“That's a no. We'll fix that today. Anybody who can't tie a bowline can't be trusted with a boat, and anybody I can't trust with a boat is no use to me.”
“Use us for what?”
“I'm taking the boat out this afternoon. Need a crew. Aidan's my first mate, but a captain needs deckhands.” He straightens up—one hand on his knee, slower than he'd admit—and fixes them with a look of absolute seriousnessthat I recognize from my own childhood. The look that made me feel, at eight, like I was being recruited for a mission. “Interested?”
Both twins nod so hard I'm surprised their heads stay attached.
“Good. Knot lesson is at noon. Be at slip two. Don't be late. I don't wait for slow deckhands.” He glances at Aidan, who has appeared at his elbow like he was summoned. “First Mate Aidan, brief your crew on the Gerald situation. I want a full report by departure.”
“Aye aye, Mr. Harold.”
The three of them take off down the dock at full sprint. My father watches them go with a satisfaction that has nothing to do with boats or tides.
My chest does the tightening thing again. The one I get when Dad looks like that—alive, lit up, the version of himself I thought we'd lost after Mom died. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum and turn back to the desk.
Emma appears at the end of the dock with two coffee mugs. She hands one to my father without asking, which tells me they've done this before—she just hands him coffee and he just takes it, like it's been happening every morning for months, and I didn't notice because I'm apparently blind toeverything on my own dock that doesn't involve a post or a line.
“Harold.” She says his name with genuine warmth. Not the weaponized sunshine she aims at me. Real warmth. The way you talk to a person you actually like.
“Morning, sweetheart.” Dad takes a sip. “Your boy just recruited me to inspect a crab nursery.”
“Gerald's got babies. It's been the headline of the week.”
“So I've heard. Steve sounds like a character.”
“Steve is Aidan's favorite because—and I'm quoting here—'Steve has independent energy.'”
“Smart kid.” Dad looks past Emma toward the parking lot where the U-Haul is still sitting, evidence of Lottie's arrival. “Your friend made it.”
“Lottie. She drove through the night. She's inside lying on the houseboat floor because she said she needed to be horizontal for ten minutes.”
“Fair enough. Ten hours with twins. I drove twenty minutes with Paul and Justin at that age and almost left them at a gas station in Beaufort.”
“You wouldn't have.”
“I thought about it. That counts.”
Emma laughs—the real one, not the performance—and my father smiles at her, and I recognize that smile. It's the one he used to give my mother. Not romantic. Paternal. Harold Spencer collects people. He claimed Emma months ago, her kids the first week, and Lottie and the twins are next whether they know it or not.
He caught me watching through the window and waved.
I did not wave back. I returned my attention to the calculations like a man with important work and no feelings whatsoever about any of this.
The wind picksup around ten, the way it always does—the onshore breeze that pushes the heat inland and makes the lines hum against the pilings. The office window is cracked two inches because the AC quit in April and I haven't fixed it yet, which means every sound on the dock drifts in—water lapping under the boards, a halyard clanking against a mast in the row.
The door opens. No knock.
“Beautiful morning,” Dad says, settling into the other chair like he still owns the place. Whichhe did for forty years before signing it over to me along with the debt and the water stain shaped like Florida.
“Morning.”
“I'm taking the kids out on the boat this afternoon. Dolphins.”
“All of them?”
“Every last one. The moms too, if they want. My boat's held more than that.” He pauses. “Your uncle fell overboard at your mother's birthday party in ninety-eight, but that was wine, not capacity.”
“Dad, the dock reinforcement?—”
