Page 41 of Jonah’s Lure

“I know.”

“He’s not sleeping. He’s not eating properly. He sits in the dock office and looks at the whiteboard and the boats go out without Jonah and come back without Jonah and he—” She stopped. When she continued, her voice was smaller, the steadiness harder to come by. “He didn’t look back, you know—at the dock. All those years. Jonah was always twenty feet behind him doing the work, and he never looked back. And now that’s all he does. He just looks back.”

Angus considered that. Frank in the dock office, staring at the water. All those years of not looking back—assuming the son behind him would always be there, coiling rope, doing the work, waiting to be noticed. And now looking back was all he could do. Staring at the space where Jonah had been and finally understanding what had been standing there.

“Tell your father I’m going to find him,” Angus said. “Tell him that from me.”

Clara was quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she was all she said..

The call ended.

He sat at the table and waited.

He wasn’t good at it. He’d established this about himself over the past three days—the evident impatience of a man built for action, for the next step, for the forward motion that had structured every working day of his adult life. Waiting ran against the grain of everything he was made of.

But underneath that, quieter and more durable, something else had been building since Tuesday evening in the truck. The understanding that his job right now was not to find the next step. His job was to hold the line he’d drawn and trust that the process he believed in was working the way it was supposed to, with or without him at the center of it.

That didn’t feel like doing something.

He was beginning to understand that that was the point. It was a test. A test of whether he would cross the same line Logan had.

His phone lit up on the table.

Miguel.

He answered before the second ring.

“Warrant came through,” Miguel said. “We’re heading into the property now.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “I’ll call you when I have something.”

Angus set the phone on the table, looked at it, and waited.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Eleven days.

He was less certain about the day of the week. Somewhere around day nine, the specific days of the week had slipped from him. But the count itself he trusted. Eleven cycles of light passed under the door. That much he knew.

His wrists had stopped being something he thought about. The zip ties were simply part of his hands now, like a cast on a broken arm—present, limiting, no longer acute. He kept them low. He managed.

The note was folded inside his jacket, pressed against his chest. He’d put it there after reading it and kept it there ever since. A piece of paper that was either the most important thing he owned or proof of how thoroughly he’d been used. He still couldn’t be certain which.

YOUR PURPOSE IS SERVED. SOMEONE WILL FIND YOU.

Three days he’d been sitting with those eight words. Turning them over. Testing them against what he knew and what he feared. The first sentence he understood—or thought he did. The second he’d chosen to believe, not from certainty, but with the stubbornness of a man who had counted eleven days and wasn’t willing to stop.

* * *

He sat with his back against the icy wall and tried to stabilize his breathing which grew more difficult with every passing minute as the cold settled deeper in his bones.

He was not a man who fell apart easily.

He’d never had that luxury. The dock didn’t wait for feelings. The tide didn’t adjust for a bad morning, or a difficult conversation, or the ache of watching your father look through you to the next thing on his list. You showed up. You did the work. You kept your accounting separate from your emotions because the accounts had to balance regardless of how you felt about the man whose name was on the building.

He’d built systems. Two planners. One for the work, one for the family. Each with its own logic. Its own column structure. Its own agenda. Fleet schedules mapped three months in advance. Expansion projections revised every time new data came in, every assumption tested against the actual figures, nothing left to chance or feeling. His father might not have noticed the precision. Clara had. That had been enough.

But the precision was gone now.

In its place was something he didn’t have a name for. Not panic. He’d held panic at arm’s length for eleven days. Not despair. It was closer to the vertigo of a man whose footing has been taken away, and who was discovering he depended on it for so long he no longer knew how to stand without it.