He was already thinking about it as a future argument. A thing they'd bicker about. That was either a good sign or he was losing his mind.
The lighthouse was dark. Quiet. Clara asleep somewhere above him, behind the bedroom door he couldn't see. He stood in the main room and breathed it in — the salt-and-linseed smell, the faint trace ofcoffee, the particular quality of silence that belonged to this building and no other.
He unpacked quietly, putting things back where they'd been. Flannel in the closet. Dopp kit in the bathroom. Work gloves on the shelf by the door. Each item returned to its place like a piece of a puzzle being pressed back in — a perfect fit, because the spaces had been shaped by his presence and hadn't yet forgotten him.
He zipped the empty bag. Put it in the closet. Behind Clara's winter coat, where it had lived before. Where the dust bunny and the wire hanger had been waiting.
Jack stood in the kitchen and looked at it — his mug, the one with the chip on the handle, the one he'd left behind because some things had to stay even when the person didn't. It was sitting exactly where he'd left it. Clara hadn't moved it. Hadn't put it away. Had just left it there, beside hers, like a pair with a missing half.
He touched the handle. Didn't pick it up. Not yet.
Then he loaded the cable hardware into a bucket, grabbed his tools, and went out to the gallery.
He'd been working for an hour when the door opened.
The sky had shifted from gray to pale gold, the sun not quite up but getting there. Jack was crouched at the third section of railing — the one he'd left bare, cables cut and coiled, tools sitting where he'd abandoned them four days ago — threading tensioning cable through the new fittings with hands that knew this work better than they knew anything else.
He heard the door. Heard footsteps. Felt her before he saw her — the specific displacement of air that happened when Clara entered a space, the way the room changed temperature.
He looked up.
Clara was standing in the gallery doorway. Barefoot. Hair a red disaster. Wearing his flannel — the one he'd just put back in the closet twenty minutes ago, which meant she'd woken up, seen it, and put it on. He didn't know what to do with that information.
She was holding a coffee mug. The blue one. His.
They stared at each other.
The ocean filled the silence the way it always did — patient, steady, indifferent to the small human dramas unfolding on its shore. Gulls were starting their morning shift, crying out over the water. The cable in Jack's hands hummed with tension.
"You're finishing the railing," Clara said.
"Yeah."
"At five in the morning."
"Seemed like the right time."
Her gaze traveled past him — to the cable, the fittings, the tensioners. To the two completed sections beside the bare one. The project he'd started in a panic and abandoned in a retreat and was now completing in a return.
"There's a truck outside," she said.
"Yeah."
"Is it yours?"
"Bought it in Camden."
Something shifted in her face. Subtle. Not a smile — not yet. More like the beginning of understanding. A man who'd hitchhiked out of town four days ago had come back with a vehicle. With a thing that needed a parking spot and insurance and an oil change every three thousand miles. A thing that didn't fit in a duffel bag.
She held out the blue mug.
Jack set down the cable tensioner. Stood up. Took the mug. Their fingerstouched on the handle — a brief, electric contact that neither of them acknowledged and both of them felt.
"Thank you," he said.
"It was on the shelf."
"I know."
