She could do it twice if she had to.
She just really, really didn't want to.
sixteen
Tuesday.
Jack knew it was Tuesday before he opened his eyes. Not because of a calendar or alarm or any external signal — just a heaviness that had settled into his bones overnight, familiar and annual, like a weather system that arrived on the same date every year regardless of where he was standing.
His dad had been dead for fourteen years today.
Clara was asleep beside him, curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek. Her breathing was slow and even. In the gray pre-dawn light, she looked younger. Unguarded. The sharp edges she wore during the day — the wit, the defensive posture, the raised eyebrow that could level a man at twenty paces — all of it smoothed out in sleep. This was the Claraunderneath. The one who pressed her cold feet against his calves and mumbled into his shoulder and trusted him enough to be soft.
Jack watched her for a long time. Longer than he should have.
Then he got up, pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, and went out to the gallery.
The ocean was steel-gray in the early light. Flat. Patient. The kind of calm that felt indifferent — the water didn't care what day it was, didn't know that Paul Callahan had died in his own woodshop on a Tuesday afternoon with sawdust on his hands and a half-finished cabinet on the bench. Heart attack. Massive. Gone before the ambulance arrived, which in Lockport meant gone before his neighbor Frank heard the fall and came running.
Jack gripped the railing — the one he'd repaired, the post he'd sealed with marine-grade sealant meant to last for years — and breathed.
Fifty-four. His dad had been fifty-four. A whole life in one town, one shop, one marriage, one house with a porch he'd built himself. A man who measured twice, cut once, sanded with the grain, and never once considered leaving. Who'd taught Jack everything he knew about wood and nothing about what to do when theperson who taught you everything was suddenly, permanently absent.
And then Joel. Five years later. Thirty-three years old. Driving home from a night shift at the hospital in a storm, hydroplaned on the highway, went into the median. Truck coming the other way couldn't stop. Joel, who'd stayed. Who'd become a nurse, lived ten minutes from home, did Sunday dinners, fixed things around the house. Who'd carried the family the way load-bearing walls carry a structure — invisibly, essentially, noticed only when they're gone.
Jack had left Lockport six weeks after Joel's funeral. Temporary, he'd told Josie. Just need to clear my head.
Seven years.
He stared at the water and thought about calling his mother. Picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again. Her number was right there — three taps and he'd hear her voice, and her voice would crack the way it always did on this day, quiet and steady until it wasn't, and she'd ask if he was okay and he'd say yes and they'd both pretend that was true.
He put the phone down.
Some calls required a kind of bravery Jack didn'thave today.
He told Clara he needed to pick up hardware in town. She looked up from her coffee — those green eyes scanning his face with the quiet attention she'd been giving him for days, reading the shifts the way she read the water, noting what had changed without demanding an explanation.
"Okay," she said. "Drive safe."
"Always."
She didn't ask what hardware. Didn't ask why he wasn't eating breakfast. Didn't mention that he'd been up since before dawn or that his eyes looked like they'd forgotten how to sleep.
She just said "okay" and let him go, and the grace of it nearly broke him.
The truck rattled down the coastal road — the same twenty minutes he'd driven a dozen times, past the same granite ledges and salt-bent pines, the same stretch of ocean appearing and disappearing between the hills. He knew this road. Had learned its potholes and blind curves, the spot where the pavement buckled near the third mile marker, the place where you could see the lighthouse if you looked back at exactly the right angle.
He didn't look back.
Town was quiet. Mid-morning lull. A few tourists wandering the sidewalk, a lobster boat chugging out of the harbor. Jack parked at the marina and sat in the truck for a minute, his hands on the wheel, his father's anniversary pressing on his chest like a hand he couldn't push away.
Dale was on the dock, doing something to a winch with the focused intensity of a man who had been maintaining the same equipment for forty years and intended to maintain it for forty more. He looked up when Jack approached. Nodded once. The Dale version of a warm greeting.
"Callahan."
"Dale."
Silence. Dale tightened something. Jack stood there, hands in his pockets, watching the harbor. This was how conversations with Dale worked — you waited until he had something to say, and if he didn't, you stood in comfortable silence until one of you left.
