Chapter 2
TWO
PAUL
Arock star just offered to pay me more money to park his boat than my father made in the first five years of running this marina.
I should probably do something about that. Call Dad. Tell Dawson. React like a normal person would when his entire financial reality shifts in a single conversation.
Instead I write the number on the back of an invoice and stare at it until the dock lights click on.
The dock fee alone.
Not including security setup. Not including what it'll take to make the dock strong enough to hold a vessel that weighs—I pull up the details on my phone the second I sat down, because I process emotions through math—approximately four hundred and fifty tons.
The biggest boat I've ever docked here weighed eighty.
I pinch the bridge of my nose and lean back in my chair until it creaks. The ceiling has a water stain shaped like Florida that I've been meaning to fix for three years. The ceiling doesn't care about my problems, it already has Florida to deal with.
Here's the thing about getting offered a lot of money: it makes it very hard to be angry.
And I am a man who relies on anger. It's my operating system, what gets me out of bed at five thirty, onto the dock by six, checking ropes and boards before the sun is fully up. Anger is simple. It doesn't require me to feel anything complicated.
But I can't hold a grudge against Levi Cole for offering me enough cash to replace every dock board and upgrade the electrical panel I've been nursing along with duct tape and prayer—and if I'm being honest, and I'm never honest about finances because it requires admitting things aren't great—maybe finally stop worrying about whether the marina survives another winter.
I should resent him for it. I can't.
Which is infuriating.
I pick up my coffee mug, realize it's empty, and set it back down harder than necessary. The mug has a cartoon pelican on it that Dawson painted at one of those pottery places when he was twelve. The pelican looks annoyed. I've always related to it.
My phone vibrates.
Dad: Heard we're hosting a wedding! Wonderful news. I always said that marina needed more romance.
I stare at the text. “Heard.” Like this is neighborhood gossip and not the most disruptive thing to happen to my dock since Hurricane Floyd. “Wonderful news.” From the man who retired and left me to deal with everything while he fishes and flirts with women fifteen years older than him.
I type back.
Paul: Did you know about this?
Three dots.
Dad: Levi mentioned it when I ran into him at the Piggly Wiggly.
The Piggly Wiggly. My seventy-two-year-old father is apparently conducting business deals in the produce aisle.
Paul: You could have warned me.
Dad: Where's the fun in that?
I set the phone face-down on the desk.
The invoice is still there. The number hasn't changed. And underneath it, because apparently my hand has opinions my brain didn't authorize, I've started a list.
Reinforce the dock—spots four and five
Fix the electrical
Repair the seawall—south side
New bumper system
My hand keeps going.
Replace the dock boards—the bad sections
Plumbing upgrade
New office roof
I glance at Florida on the ceiling.
Finally.
It's a good list. A practical list. The kind of list a man writes when he's been holding a marina together with stubbornness and duct tape for the better part of a decade, and who can suddenly imagine not having to.
I should feel relieved.
My chest tightens instead and it’s tougher to breathe. I press my thumb into the edge of the desk and focus on the pressure until the feeling passes.
The door swings open without a knock, because no one in this town respects a closed door.
“You look like your boat just went down.” Justin fills the doorframe, trailing the sharp bite of diesel and salt water, which means he's come straight off the deck. His shrimp boat docked twenty minutes ago, but I was too busy staring at numbers to go out. “What happened?”
“A rock star wants to park a yacht at our marina.”
Justin blinks. “Come again?”
“Levi Cole. Bought a yacht. Wants to dock it here for his wedding to Delilah. Ceremony on the boat. Right here at the dock.”
Justin is quiet for a long moment. He's the Spencer brother who processes things at normal human speed instead of immediately converting them into irritation like I do.
“How big?” he finally asks.
“Big enough that I need to reinforce the dock in two spots and replace every bumper we've got.”
“How much is he paying?”
I turn the invoice toward him.
Justin's eyebrows climb. They never climb. They're as stoic as the rest of him, and right now they're near his hairline.
