"Yeah. You do."
"Jos?"
"What."
"Thankyou."
"Don't thank me. Thank me by going home. And I mean home, Jack. Not Lockport. I mean wherever she is. That's home now."
She paused. And then, softer: "But call Mom this week. Okay? She's waited long enough."
"I will."
"Promise."
"I promise."
"Good. Now go. And Jack? If you screw this up, I'm driving to Maine and dealing with you personally. And I will bring the kids. Both of them. And the hamster."
She hung up.
Jack sat on the motel bed with his dead phone in his hand. The same position he'd been in on the gallery after the first Josie call — phone silent, chest cracked open, the weight of everything he'd been avoiding finally pinning him in place.
But this time was different.
On the gallery, the weight had pushed him further into fear. Had sent him spiraling toward the exit, building the case for leaving, stacking reasons like lumber for a wall.
Now the weight was pushing him the other direction. Toward. Back. Home.
He thought about his dad. Paul Callahan, who'd spent thirty years in one shop building things for people. Who'd known every customer's name, every grain of every species of wood, every shortcut that wasn't worth taking. Who'd built a porch and taught his sons to hammer on it and died with sawdust in his hair because he was in the middle of something. Always in the middle of something. Never finished. Never done. Because that was the nature of building — there was always another project, another repair, another thing that needed tending.
His dad hadn't run from that. Had never looked at the endless work of maintaining a life and thought: too risky. Had just shown up every morning and picked up his tools.
And Joel. Joel, who'd wanted to sail the Caribbean and never got the chance. Who'd mapped routes and bought books and dreamed about a future he didn't get. But Joel hadn't waited. Hadn't held himself back from living because living might end. He'd been a nurse. He'd helped people. He'd had friends and plans and Sunday dinners and a diner he went to at midnight after his shifts.
Joel had been in the middle of something too when he died. On his way to meet his brother for eggs before midnight. Living a full, ordinary, beautiful life that happened to end on a wet highway.
The men in Jack's family didn't run. They stayed. They built. They died in the middle of things because that's where people who are actually living tend to be — in the middle. Not at the edges. Not on the road. Not in motel rooms with light bags and empty hands.
Jack stood up.
He didn't have a plan. Didn't have a speech. Didn't know what he was going to build or how he was going to prove that this time was different — that the man walking toward the lighthouse was not the same man who'd walked away from it.
But he had his hands. And his hands had always known what to do, even when his head was a mess and his heart was in pieces. His hands could measure and cut and join and build. Could make something permanent out of raw materials. Could create the thing his mouth couldn't say.
He picked up his bag. Same bag. Same weight. Same gesture he'd made a thousand times in a hundred towns.
But this time, when he walked out the door, he turned south.
nineteen
Clara woke up and made coffee for one.
She stood at the counter and watched the French press steep and didn't look at the blue mug on the shelf. Poured into her lighthouse mug — her grandmother's, the one that had been hers long before Jack Callahan showed up and claimed the one next to it. Took it to the kitchen table. Sat down.
Made toast. Ate it. Not because she was hungry but because she'd made a promise to herself — not out loud, not to anyone, just a quiet internal contract: she was not going to be the woman who stopped eating. She'd done that before. Two weeks of Tim's soup going cold on the porch, two weeks of Lena taking the boat out because Clara couldn't answer her phone, two weeks of existing in a body she'd forgotten to feed because the grief was taking up all the space.
Not this time.
