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“How the hell have you heard that already?”

“Marcus’s wife told Ellie at the market.” He spits over the rail. “It’s a good thing. This place has run on your stubbornness three years running now. Stubbornness don’t get the filing done.”

“You’re all fixed, Walt. Feel free to go.”

“My Doris kept our books forty-one years. Know what she always said?”

“That you talk too much?”

“That too.” He cackles and fires the engine, and the charge light goes out like it should as he backs away still talking. Half of it’s lost under the noise of the diesel engine. Probably for the best.

It’s a good day, honestly. Loud, hot, everything broken in ways I can fix.

Mid-afternoon I’m up on the east dock replacing one of the boat tie-off cleats when Tommy comes out to hold the bolts and spoil my good mood.

“Decking’s held up nice out here,” he says, bouncing his heel on a plank. “Can’t even tell anymore, huh?”

I can tell. I sank every one of these posts myself. Reinforced the supports, laid the decking through most of a November, alone half the time because I couldn’t make payroll for a full crew that year and Marcus had to work on the boats or we’d have had no income at all.

The deck has three years of weather on it now and the wood’s finally going silver like the old dock used to be. So no, I guess you can’t tell anymore just by looking. Not unless you’re me.

“Give that bolt another quarter turn,” is what I say.

Tommy’s twenty-four. The storm’s a story to him, something the older guys mention and then don’t finish. He fastens the bolt tighter and moves on to whatever’s next in his head, music or some meme probably. I give it a kick to test it, and nothing moves. Good.

Diesel barks once from the yard. His business bark. Somebody’s here.

I come off the dock and there’s a 4x4 rolling through the gate. Dark blue. Clean. Not showroom clean, but washed-this-week clean, which in this lot might as well be a float in a parade. Out-of-state plates. It pulls in by the office like it’s done it a hundred times and parks dead straight, which is a trick, because I don’t even have lines painted.

Marcus appears at my shoulder. Man’s got radar for a scene.

“That’ll be the agency.”

“That’s not an agency car.”

“Maybe the agency’s doing better than us.”

“Everybody’s doing better than us.”

The door opens and a woman steps down out of the cab, and the whole yard develops a sudden, burning interest in tasks near the fence.

Blazer. Fitted, charcoal, over jeans, which is somebody’s idea of dressing down for a marina. Sunglasses pushed up into chestnut-brown hair streaked with warm caramel highlights. She takes a second to look the place over. Taking in the racks, the lifts, the office, the water.

And my body, with zero authorization from me, takes her in right back. The line of her throat when she tips her head. The way that blazer sits at her waist. Her mouth. Christ, her mouth. I’m standing in my own yard staring at a stranger’s lips like a man who’s been at sea for a year. Heat rolls through me, low and heavy, and settles exactly where I don’t want it. Haven’t heard her voice yet. Don’t know her name. Doesn’t matter. Every inch of me is already wide awake and asking questions.

Then reality rushes back in and I bristle at the way she’s reading my yard. Suspicion drops over the want like a tarp over a fire.

It’s not the once-over people give a business. She’s cataloging everything. I’ve watched people stand in my yard with a clipboard wearing that exact expression before. By the time they left, my father’s marina was eighteen months and one signature away from being a parking lot.

The warmth drains out of me. Most of it. The part that’s been staring at her mouth stays exactly as hot as it was, and that, right there, is the first thing I hold against her.

“Down, boy,” Marcus mutters.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face is saying plenty.”

She crosses the gravel toward us. In heels. On my gravel. Doesn’t wobble once, which annoys the hell out of me for some reason.