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It felt so intimate to say something like that to Ian, as if the two of them had a whole history together. Actually, the fact that he took his coffee without cream or sugar was one of the few things she knew about the man next to her. She hoped to change that, but she didn’t want to turn their outing into an interview. It had been so long since Cam had been on a real date that she had forgotten how one was supposed to go about it. She exhaled, thinking of Birdie’s advice. Have a little fun. Don’t get so hung up on the future.

Ian smiled, an expression that seemed to come easily to him. “So did I,” he said. “It’s in the bench. At least we’ll be caffeinated.” He seemed like someone who didn’t need Birdie’s advice. Not an overthinker like her.

Ian handed her a rod and loaded the bait on both their hooks.

“Worms,” he said apologetically as he opened a plastic tub and slipped some slimy creatures onto the hooks. “I’m sorry. Is this grossing you out? Geez, I’m blowing this, aren’t I? Here you are, this beautiful city lady, and I’m some bumpkin with a stinky can of bait.”

Please, Cam thought. She had deboned flocks of ducks and made pâté out of their livers. Still, she felt herself reddening even more from his compliment.

“I’m fine,” she said, weighing the loaded rod in her hands and cocking it back to cast. It had been a while since she’d gone fishing, but she knew what she was doing. Birdie had taught her when she was a little girl, and she and her grandmother had spent many a lazy afternoon on the boat pulling in rockfish and grouper. Birdie had showed her how to bait a line, how to reel it in, gently, and how to check to make sure the fish they caught were big enough. Keepers, they were called. And then how to clean them, scraping the iridescent scales off with Eddie’s old wood-handled knife and fileting them.

“I probably should have asked you out for dinner instead,” he said. “Somewhere with tablecloths and wine and candles. Is there anything like that around here?”

So it is a date, Cam thought, realizing that she was more than okay with that.

“It’s all right,” Cam said. “I think I like this better. Besides, there’s not much in the way of fine dining around Silver Cove.”

Cam managed to quiet the self-conscious voice in her head and found Ian easy to talk to. He had a way of really listening. He asked about her and about Birdie. She found herself telling him about the cookbook she was trying to write, without using Izzy’s name, of course. About the fete and how Birdie had roped her into catering it in exchange for getting the permits. That story made him laugh in a way that was infectious, making Cam smile. It was funny, in retrospect, even if she had wanted to murder her grandmother at the time. She didn’t, however, tell Ian about the ghost who was apparently living in the old cookbook she had found and who possibly wanted her to find something. She didn’t want to just hand this handsome guy who she was feeling increasingly drawn to a reason to run for the hills.

“I’m being rude,” Cam said after a while. It had been a long time since she had talked about herself so much. “Here I am going on about myself when I really wanted to find out about you.”

“I’m a little complicated,” Ian said.

“Funny, you don’t strike me that way,” Cam said. “You seem like a straightforward guy.”

“Should I be insulted by that?” Ian asked, smiling and flashing her a look of mock woundedness. “You don’t think I’m mysterious and dark?” His voice lost its teasing tone. “The truth is that it’s not so much that I’m complicated but rather my situation is a little difficult, particularly at the moment.”

“You’re on the run from the law,” Cam said, still joking around. “You’re a notorious bank robber. Ian McCabe is an alias, and this is”—she reached over and gently touched one of the curls peeking out from his wool hat—“a wig.” She realized in a rush how badly she wanted to run her fingers through his hair, to pull his face toward hers. If she was someone more impulsive, she might have. Avery would do it in a millisecond.

“Not exactly,” Ian replied. “Though I could use that kind of cash. Nope, my story is that I have two kids, one of whom seems to have made teenage rebellion a full-time profession.”

Cam nearly dropped the fishing rod she was gripping. Ian had kids? One of whom was a teenager? She felt like she had held up a funhouse mirror to him. Suddenly, he seemed so different than he had just a moment ago.

He told her his story, about how he had married his high school sweetheart, Lori, right out of school. They had a baby, and they had been happy. They were living in Raleigh, and he was working on construction crews, taking longer hours to pay for their house, for all the things their daughter needed. He didn’t realize at first that Lori had started using drugs until one day he had come home early to find her passed out on the sofa and their daughter crying in her crib. That started a cycle that went on for years—Ian would threaten to leave with their daughter if she didn’t get clean, so she would, for a while. Things finally seemed to be working out, and she had stayed sober for years. But after they had their second child, a boy, she went off the rails again. He had a tear in his eye when he told Cam about their messy divorce, the legal battle he’d had to wage to get custody. The guilt he felt about taking the kids away from their mother, the times Lori would call, crying, and he would have to tell her she couldn’t see their children because he could tell she was high.

He did everything to give them a stable life, and it seemed to be working. Until earlier that year when his oldest, Paige, graduated from high school and, instead of going to college, had started hanging around a new crowd. They smoked a lot of pot and drank a lot. He was afraid she was about to turn into Lori—a bright, beautiful girl suddenly transformed into someone unrecognizable.

“So I packed us up and moved to Silver Cove,” Ian said. “I thought if we went somewhere quiet, we could have a fresh start.”

“I take it Paige doesn’t see it that way?” Cam asked. She thought back to when she was a teenager and couldn’t get away from the small town fast enough. The whole time Ian was telling her his story, she had felt a kaleidoscope of emotions. She mostly just felt sympathy for him.

“She hates me, or so she says. Apparently, I’m a jailer, and Silver Cove is the tenth ring of hell. She mostly spends her time in her room on her phone, probably texting with those losers from back home. She’s still only seventeen, so I figure I’ve got another year to keep her away from all that. I’ve tried to get her to take classes at the community college, but she seems to be too busy holding a grudge against me. But at least Davis is okay, or at least I hope he is. He seems to be adjusting to his new school.”

Ian paused. “I’m sorry for unloading all this on you,” he said. “I know it’s a lot. But I guess I just want you to understand all of it. Because I like you. And I hope it doesn’t scare you off.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Cam said, though she wasn’t sure at all about that. Just spending time with Ian had felt like a huge leap for her—and now she knew about his family. Ian was right. His life was complicated, full of the kind of relationships and potential for upheaval that she had spent her entire life avoiding. But she still felt so drawn to him—his passion for his work, his quick smile, his steady gaze. As he turned the little boat back to the harbor, Cam ticked through all her worries: Izzy, her deadline, the fete, Birdie—not to mention the possible ghost. The last thing she needed was a distraction in the form of a man who had more baggage than a Delta shuttle.

Still, as Ian finally steered the tiller toward the docks, Cam let herself relax and pushed her troubles aside for a few minutes longer. She watched an osprey settle into its nest on a channel marker and spied Birdie’s house across the way. She thought of all the ships over the decades that had come to Silver Cove seeking shelter during storms, as whitecaps whipped up across the bay and threatened to overturn them into the salty waters. The little town had been a place of safety for Cam once when she had been reeling from her mother’s death. She watched as Ian brought the boat snugly up against the dock and threw a stout rope around one of the pilings. Cam knew Ian had brought his family here for the same reason, hoping it would give them refuge from life’s choppy seas, too.

“So let me get this straight.”

Cam was in no mood to get a lecture from her cousin Avery, much less over the phone when she was in the middle of the canned-goods aisle of the Pack ’N’ Save grocery. And although she usually shut down her cousin’s advice on her love life, which usually consisted of trying to sign her up for some dating app, Cam was too distracted to protest.

“So you like this guy Ian,” Avery continued as Cam scanned the shelves.

Cam resisted the urge to interject, to say that, in fact, she wasn’t sure how she felt about Ian McCabe. She let Avery go on.

“And he’s totally hot, right?”