“Yes.” Margot looked at her. “Thank you. For holding it together while I couldn’t.”
“That’s the job.” Jolene pushed her glasses back up into her hair. “We hold things. Until the person who’s supposed to carry them is ready to carry them again.”
Margot walked toward the ballroom with her trusty pen held firmly in her hand, the gala five hours out, the ornaments still missing, and a plan assembling itself in the back of her mind, list by list.
Not even Evan had heard it yet.
First, the gala.
Chapter forty
Warm White Lights
Evanthoughtaboutleaving.
The same thought arrived every year when the Christmas lights went up over the harbor and the memories came in on the tide. Pack a bag. Put the truck on Route 12. Drive north until Harbor’s Hope was a name on a map and Dock Three was somebody else’s responsibility.
He sat on the end of the dock with the compass in his palm and let the thought run its course.
The cracked crystal caught the late afternoon light and threw a faint rainbow across his hand. Lauren’s laugh had done that to rooms once. Caught whatever light there was and thrown warmth into every corner of it.
He missed her. He would always miss her. But the missing had changed shape across five years, from a wound to a scar to an itch. A reminder. The awareness of an absence that had become as familiar as breathing. And beside it now, taking up more and more room, was the awareness of a presence.
Margot. In the dock shed every morning at six thirty. At the end of the pier with her hand on his arm. On the beach with her sneakers dangling from two fingers. In the kitchen at midnight with cocoa going cold between them. In the stairwell. On the bench seat. At the workbench. Everywhere he turned, there she was, stubborn and sharp and brave, and the life he’d built to be small enough to be safe had stopped being either one.
He could rebuild the small life. That was the thing about building. He was good at it. Three hurricanes had come through this marina, and three times he’d put it back stronger. He could drive north and find another harbor and another shed and another routine, and the careful, contained numbness would grow back over him like scar tissue.
Or he could stay.
Staying was harder. Staying meant the lights going up every July for the rest of his life, and the water that had taken Lauren lying fifty feet from where he worked, and a woman from Raleigh who could leave for a hundred reasons that had nothing to do with him.
Staying was the harder option. It was also the better one, and he’d spent five years pretending those were the same decision.
A keel, Ray had said once. Not an anchor. The thing that keeps you upright in rough water, not to hold you in place.
He closed his hand around the compass, put it in his pocket, and stood up. Then he walked toward the resort.
The ballroom doors stood open, and the light inside stopped him on the threshold.
Margot had been at it for hours. The evidence was everywhere. White tablecloths catching the window light. Silver centerpieces marching down the long tables in disciplined rows. Dana’s salvaged flowers filling the corners, greenery and hydrangeas wound through with ribbon until they looked like a choice instead of an emergency.
The Christmas tree stood in the far corner, still dark, waiting. She was in the center of it all with her clicky pen, building something beautiful out of an empty room, and her own refusal to quit.
She saw him in the doorway. “You’re here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I wasn’t sure you would be.”
He crossed the floor to her. Close enough to see the tiredness around her eyes and the determination underneath it, holding the tiredness up like scaffolding.
“I thought about leaving,” he said. “Sat on the dock and ran the whole thing. Truck. Highway. New harbor.”
“And?”
“And then I pictured you setting up a gala alone. I decided that was worse than anything I’d be running from.”
She smiled. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, and it was terrible.”
