The bench creaks. Footsteps scatter. The screen door bounces twice.
I sit in the office for a long time after that.
Matt is coming. The father. The real one—the man who has legal rights and shared history andDNA in common with those three kids. The man who had Emma for years and chose model trains. The man who bought birthday tickets and didn’t show up.
I’m not jealous. Jealousy would require me to believe I have a claim on something, and I don’t. I’m the neighbor who makes pancakes and carries sleeping children and rescues crabs from toilets. I’m not their father. I’m not Emma’s anything—not officially, not in a way that has a name.
But I’ve heard Aidan talk about his dad before. The hope in his voice. The careful way he mentions him, like he’s handling something he knows might break. And I’ve seen Emma’s face when Matt comes up—the way she braces, just slightly, like she’s preparing for impact.
I think about what Emma told me in the galley. The garage with the climate control. The custom-painted caboose. Being second place to a hobby. And I think about Aidan’s voice just now—he said he was coming for my birthday and then he didn’t come—and something hot and sharp settles behind my ribs.
I know what it’s like to grow up with a father who shows up. Dad was there for every game, every bad day, every dock repair I messed up as a teenager. He was there when Holly died. He wasthere the morning after, making coffee in my kitchen without being asked, not saying anything, just being present. That’s what fathers do. They show up. They stay.
Matt bought tickets and didn’t come.
I’ve rebuilt dock pilings that were more reliable than that.
Part of me—the part that’s been making pancakes and teaching knot-tying and letting an eight-year-old fall asleep against my arm at fireworks—that part wants to walk over to Emma’s houseboat and say something. I don’t know what. Something likeI’m hereorI’m not going anywhereoryour kids deserve better than a man who treats showing up like it’s optional.
But those aren’t my words to say. Those kids have a father. He’s coming next week. And if he doesn’t —
I stop that thought.
I pick up my pen and go back to the marina schedule. I write in the restricted dates for the wedding week, double-check the power calculations for the yacht. verify the pump-out schedule, review the security perimeter plan, and do the work. Handle the things I can control. Let the rest be someone else’s problem.
Through the window, Emma’s houseboat isquiet. The fairy lights on her deck are off. The sun is going down behind the marina, turning the water orange and gold, and the yacht in its reinforced slip is catching the last light like a promise. Next to it, Emma’s houseboat looks like a toy. Next to that, my fishing vessel looks like a lunch box. We are three very different boats tied to the same dock, and I’m not sure what that means but I think about it more than I should.
I think about Holly. Not in the way I usually think about Holly—the ache, the absence, the grocery list on the sticky note. I think about what she’d say if she were here. If she could see me sitting in this office, listening through a window, falling for a woman I’m too careful to reach for.
She’d give me the look. The one that made me pick up my boots for eleven years.
Paul Spencer,she’d say.If you don’t go over there, I swear —
Yeah. I hear you.
I close the logbook. Turn off the office light. Walk out onto the dock.
The marina is settling into evening the way it always does—the water going dark, the boats creaking in their slips, the pelicans calling it a day. The yacht gleams white againstthe fading sky. A light comes on in Emma’s galley. I can see her silhouette moving through the kitchen, probably starting dinner, probably doing it alone the way she does everything alone.
Not because she wants to. Because she learned to.
I stand there on the dock for longer than I should, hands in my pockets, watching that galley light. Then I walk to my boat, go inside, and close the door.
Not tonight.
But soon.
SEVENTEEN
EMMA
Iwake up to the sound of the water.
That’s the thing about sleeping in the bow of a houseboat—the ocean is right there, underneath you, around you, a constant low hum that used to keep me awake and now keeps me sane. Aunt Dottie’s old bedroom has windows on three sides that come together in a point at the front, and in the morning the light pours in from every direction. Blue and gold and shifting. It’s like waking up inside a prism.
This room took me three months to make mine. When I moved in, it was still Dottie’s—her lavender bedspread, her collection of sea glass in a mason jar on the sill, her reading glasses on the nightstand like she’d just stepped out. I kept the sea glass and the jar.I added my things around them—my camera bag hanging on the hook behind the door, my laptop on the quilt where I edit photos in bed at night, the kids’ school pictures in mismatched frames on the built-in shelf that runs along the port side. A woven rug Lottie gave me as a housewarming gift that’s supposed to look like beach waves but looks more like a tie-dye accident. I love it anyway.
There’s a print above the bed that Dottie left—a black-and-white photograph of Twin Waves from the 1960s, taken from the water. The marina is in it. The boardwalk. The pier where Levi proposed to Delilah. It looks almost the same now. That’s what I love about this place. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.
