And under the wanting, quieter and harder to name, sat the thing she couldn’t say out loud yet: in two days they would hand it all to a man who’d already decided none of it mattered.
After that, all bets were off.
Chapter twenty-eight
Thirty Seconds
Evanhadbeenthinkingabout endings all afternoon.
The expo’s closing gala was tomorrow. After that, the vendors would pack up, the guests would leave, and whatever reason he and Margot had to be in each other’s lives every day would disappear. He kept thinking about the after. The part where the scaffolding came down and you found out if what you’d built could stand on its own.
That night, they sat at the end of Dock Three with their feet hanging over the water. Their spot. He’d stopped pretending it wasn’t their spot about three days ago.
The harbor lay still beneath a streaked orange-and-pink sky. Christmas lights from the resort terrace reflected across the calm water like colored stars.
Then Margot asked quietly, “Will you tell me about Lauren?”
He’d told her the facts already. The boat parade. Caleb’s weight ratings. The sandbar. Four pulled out, not five. She’d heard it from Ray, and then from him in the dock shed, and she’d held it without flinching both times.
But there was a part he hadn’t told anyone. Not Ray. Not Jolene. Not the counselor the Coast Guard had sent him to three times before he’d stopped going. The part that woke him at two in the morning and wouldn’t let him sleep.
He said yes. Because she’d trusted him with David and Rita and the bank statements and the folding table, and it was time to trust her with the worst of his.
“She was on the foredeck,” he said. He kept his eyes on the water. It was easier that way. “Near the pine tree Caleb had bolted to the deck. When the boat hit the sandbar, the tree broke loose. She went over with it.”
Margot was quiet beside him. He could feel her stillness, the way you feel a hand hovering near your back.
“I could hear her.” His voice was steady. The words underneath were not. “For about thirty seconds. She was calling my name. Not screaming. Just calling. The way she’d call from the kitchen when dinner was ready, or from the beach when she’d found a shell she wanted me to see.”
The harbor was dark now. The dock light threw a gold circle on the water at their feet.
“Then the current took her around the sandbar, into the deeper channel, and I couldn’t hear her anymore.” He pressed his thumb against the compass crystal. “Thirty seconds. That’s what I carry. Not the squall or the rescue or the investigation after. Thirty seconds of her voice, and then nothing.”
He’d never said it this plainly.
The air held it. She held it. Neither of them buckled.
They sat like that for a long time. The dock creaking. The water moving beneath them. The compass between his palm and hers.
“What was she like?” Margot asked. “Not the facts. Her.”
He almost smiled. The real kind, the one that hurt.
“Warm. Curious. She talked to everyone. She’d walk into a room and within five minutes she’d know the bartender’s kid’s name and what the hostess was studying in school.” He turned the compass in his hand. “She collected shells. Even the broken ones. She’d say they were more interesting because they’d been through something.”
“She sounds like someone I would have liked.”
“She would have liked you.” The truth came out before he had time to dress it up. Lauren would have seen through Margot’s armor in about ten seconds. She would have made her laugh. She would have handed her a broken shell and said look, this one’s been through something too.
And she would have been glad. That was the part that undid him.
Lauren would have been glad he’d found someone. Not because she’d have wanted to be replaced. Because she’d have wanted him to stop drowning.
He couldn’t say that out loud. Not yet. But the realization settled into place, heavy and still.
Margot lifted her hand from his. Not pulling away. Making room. She held the compass between them, the cracked crystal catching the terrace lights. “So you always find your way back to me.”
She was quoting Lauren. She knew it. She said it gently, reverently, like a line from a prayer.
