“Which boys?”
“All of them.”
I process this. “All of them” means Aidan, who has named every crustacean within a hundred yards of the dock and once tried to set a crab trap using a shoelace and a Ziploc bag. It also means Olson and Mitch, who I spent an entire dolphin tour with yesterday during which one asked me if I'd ever been attacked by a shark and the other untied a dock line while I was standing on it.
“Fine.”
“Also, Grandpa said to tell you the dolphins were a hit.”
“The dolphins were there. I didn't arrange them.”
“He said you stayed on the boat the whole time.”
“I was checking the south posts.”
Dawson puts down the impeller. Looks at me. He's got his mother's eyes—dark brown, warm, the kind that see more than you want them to—and when he looks at me a certain way, it's like she's in the room.
“Dad. You don't check the south posts from a boat full of kids watching dolphins.”
“I multitask.”
He goes back to work. Doesn't push it. He's been watching me bottle things up for ten years, and at some point he learned to let me have my walls. Whether that's wisdom or resignation, I haven't figured out yet.
“The impeller's fine,” he says. “Just needed cleaning. Want me to put it back together?”
“Go ahead.”
I sit at the workbench across from him and pull the logbook toward me. Morning routine. Tide schedule, slip assignments, maintenance notes from overnight. The familiar rhythm of running a marina—the thing I can do without thinking, the thing that makes sense when nothing else does.
Holly died when Dawson was six.
I don't talk about it. Not because it hurts—though it does, the way old injuriesache when the weather changes—but because I don't know what to say that would be enough. People want a narrative. They want “It was the hardest thing I've ever been through, but I came out stronger.” They want recovery arcs and silver linings.
What it taught me is that you can love a person completely and lose them, and no amount of preparation changes that math. So I stopped trying to change it. I built a life around reliability. Tide charts and dock lines and things that follow rules. Dawson. The marina. Dad, who is too stubborn to age properly and too cheerful to leave alone for long.
It's been a good life. A small one, maybe. But functional. Predictable. Mine.
Then Emma Mills docked her rattletrap houseboat in slip twelve with three kids, a dangerous number of electrical appliances, and a smile that makes me forget what I was annoyed about.
I stare at the logbook. The page is blank.
“Hey, Dad?” Dawson says.
“Yeah.”
“You've been staring at that page for two minutes.”
I pick up my pen and start writing.
By eleven,the marina is in full chaos mode.
It's a regular Tuesday, which means the rental boats are booked, the fuel dock is busy, and I've already dealt with two tourists who can't figure out a trolling motor and one regular who insists his slip fee should be prorated because he was out of town for a week. (“You were out of town. The slip wasn't.”)
But the new element—the one that has turned my orderly marina into a daycare with better waterfront access—is the children.
Aidan and the Roberts twins are on the dock with my father, who has set up what he's calling “Knot School” using thirty feet of line, a whiteboard he got from who knows where, and the patience of a retired man with nothing to do and all day to do it.
“The bowline is the king of knots,” Harold is saying. He's standing at the edge of the dock with his hat tilted back, holding a length of rope between his hands. “You can tie it with one hand, in the dark, while the boat's moving. But first, you learn it on dry land. Like everything worth doing.”
