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I laugh, then shake my head. “I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“I got back from Europe and kept thinking I’d be here until the next thing happened. Then Ruby happened. Jack happened. The album started coming together. Now I’m leaving again, and I’ve been trying to make Ruby tell me everything will still be exactly where I left it when I get back.”

Dad’s expression softens, but he doesn’t jump in, and I keep going because I need to say it out loud.

“She never asked me not to go. She hasn’t even hinted at it. She just keeps telling me she can’t promise nothing will change.”

“Can you?”

“No.”

“Then she’s got a point.”

“I know.”

He picks up the ratchet again, but instead of returning to the motor, he turns it absently in his hand.

“You know, when your mom and I were younger, I spent a lot more time on the water than I do now. Trips ran long. Weather changed plans. Sometimes I’d come home when I said I would; sometimes I wouldn’t.” He glances toward me. “Your mother never built her life around waiting for my boat to come back.”

I keep listening.

“She had her work. Friends. You boys. Half the town asking her to volunteer for something.”

“And you still came home.”

“Every chance I got.”

The answer is so simple that I almost laugh. Not because the situations are identical. They aren’t. Dad wasn’t touring the country, and Mom wasn’t deciding whether to fly to Denver between tattoo appointments.

But the important part isn’t the job. It’s what happened around it.

“You never thought of being home as temporary,” I say.

Dad shakes his head. “Not once.”

I look around the shop. Dad built this place after he left commercial fishing, but even before Hale Marine Repair existed, Redwood Point was where he belonged.

Where we belonged.

I’ve always known Redwood Point is home. I just never made a conscious decision about it because I didn’t think I had to. Maybe that’s what Ruby has been trying to get me to understand. She isn’t asking me to promise I’ll never leave or somehow make every tour fit neatly around her schedule. She wants to know whether she belongs in the life I’m building even when my career takes me somewhere else.

And that answer is easy.

“She does,” I say.

Dad’s brows lift. “Who does what?”

I realize I said it out loud. “Ruby. She belongs in my life.”

He gives me a look that says he figured that out long before I did.

I stand and pace a few steps toward the open bay door. Evening fog has started moving in beyond the parking lot, softening the line of trees across the road.

“I don’t want her following me around because she thinks that’s the only way this works. She has Black Fern. If she buys into the shop, that’s huge for her.”

Dad nods.