"I didn't have a plan for you."
The corner of my mouth pulled. "That makes two of us."
"Ty said original shutdown contract, and I was standing in Houston again, reading a conference program with someone else's name on my work." She pressed her palm flat on the dock between us. "I know you're not Grant Kelsey. I know that. But the pattern is older than Tidehaven, and it has its own reflex, and the reflex says run."
"Are you running?"
She looked at me, and what I saw in her face was not closed. Not afraid. It was a woman who'd spent years leaving before anyone could take something from her, and had just stopped.
"No," she said. "I'm not."
The word hit me and opened something that had been held shut for longer than this assignment. Longer than this year. Longer than the three years I'd spent in this boathouse building a life small enough that losing it wouldn't hurt.
I stopped thinking.
I reached for her. Both hands. Her face between my palms, her jaw warm, her pulse fast under my thumbs. I closed the distance and kissed her on that sun-bleached dock in full view of the marina and the water and anyone in Tidehaven who cared to look.
Her hands came up and gripped my wrists, holding on, and the sound she made against my mouth undid every careful, disciplined, controlled thing I'd built around myself. I kissed her with everything I'd held back: every morning I'd watched her work and said nothing, every night I'd pulled her close and not said the words, every hour of steady silence while I waited for her to stay.
The sun was on our backs. The wood was hot beneath us. The salt marsh breathed, and the tide was coming in, and I kissed heruntil neither of us was thinking about contracts or trust wounds or the wreckage of the lives we'd built before this one.
When I pulled back, her eyes were wet and her hands were still locked on my wrists and she was laughing. That messy, half-wrecked laugh that was the best sound I'd ever heard.
"You—" She shook her head. "You couldn't have done that twelve hours ago?"
"You weren't ready twelve hours ago."
"And you knew that."
"Yeah, Doc. I knew that."
She kissed me again. Softer. Her thumbs running along my jaw, her forehead against mine, her breathing evening out.
* * *
We sat on the dock. Her shoulder against mine, the afternoon stretching long and golden across the marsh, the tidal creek running full and quiet beneath us. A pelican worked the channel in its heavy-shouldered patrol. Somewhere on the Intracoastal, a shrimp boat engine hummed.
Her hand found mine on the sun-baked planking. Her fingers laced through and held.
The boathouse was behind us. Her charts on the walls. Her ginger beer in the fridge. The grill she'd cleaned and covered because that was what you did when a place became yours. The cleat where she'd bruised her shin and laughed about it. The water that had brought us together and tried to kill us and given her back everything she'd lost.
I'd built this life to be small. Defensible. A clean, quiet space where the worst had already happened and the best I could expect was useful.
She'd wrecked that. Completely and irreversibly, in the time it took.
I looked at her in the late-afternoon light. Salt on her shoulders, freckles dark from the sun, the silver compassglinting at her throat. She was watching the marsh with that expression I'd come to recognize: the one that meant she was seeing further than what was in front of her. The history, the current, the whole living system of coast and water that had made her who she was.
"What are you thinking?" I asked.
"I'm thinking my boat's at the wrong dock." She looked at me. The smile on her face had nothing defensive in it. Nothing held back. "I'm thinking I should move it here."
Something went through me so large and so simple that I wouldn't have had words for it if I'd tried.
"I'll clear the slip," I said.
She leaned into me. Her weight settled against my shoulder, the slow rise and fall of her against my side, the sun heavy on both of us. The marsh ran gold to the horizon, bright and alive. The jasmine on the dock railing had started to bloom, sweet enough to catch in the back of my throat.
I pressed my lips to her hair, still damp from the dive and warm from the day.
