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She swats my arm like I’m still a naughty child. My face burns and I sit there like a scolded kid, not sure how to act. She's swatted my arm over ketchup, over language, over chewing with my mouth open in 1998. This one isn't that. This one was meant, and we both know it.

"Fifteen years ago, you went off that dock without asking whose child she was," she says, and her voice is shaking now. "Now the same girl is going under twenty yards from your workshop, and you won't read a piece of paper." She picks up her purse. "Where is it?"

"You don’t-"

"Where. Is. It?"

“On her desk.”

She gets up, leaving the terrible coffee behind, and marches back to the boatyard and into the office. I follow at a distance and watch through the workshop window like a coward. The door opens, Vanessa stands up from the desk, and whatever else happens in there happens with the door shut. Four minutes later my mother comes out with the packet under her arm, walks into my workshop, pulls out my stool, sends Tommy to the Buick for her reading glasses, and tells Marcus the radio's too loud.

Then she reads it. Every single page. It takes her until well past noon.

Nobody works well that whole time. Tommy keeps finding jobs at the far end of the shop. Marcus keeps not looking at me so loudly I can feel it. I rebuild a carburetor twice.

When she finally finishes, she taps all the pages neatly back together again and sits with her hand flat on top of it for a minute. Then she says, "That company did to this girl exactly what they did to us. Except she was inside it, fighting. There are eighteen months of appeals in here, Aiden. They get angrier as they go. The last one reads like she's expecting to be fired for writing it, and then there's a resignation letter, so I suppose she quit before they got the chance. She went down swinging for you. Before she ever shook your hand."

"That doesn’t change the fact that-"

"Oh, stop it. You trust paper more than people. You've been saying that for years now. Well, here's the paper." She puts the packet in my hands and folds my fingers around it like I'm eight. "Read it tonight. Or I will come back tomorrow and read it to you out loud in front of your crew, and I'll do the voices."

She kisses my cheek before she leaves. Nobody dares to breathe a word.

At the end of the day, Marcus stops next to my bench with his keys in his hand. "You should probably hear it from somebody, and I’m volunteering myself as sacrifice," he says drily. "Whitmore came and offered Vanessa a job yesterday. He brought paperwork with him. Tommy was in the cage getting parts when he came in. Apparently, he said he’s willing to negotiate on the salary. Vanessa said it was already more than generous." He watches my face while he says the rest. "She told him she'd think about it."

The cold that goes through me isn't like anything I've got a name for. It starts in my chest and goes all the way down to my boots and just sits there.

"Now you know," Marcus says, and goes home.

Her truck leaves at five. When the lot is empty, I carry the packet into the office and sit down at her desk and read every page. The appeals are dated. Dogged. The third one is furious. The fifth one is a woman burning her own career down over somebody else's dock, and the dates line up with everything I remember, every stonewall month of it. She was never lying about this part.

Whitmore’s offered her a clean start. Now I have to decide what my next move is going to be.

Chapter 18

Vanessa

Gus's store is closed on Sundays. So is the boatyard. Which means there’s nothing between me and my thoughts for one entire day. Because of that, I'm cleaning.

Not tidying. Deep cleaning. Taking every dish out of the cabinet so the shelves can be scrubbed down to bare wood. I’ve taken the ancient window fan apart and washed it blade by blade. It has three working speeds, and apparently every one of them has spent the summer blowing dust straight at me.

The counter is four feet long and I gave it the better part of an hour, anyway, using a paint scraper to dig built-up grime out of the corners and edges. Last week I tried red wine and crying at sad movies. All it accomplished was swollen eyes and a headache. So, I’m trying a different approach this week.

I’m still heartbroken, but at the very least there will be noticeable results to what I’m doing today. At least that’s what I tell myself as I’m kneeling in front of the stove with a butter knife wrapped in a rag, digging into the crack along the oven door that hasn't seen daylight since before I was born.

I move all the furniture and clean behind every piece. The broom finds dog hair in the corner under the window. Gray and brown. Nearly a whole dog's worth of it. Diesel hasn't come here since the firing. I sweep it into the dustpan and forbid myself from looking at it. I empty it into the trash can in a rush and keep moving. The other alternative is to sit down on the floor and cry about a dog, and I’ve done that several times already. The result stays the same.

The moment I stop being busy there are two things I’ll have to face. Whitmore's offer, and Aiden. I told Whitmore I'd think about it. All this scrubbing is what thinking about it looks like when I'm too much of a coward to do it sitting down.

Aiden is the dragon I’ll do anything to avoid facing and can’t escape no matter what I do. Even now, he’s lurking at the edges of my mind, no matter how furiously I try to wipe him away.

The bed comes last. I stripped it earlier and took the sheets, pillow covers and quilt to the laundromat. Now I’m going to move the frame. Possibly for the first time since it was placed here. For something so rickety it’s very heavy. The bedside table is attached to the bed and I’m doing my best to keep it all in one piece.

I get a grip on the headboard and a front leg and haul it back with all my might. It comes scraping across the slope of the floor an inch at a time. Behind it, against the baseboard, I find dust I can't possibly have made all by myself, and a small lavender cardboard packet.

I bend down and pick it up.

Oh.