I switch to the heat-shrink connector. She nods once, barely perceptible, like I've passed a test I didn't know I was taking.
“Your son said you built most of this dock yourself,” she says after a while.
“Rebuilt. The original was here. I replaced the boards, reframed theposts, added the finger piers.”
“That's cool.”
It's the most Jenna has said to me since Emma moved in. She's been treating me like a piece of marina furniture—an obstacle she walks around without acknowledging. This is different.
“Your mom know you're down here?” I ask.
“She's editing photos. Lottie's watching the little kids.” She picks at a splinter on the dock board. “It's loud on the houseboat right now. Six people. You know.”
I do. I know what it's like to need quiet and not know how to ask for it. I know what it's like to be sixteen and feel like every room you walk into is already full.
“You can sit here anytime,” I say. “It's usually quiet.”
She doesn't thank me. Doesn't gush. Just nods and pulls out her phone, and we exist in the same space without talking for the next twenty minutes while I finish the terminal and she scrolls through whatever sixteen-year-olds scroll through.
When she gets up to leave, she pauses.
“The cap is Dawson's,” she says. “He lent it to me because the sun was in my eyes. Before you make a thing of it.”
“I wasn't going to make a thing of it.”
“Your face already did.”
She walks back toward the houseboat, and two things hit me at once. Jenna watches YouTube videos about marine electrical, which means she's been thinking about the houseboat's problems and trying to solve them on her own. And she chose to sit here, with me, in the quiet, when she could have gone anywhere.
My chest does the tightening thing again. The same one from yesterday, watching Dad light up with the kids. The same one from this morning, watching Emma hold an empty mug like a security blanket.
I pack up my tools and go back to the office.
The coffee is cold now. I finish it anyway and open the logbook.
Slip 12—breaker trip, 6:47 a.m. Load management discussed with tenant. Resolved.
I stare at what I've written. Then, before I can think about it too hard, I add:
Shore power upgrade—slip 12. Get estimate.
It's practical. The circuit needs upgrading if she's going to keep living there with six people on board. It has nothing to do with the coffee. Nothing to do with the empty mug or thelaminated schedule or the way she saidthanks for checking on itlike I'd done her a favor instead of my job.
I close the logbook. Pick up the cold coffee. Drain it.
Outside, my father is teaching three eight-year-olds to tie a cleat hitch. The woman in slip twelve is photographing herons in the shallows. My son is putting an outboard back together with hands that look like his mother's.
And I'm sitting here getting an estimate for a shore power upgrade I swore I'd never do.
Holly would be laughing at me right now.
SEVEN
EMMA
Six people on a houseboat built for two, and the only bathroom has been occupied by a sixteen-year-old for twenty-three minutes. This is the hill I will die on.
I'm standing in the galley with a mascara wand in one hand and my gear bag in the other, trying to do my makeup in the reflection of the microwave door. Millie is eating cereal at the fold-down table, unbothered, because Millie is always unbothered. Lottie is on her knees behind the bench seat, fishing for one of Mitch's shoes, which has ended up inside the cushion storage compartment.
