Tonight she was just going to survive it.
She closed her eyes. The lighthouse beam swept across the ceiling in its steady rotation. The ocean kept its rhythm. The building held.
Clara slept.
eighteen
The guy in the pickup was named Earl, and he wanted to talk about lobster.
"Prices are up this year," Earl said, merging onto Route 1 with the casual disregard for lane markings that seemed standard in coastal Maine. "Dealers blame the water temperature. Water's too warm, lobsters move deeper, harder to trap. But if you ask me, it's the middlemen. Always the middlemen."
"Hm," Jack said.
"My brother-in-law traps out of Rockland. Says his catch is down thirty percent. Thirty percent! And the dealers want to pay him less per pound, not more. Explain that math to me."
"Can't," Jack said.
Earl took this as encouragement and launched into a detailed analysis of the lobster supply chain that Jack absorbed none of. He sat in the passenger seat with his bag on his lap and watched the coast scroll by through the window — rocky beaches, pine trees, the occasional white steeple of a church poking above the treeline. Towns appeared and disappeared. Gas stations, antique shops, lobster shacks with hand-painted signs.
He'd done this a hundred times. The road. The ride. The small talk with a stranger who'd forget his face by dinner. This was the rhythm of his life — the thing he'd chosen, the freedom he'd chased, the clean simplicity of being nobody in particular on the way to nowhere specific.
It had never felt this empty before.
"Where'd you say you were headed?" Earl asked.
"Camden."
"Nice town. Tourist-heavy but nice. Got a job lined up?"
"Something like that."
"Smart man. Too many people drifting these days. No direction." Earl glanced at him. "You alright? You look like you left something behind."
Jack almost laughed. "Yeah. Something likethat too."
Earl dropped him in Belfast, which was as far as he was going. Jack thanked him, shouldered his bag, and stood on the sidewalk of a town he'd never been to and felt absolutely nothing about.
He found a motel. The Harbor Rest, which didn't rest on a harbor and probably hadn't been updated since the nineties. Thirty-eight dollars a night, cash. The woman at the desk didn't ask questions. Handed him a key — an actual metal key, not a card — and pointed down the hall.
Room 7. Beige walls. A bed with a floral comforter that had seen better decades. A TV bolted to the dresser. A bathroom with thin towels and a shower that probably ran lukewarm at best.
Jack had stayed in a hundred rooms like this. Two hundred. They were the set pieces of his life — interchangeable, forgettable, designed for people passing through. He used to find comfort in their anonymity. No history. No expectations. Just a bed and a door and the knowledge that tomorrow he'd be somewhere else.
He sat on the edge of the bed and set his bag on the floor.
The bag was light. That was the point — had always been the point. Travel light. Keep your possessions to what you can carry and your attachments to what you can leave. Seven years of practice and he'd gotten goodat it. Everything he owned fit in one bag. Everything he needed fit in his hands.
Except now the lightness felt like subtraction. Not freedom — absence. He'd left the blue mug on the shelf. The pencil on the windowsill. The half-finished cable railing. The cedar sealant that would last for years. All the pieces of himself he'd embedded in that lighthouse, pulled out one by one and left behind like teeth.
And Clara.
He'd left Clara standing at the dock with bright eyes and a tight jaw and a voice that broke when she told him not to be kind.
Jack pulled the Camden job number from his pocket. Smoothed the scrap paper on his knee. Harlan Goss. Historic inn restoration. Six months, housing included. Good work. Honest work. The kind of project he would have jumped at three months ago — a beautiful old building that needed saving, a fresh town, a clean start.
He picked up his phone. Dialed the first four digits. Stopped.
Set the phone on the bed.
