I sit in the silence and hate that he's right.
The thing about Emma Mills—andI'm only thinking about this because we're about to spend weeks coordinating a celebrity wedding, and I need to understand the dynamics—is that the money is going to change things for her.
Her finances aren't a mystery. Not because I'm keeping track. Because I run this marina and the checks cross my desk and a camera-for-hire in a town this size earns what it earns, and the rest is arithmetic. Three kids, an ex-husband whose support probably doesn't stretch halfway, and a houseboat with wiring that should keep me up at night. Notbecause I care. Because one bad spark and my dock goes up with it.
That fee Levi offered her—she almost cried. I wasn't watching. I was heading down to tighten a loose rope and her face was right there, open and stunned, like she just realized she might actually be okay. Not rich. Just... okay. Not lying awake calculating how to make a single season's income cover a full year of groceries and boat repairs and shoes that get outgrown every four months.
My throat tightens. I swallow against it.
I recognize that expression. I've worn it exactly once—the day Dad handed me the marina and the debt came with it, and then three years later when I finally broke even and could stop running numbers at midnight.
The money is earned. She's good—Justin's right, and it costs me to admit it, even silently, even where no one can hear me. She's got an eye. The way she chases light. I've watched her on the dock at sunset, camera up, finding beauty in a thing I walk past every day without noticing, and for a second the world through her lens looks warmer than the one I live in.
Not that I'm watching her. I'm monitoring dock activity.
When this wedding is over, she'll have enough to fix that wiring herself, and I won't have to lie awake thinking about whether her coffee maker is going to burn down my marina.
The fire hazard. That's what I care about.
I look at the number on the invoice. At my list. Out the window at the dock where I've spent every morning for ten years trying to keep this place alive.
Emma's on deck, camera bag over her shoulder, heading out to her shoot. Coral sundress. Hair in a ponytail. On the phone, probably with Delilah, already building this wedding in her head like it's a photograph she hasn't taken yet.
The wide smile is on. The kind that rewrites her whole face. Either she believes the world is fundamentally good or she's the best actress on the Eastern Seaboard.
Up the dock she goes without glancing toward the office. I don't look away fast enough. Doesn't matter. Already gone, and I'm still here, holding a number that could fix this place and a weight behind my ribs I won't touch.
Holly would have made me touch it. She would have sat on the edge of this desk, crossed her arms, and waited until I cracked. She had the patience of a woman married to a Spencer—patience witheverything except my pigheadedness, which she treated like a personal challenge she intended to win.
She always won.
I pick up my pen and add one more line to the list:
Port running light—slip twelve. Fix it myself. She's never going to do it.
Not a gesture. A safety issue.
That's all.
THREE
EMMA
My phone rings at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday, which is never good.
Good news calls at reasonable hours. It sends a text first and waits for a response like a civilized human being.
Eleven p.m. on a Tuesday is a crisis call. I know this because I've made a few myself—the night Matt told me he was converting the spare bedroom into a train museum, and the night I sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot and cried for forty-five minutes because I couldn't remember the last time anyone asked me how my day was.
I check the screen. Lottie.
My stomach drops. The divorce papers were supposed to come through this week, and Lottie'sbeen going progressively quieter in our text thread. Lottie quiet is Lottie drowning.
“Hey.” I'm already sitting up in bed, already in best-friend mode. The houseboat rocks gently beneath me. Through the thin wall, Aidan is talking in his sleep—Gerald the crab and a submarine.
“He signed the papers.” Lottie's voice is flat. Not crying. Past crying. “It's done.”
“Oh, Lottie.”
