“Mason is in town. Right now. At the Seafoam Inn.”
I can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t do anything but stand here, gripping the rail until my knuckles go white, while the world restructures itself around this single impossible fact.
Mason is here.
Mason is in Harmony Harbor.
After ten years of nothing—no calls, no letters, no word at all—Mason is less than two miles from where I’m standing.
“Judah?” Dominic’s voice sounds distant, tinny. “You still there?”
“Yeah.” The word scrapes out of my throat like broken glass. “I’m here.”
“I thought you should know. Before you heard it from someone else. Before you ran into him at the grocery store or some shit.”
Ran into him.The thought is absurd. Terrifying. The idea of turning a corner and suddenly finding myself face to face with?—
“I have to go.”
“Judah—”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“Wait. Just…wait a second, okay?” Dominic’s voice softens in a way I’m not used to hearing from him. “Are you gonna be alright?”
Am I going to be alright.
What a fucking question.
“I’ll call you later,” I say, and hang up before he can respond.
The phone goes back in my pocket. My hands find the wheel. The engine roars to life on the first try—of course it does, because the universe has a sick sense of humor—and I’m turning the boat around before I’ve consciously decided to do it.
The trap lines can wait. The storm can wait. Everything can wait except the desperate, overwhelming need to be on solid ground while I figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do with this information.
Mason is here.
The words play on repeat in my head as I navigate back through the harbor, barely seeing the other boats, barely hearing the shouts of greeting from fishermen who know my face if not my name.
Mason is here.
ELEVEN
PHOENIX
The phone’sringtone shatters through my skull like an ice pick.
I jerk awake, disoriented, mouth tasting like something crawled in and died. My arm flails toward the nightstand, knocking over what sounds like a water glass before my fingers finally close around the vibrating rectangle of doom.
The screen’s brightness is pure assault. I squint against it, trying to make out the caller ID through sleep-crusted eyes.
Victoria Riviera.
Of course. Of fucking course.
My thumb hovers over the decline button. It’s—I check the time—6:47 a.m. In a time zone I didn’t ask to be in. After a day that included a near-death experience and the world’s most awkward bathroom encounter. My mother can wait.
I silence the call and let the phone drop onto the mattress beside me.
