Evan didn’t argue. “I intend to.”
“Good.” Ray turned back to his rods. “Now stop drinking my coffee and go act like a marina director.”
News in this town didn’t travel. It teleported.
The vendors started loading out at eight.
The expo came apart in reverse order, booth frames folding, banner stands collapsing, equipment wheeling across the lot into vans with out-of-state plates. Evan helped where a second pair of hands was wanted and stayed out of the way where it wasn’t. The morning filled with the slam of cargo doors and the beep of reversing trucks.
Dana left first. She paused at her van with the last bucket of greenery and pointed a stem at him like a baton. “Tell Margot I’m already booked for next summer. Tell her I want the same corner booth and better lighting. And tell her if anybody steals anything next year, I’m handling it personally. I have pruning shears and a long memory.”
“I’ll pass it along.”
Lou came next, carrying baking sheets in stacked towers, narrating next year’s gingerbread plans to no one in particular. At his van he stopped, set the sheets on the tailgate, and shook Evan’s hand. “Take care of yourself. And her.”
Then, he drove off with his mixer strapped into the passenger seat like family, because in Harbor’s Hope the important things never needed more than seven words.
By nine, the lot was half empty. By ten, the pavilion was a shell and the resort had begun its slow change back into an ordinary place where people came to rest beside the water.
Evan stood at the boardwalk railing and looked at the harbor.
The water had finished turning blue. The chapel steeple stood up above the rooflines in town, white against the sky. Sunday. The bell would ring at ten the way it had rung at ten since 1923, carrying over the water clear and true, outlasting every storm the century had thrown at it.
He reached into his pocket and found the compass. Brass case warm from his body, the cracked crystal under his thumb, the weight of it as familiar as his own pulse.
He let himself remember Lauren. Not the accident. Not the water or the dark or the thirty seconds he’d rebuilt a thousand times. He went further back, to a dock party in Hatteras the morning after they’d met, when she’d stolen his coffee straight out of his hand, taken one sip, and informed him that his boat needed paint. One stolen sip, and his whole life had quietly changed ownership.
She would have liked Margot. The thought arrived without guilt. Without weight. Just a fact, calm and warm, like a candle burning in a window of a house he could finally look at again.
She would have been glad.
And the absence of guilt inside that thought, the clean, clear space where the guilt had stood for five years like furniture too heavy to move, was the surprise he’d come across in all of it. He stood at the railing and let himself look at the space. Swept. Open. Ready for something new to be carried in.
The chapel bell rang ten, and the sound came over the water the way it always had.
He put the compass back in his pocket. Not away. Just back, where it belonged. Then he walked up the boardwalk toward the resort, where sooner or later this morning a woman would appear with a coffee and the particular expression she wore when the day was new.
The harbor at his back was full blue now. The town was awake.
And for the first time in five years, so was he.
Chapter forty-eight
A Silver Car
Margotrecognizedthecarbefore she recognized the man.
A silver Audi, polished to a mirror shine, parked in the resort’s guest lot between a minivan with Virginia plates and a pickup with a surfboard rack. Sleek, expensive, and completely wrong for a beach town where the most prestigious vehicle was Ray’s charter van.
David’s car. David’s taste. Every detail chosen for the impression it made instead of the job it did.
She stopped on the boardwalk. Pen and coffee in each hand. The morning had been perfect for exactly as long as it took her to read a license plate.
He stood at the terrace railing, gazing out at the ocean. Linen shirt. Sunglasses pushed up into his hair. The tan that came from a salon and not from weather. He looked exactly the way the day she met him, which was also the same as the day he emptied their joint business account and disappeared.
Same smile waiting in its holster. Same posture. Same man who’d taught her that charm could be a weapon, years before Caleb Henson arrived to confirm the lesson.
She took one slow sip of her coffee. Then she walked up the boardwalk toward him, because the only way out of this conversation was through it.
