“He fell asleep on my arm.”
We’re standing in Aidan’s doorway. The houseboat is dark except for the hall light. Paul is close enough that I could reach out and touch him, and I want to, and I don’t, because we’re in the hallway outside my kid’s room and this isn’t the lighthouse and I don’t know what we are.
“Good night, Emma,” he says.
“Good night, Paul.”
He walks down the hall, out the door, and across the dock to his boat ten feet away. The same distanceas always.
His door clicks shut.
I stand in the hallway for a long time, looking at my sleeping son with his crab racing ribbon and his sticky festival fingers and the indent on the pillow where Paul set him down.
Then I go to bed, and I don’t overthink it.
Much.
SIXTEEN
PAUL
The yacht arrives on a Tuesday.
I know it’s coming. I’ve been preparing for weeks—reinforced the pilings, rebuilt the fender system, upgraded the electrical hookup to handle a vessel that probably uses more power than the rest of the marina combined. I’ve run the numbers. I’ve done the measurements. I’ve made the slip ready.
Nothing prepares me for the actual size of it.
It comes around the point just after sunrise, white and gleaming, catching the early light like it was designed to make everything around it look shabby. Which it was. The thing is a hundred and twenty feet of Italian engineering and obscenewealth, gliding into my working marina the way a limousine pulls into a gravel driveway.
Justin is standing on the dock next to me. His shrimp boat—immaculate, practical, the pride of his life—is docked in the next slip over. We both watch the yacht approach in silence.
“Huh,” Justin says.
“Yeah.”
“That’s...a lot of boat.”
We stand there for a minute, not saying anything else, because there’s nothing to say. His shrimp boat is forty-two feet. My fishing vessel is thirty-six. Emma’s houseboat is maybe fifty. This yacht has a sun deck bigger than my father’s house.
The captain—because of course it has acaptain, a hired professional who navigates yachts for a living, which is apparently a career that exists—eases the vessel into the reinforced slip with the kind of precision that makes me grudgingly respect him. The dock creaks. The pilings hold. The fender system I spent three weeks building absorbs the impact exactly the way it should.
I don’t say anything about the fender system. But I’m satisfied.
Emma is on her deck. Of course she is—you can’t miss a hundred andtwenty feet of white fiberglass pulling into the slip next door. She’s standing at the railing with her camera already up, shooting the yacht as it docks, because Emma photographs everything, including things that are disrupting my entire operation.
“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she says.
“It’s a vessel I need to secure properly, so if you could stop photographing it and let me work?—”
“Look at the lines on the bow. Look at the way the light is hitting the hull right now. Paul, that’s?—”
“Emma.”
She ignores me completely and keeps shooting. The shutter clicks mix with the sound of dock lines being tossed and the low rumble of the yacht’s engines powering down.
Aidan bursts out of the houseboat in his pajamas. “Is that aspaceship?”
“Does it have a pool?” he asks, not waiting for an answer to the first question.
