But being right and being enough were different things, and Jack didn't know how to be enough. Didn't know how to stay in one place and trust that the floor wouldn't give way. Didn't know how to wake up next to someone every morning without the quiet, corrosive certainty that one of those mornings would be the last.
He started the truck. Drove back to the lighthouse. Passed the spot where you could see the gallery railing if you looked at the right angle.
He looked.
Clara was at her drafting table.
Of course she was. This was the hour when the afternoon light hit the table just right, when she pulled out the finer pens and worked on detail panels, mouthing dialogue to herself. He'd memorized her schedule without trying — the same way he'd memorized the kitchen choreography and the hook for the dish towel and which cabinet held the good mugs.
He stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the duffel bag.
It was where he'd left it — by the front door, straps loose, mostly empty. The bag that had followed him across thirty states and seven years, salt-stained and battered, the only constant in a life designed to have none.
He pulled it onto the bed. Unzipped it.
Started packing.
It didn't take long. That was the thing about traveling light — departure was efficient. His flannel. A spare t-shirt. The dopp kit he kept organized out of habit. The extra pencils he stored behind his ear on job sites. Work gloves, already softened to the shape of his hands.
Each item he folded and placed was a small amputation. A thread pulled from the weave of a life he hadn't meant to build. Six weeks. That's all it had been — six weeks of living together and reluctant attachment andthe slow, terrifying accumulation of belonging. And somehow in that time, his possessions had spread through Clara's lighthouse like roots, claiming space in drawers and on shelves and in all the small gaps a person fills when they stop passing through and start staying.
He reached for the blue mug on the kitchen shelf. The one with the chip on the handle. The one that had become his by default, sitting next to Clara's lighthouse mug like a pair.
He picked it up. Held it. Set it back on the shelf.
He couldn't take the mug. The mug belonged here, in this kitchen, next to hers. Some things had to stay even when the person didn't.
The pencil behind his ear — the one he'd been keeping there since the first day on the festival stage, his dad's habit, the gesture that connected him to a dead man's hands — he left that too. Set it on the windowsill beside the kitchen sink, where it would sit in the morning light and remind Clara that he'd been real. That someone had stood in her kitchen and built things and loved her and left anyway.
Or maybe it would just be a pencil. Maybe that was better.
He zipped the bag. Carried it to the main room.
Clara looked up.
Her gaze went to the bag first. Then to his face. Then back to the bag.
She didn't look surprised.
That was the worst part. She didn't gasp or flinch or ask what he was doing. She just set down her pen with a careful precision — aligning it with the edge of the table, the way she did when she was buying herself time — and turned on her stool to face him.
"So," she said.
One word. Flat. Controlled. The voice of a woman who'd been watching this coming and had already decided how she was going to handle it.
"There's a job," Jack said. "In Camden. Historic inn restoration. Six months, housing included. Dale passed along the number."
He heard himself and hated the sound of it — the practical framing, the professional language, as if this were a career decision and not a man dismantling the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Clara's expression didn't change. "When did you hear about this?"
"This morning."
"And you alreadypacked."
It wasn't a question. Jack looked at the bag in his hand — full, zipped, ready. The familiar routine of a man who'd done this too many times.
"Yeah," he said.
