I'm halfway down the dock, gear on my shoulder, when Justin's shrimp boat rounds the breakwater. White hull, outriggers folded up, nets bundled tight, every surface gleaming. Finch is with him—jumping from the boat to the dock, already tying off the stern line without being told. Sixteen, wavy brown hair, arms that come from hauling nets instead of a gym membership, and the reason my daughter has been braiding her hair before breakfast for months.
Justin starts unloading coolers. The briny, clean scent of a fresh catch reaches me across the dock.
“Good haul?” I ask.
He glances up. Gray-blue eyes, same jawline as Paul. “Current pushed the schools close to shore.” Not unfriendly. Just economical.
“You any good?” he asks, tipping his chin at my bag.
That's the firstpersonal question a Spencer has asked me. Nobody asks if I'm good. They ask what I charge.
“Yeah,” I say. “I'm good.”
He nods like that's the right answer. “I pulled extra today. You cook?”
“I do.”
“Take some.” He flips open a cooler—ocean, clean and sharp. The shrimp are gorgeous. Gray-pink, translucent, piled on ice and still curling. “Can't sell what The Salty Pearl didn't order. Hate wasting good product.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don't offer twice.”
I take the bag. Two pounds, at least. My brain is already running—garlic, butter, lemon, white wine. Shrimp scampi. The real thing, not the frozen-bag version.
“Thank you,” I say, and my chest goes warm the way it does when you watch a person take pride in their work.
Justin grunts. The Spencer men and their grunts. Harold's the only one in the family who uses full sentences.
I'm turning to leave when the crash happens behind me.
A yell, a clatter, a splash, a second yell in adifferent register, followed by a word I'm fairly sure Justin Spencer has never said in front of a teenager before.
Olson and Mitch—who were supposed to be on the houseboat with Lottie—have found the dock cart stacked with coolers and discovered that it rolls. Well enough that when one twin stands on the back rail and the other gives it a running push, it achieves a speed that is genuinely impressive for industrial equipment on a wooden dock.
The cart hit Justin's gear. A full cooler tipped, bounced once, and went into the water.
Fresh-caught shrimp are now floating in the marina.
Justin is standing at the edge, staring down at the water where his morning's work is dispersing in a slow, expensive cloud. His jaw could cut glass.
The twins are frozen mid-getaway. Olson still has one foot on the cart. Mitch is three feet away, arms out, caught in the posture of a boy who was running and then suddenly realized he shouldn't be.
“That,” Justin says, very quietly, “was my delivery for The Salty Pearl.”
Olson steps off the cart. “It was an accident.”
“That cooler had thirtypounds of shrimp in it.”
“We didn't know it would roll that fast.”
“It's a cart. On wheels. On a flat surface. What did you think it would do?”
Mitch's lower lip trembles. Just barely—he's too proud for more. Olson steps in front of his brother. One shields, one feels.
Lottie arrives at a walk. Not a run. The measured pace that means she checked from the deck, confirmed nobody was bleeding, and decided sprinting would only make it worse.
“Boys. Come here.”
