gone back.
And now Josie was asking him to come home for his dad's anniversary, and his mother was too proud to beg, and Clara was in the next room probably sensing that something had shifted and being too kind to push.
Clara came to bed an hour later. She slid in beside him, her cold feet finding his calves the way they always did, and curled against his back.
"You okay?" she asked, quiet in the dark.
"Yeah. Just tired."
She was still for a moment. Her hand rested on his hip — light, not demanding.
"Okay," she said. "Goodnight."
She didn't push. Didn't ask follow-up questions. Didn't try to fix whatever she could feel was wrong.
And Jack, who should have rolled over and told her the truth — that his dad's anniversary was coming and his sister had called and the grief he'd been outrunning for seven years had finally caught up — did what he always did.
He said goodnight. And he didn't say anything else.
The distance between them was only a few inches of mattress. But lying there in the dark, it felt like it was growing.
fifteen
