I don't know why she's telling me this. I don't know why she's standingin my office drinking coffee like we're friends. We met yesterday. She watched me grunt my way through a dolphin tour while my father narrated my emotional development to three eight-year-olds.
“Lottie.”
“Yes?”
“Did Emma send you in here?”
“No. She'd be mortified if she knew I was here. She thinks I'm getting sunscreen from the car.” Lottie straightens up. “I wanted to say thanks. For yesterday. The boat trip. It was the first time my kids have been happy—actually happy, not performing-happy-for-mom—since the divorce.”
Her voice catches. Just for a second. Then she smooths it over with a practiced smile.
“That was Dad,” I say. “Not me.”
“Your dad drove the boat. You caught Mitch before he went overboard. That was you.”
I remember. Mitch had been reaching for a line and his center of gravity shifted and I'd moved without thinking—grabbed his life jacket strap and hauled him back before his sneakers hit the water. It wasn't heroic. It was reflex—a lifetime around boats and kids, and you develop an instinct for which direction a body is about to fall.
“He was fine,”I say.
“He was absolutely going overboard. You just didn't let him.” She taps the doorframe twice. “Enjoy the coffee, Paul.”
She leaves. The office is quiet again. Just the hum of the computer, the distant sound of Harold with the boys, and water doing what it always does.
I pick up the coffee. Take a sip.
It's really good.
I lean toward the window—nobody's watching—and Emma is down at the far end of the dock, crouched at the waterline with her camera. She's photographing the shallows—a heron, maybe, or the way light hits the oyster shells. Her whole body is still the way photographers get when they're locked on a shot, every ounce of attention focused through the lens.
In nine months, she's tripped the breaker fourteen times, hosted a book club meeting on the aft deck that kept me awake until ten thirty, let her eight-year-old name a crab that now lives under my dock, and smiled at me in a way that makes me feel like I'm standing in direct sunlight.
I don't want to feel this. I'm not built for it anymore. The part of me that knew how to open up—how to let a person in and trust that they'd stay—that part went quiet a long time ago, and I've made my peace with the silence.
But she keeps smiling. And my father keeps scheming. And her kid named the crab Steve, and that's the part that gets me. Not the smile, not the warmth, not the way she looks in the morning holding an empty mug. The crab. Named Steve. Living under my dock like he belongs there, like everything Emma touches eventually decides to stay.
My throat tightens. I swallow against it and turn back to the logbook.
The afternoon passesthe way marina afternoons do—a series of small problems that add up to a full day. A loose cleat on B dock. A bilge pump that needs replacing on the charter boat. A tourist who wants to know if he can fish from the fuel dock. (He cannot.)
At four o'clock, I'm on my knees at the junction box behind the boathouse, replacing a corroded wire terminal, when Jenna's voice comes from above me.
“You're doing that wrong.”
I look up. Emma's sixteen-year-old is standing on the dock, arms crossed, phone in her backpocket for once. She's wearing a Twin Waves Marina cap that I'm fairly certain belongs to Dawson, though I'm not going to ask how she got it.
“Excuse me?”
“The terminal. You're using a butt connector. You should use a heat-shrink connector. Better waterproofing.”
I stare at her. “How do you know that?”
“YouTube.” She says it like it's obvious. “Also, my mom's houseboat has the same junction box and I've watched four videos on why it keeps tripping.”
I look at the butt connector in my hand. Then at the heat-shrink connectors in my tool bag, which I was going to use but hadn't gotten to yet.
“I was getting to that,” I say.
“Sure.” She sits down on the dock, legs dangling over the edge. She doesn't say anything else. Just watches me work the way Dawson used to when he was younger—quiet, studying, filing things away.
