"Heard about a job," Dale said, not looking up. "Fellow in Camden needs a finish carpenter. Historic inn, full restoration. Six months, maybe more. Housing included."
He said it the way he said everything — flat, factual, no editorializing. The way you'd tell someone the tide schedule or the price of diesel.
"Good work if you want it," Dale continued. "Man should work if he's able. Number's on my desk if you need it."
Jack's mouth went dry. "Thanks, Dale."
Dale grunted. Went back to his winch.
That was it. No subtext. No agenda. Just a working man passing along a lead because good jobs shouldn't go unfilled and idle hands were a waste of God's engineering. Dale had probably mentioned the same job to three other people this week.
But Jack was the one standing here with a hollow chest on his father's anniversary, and the job was in Camden — ninety miles up the coast, far enough to be gone, close enough to pretend it wasn't running.
He found the number on Dale's desk. A scrap of paper, pencil, neat block letters: HARLAN GOSS, CAMDEN INN RESTORATION. A phone number.
Jack put the paper in his pocket.
It felt like picking up a loaded gun. Not because the job was dangerous, but because a version of Jack that had existed six weeks ago would have called already. Would have been excited — a new town, a new project, six months of purpose without attachment. The openroad and the clean slate and the familiar, comfortable absence of anything that could hurt him.
That version of Jack had been dying since he washed up on a beach and a woman with red hair and a sharp tongue had pulled him out of the water and given him a place to heal.
He sat in the truck in Dale's parking lot with the phone number in his hand and tried to figure out which Jack he was today.
He didn't drive back to the lighthouse.
Instead, he pulled off the coastal road at the overlook — the spot where the guardrail was rusted and the shoulder widened enough for one truck. Below, the ocean churned against black rocks. The lighthouse was visible from here, small and white on its point, the gallery railing catching the midday light.
He could see the sections he'd replaced. The new cable he'd started running. The post — the southwest one, the first repair he'd made — standing solid and straight, sealed against years of weather he wouldn't be here to see.
Jack turned off the engine and sat in the silence.
He was going toleave.
The knowledge arrived without fanfare. No dramatic moment, no single deciding factor. Just a quiet certainty settling into place like a joint finding its groove — the recognition that he'd been building toward this exit for days, maybe weeks, that every deflected question and half-smile and too-early morning had been preparation for this.
He loved Clara.
He could admit that here, alone, with the engine off and the ocean below and nobody to hear it. He loved her. Loved her prickliness and her courage and the way she yelled at seagulls and drew her way through every emotion she couldn't name. Loved the cold feet on his calves at midnight. Loved the way she saidCallahanlike it was simultaneously an insult and an endearment. Loved the lighthouse and the town and the drafting table and the mug that had become his without anyone deciding it should.
He loved all of it. And that was exactly the problem.
Because Jack knew what happened to the people he loved. They died. Not metaphorically, not in the slow erosion of a relationship going stale — they died. His father's heart stopped in a woodshop. His brother hydroplaned on a highway. The two men who'd anchored his life, gone in the space of five years, and what Jack had learned from that — the lesson branded into his bones — was that love was a countdown. Everygood day was a day closer to the day it ended. Every morning you woke up happy was a morning you'd eventually look back on and wish you could return to.
He'd tried telling himself it was different with Clara. That not everyone left. That staying didn't automatically mean losing.
But the fear was older than reason. Deeper than logic. It lived in the part of him that had stood in a cemetery twice before thirty and decided, without words, that the only way to survive loss was to never accumulate anything worth losing.
And then Maeve's voice:She stopped eating for two weeks. Tim brought soup every day and I'd find the containers on the porch untouched.
He knew what his leaving would cost Clara. Maeve had made sure of that — not cruelly, just honestly, the way Maeve did everything. And the knowledge sat in him like a splinter he couldn't reach.
But here was the thing Jack couldn't say to anyone, the thing that lived underneath the grief and the fear and the seven years of motion: he wasn't just afraid of leaving Clara. He was afraid of what would happen if he stayed and she lost him. If he was the one whose heart stopped or whose car slid or whose body simply stopped being there one day. If Clara — who had already survived one man's destruction and rebuiltherself from the wreckage — had to do it again. Not because he chose to leave, but because the universe chose for him.
He was protecting her.
Even as he thought it, he heard how it sounded. Heard Josie's voice in his head:That's the biggest load of self-serving bullshit you've ever produced, and the bar is high.Heard Clara's voice too, dry and slightly incredulous:You don't get to decide what I can survive.
They were probably right. They were almost certainly right.