“The dock fee,” I say. “Not including modifications.”
“That's more than I make in—”
“Yep.”
“In a good year, it's—”
“I'm aware.”
He lowers himself into the other chair—slowly, the way he does on mornings when his back is giving him trouble, though he'd deny it—and leans back.
“So what's wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You've got your look on.”
“This is my regular face.”
“Exactly.” He crosses his arms. “Spill.”
I don't want to. I want to sit here with my list and my empty mug and be left alone. But Justin is my brother, and he's not leaving, and he's got steady patience from hauling nets for a living and understands that some things take time to surface.
“It's a wedding,” I say.
“Yeah. That's generally what happens before a marriage.”
“At my marina.”
“Our marina. Dad's marina. Whatever.”
“A big, loud, celebrity spectacle. Paparazzi. People in kayaks with telephoto lenses. Drones buzzing the dock. It's going to be a circus, Justin.”
“Probably.”
“These slips were built for fishing boats and shrimp trawlers. Not mega yachts and cocktail parties.”
“The wood doesn't care what's parked on it as long as the pilings hold.”
“The pilings might not hold. That's my point.”
“Is it, though?”
I look at him. He looks at me. He knows the dock isn't what's bothering me. He's going to make me say it anyway, because that's what brothers do—they sit there with their arms crossed until you crack.
“It's a wedding,” I say again. Quieter.
Justin is still for a beat. Then he nods, once.
“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
We sit with that. The dock office creaks. A pelican lands on the railing outside the window with a thud that sounds personal.
“Holly would've loved this,” Justin says, and his voice goes careful. People always go careful with her name around me, like it's a match they're trying not to strike.
Holly.
I don't say her name much. I think it plenty—when I'm checking the dock at dawn and the light hits the water in that golden way she used to photograph.
When Dawson laughs, really laughs, not the teenage grunt that passes for amusement, because he sounds exactly like her.
At two in the morning when the boat rocks and the other side of the bed is empty and has been empty for ten years and I still sleep on my side like I'm making room.
My jaw aches. I've been clenching it.
“She would have,” I say, because it's true.
Holly would have been in the middle of it.
She would have known Delilah's favorite flowers and how to arrange the tables so everyone could see the sound.
She would have been friends with Emma—best friends, probably—the photographer and the woman who loved beautiful things, and they would have ganged up on me about the running lights and I would have lost every argument and been quietly happy about it.
“She would have dragged you into it,” Justin says. “You'd have been carrying centerpieces and pretending to hate it.”
“I wouldn't have been faking.”
“You absolutely would have.”
He's right. Holly had a way of making me participate in things I claimed to despise, and then I'd be halfway through, enjoying myself against my will, and she'd give me that look—I know you, Paul Spencer, and you're not fooling anyone—and I'd have to just surrender.
She was right about everything, for thirteen years, until she wasn't there to be right anymore.
I press my palms flat on the desk. The wood is warm from the sun through the window. Solid.
“Anyway,” I say, because I've reached the limit of what I'm willing to feel before noon. “A four-hundred-and-fifty-ton yacht needs serious dock reinforcement, and I've got three weeks.”
Justin accepts the subject change because he's a good brother. “You'll need to double up the support posts on at least two spots. Maybe more, depending on where they put the ramp.”
“Already on it.”
“I can help with the underwater work. My back's been—” He stops. “I can help.”
“Been what?”
“Fine.”
“You hesitated.”
“I was thinking about the ramp, not my spine.”
“You're a terrible liar.”
"I'm an excellent liar. You just know me too well."
He says it light, but the deflection lands a half-second too late. I file it away. Justin doesn't want to talk about his back, which means I'll be watching him closer than he'd like for the next few weeks.
I let it go because Justin lets my things go, and that's how we work.
We carry our separate weights side by side without asking to share the load.
Holly would have told us it's not healthy.
But Holly's gone, and two Spencer brothers sitting in a dock office not talking about their feelings is the closest we get to therapy.
“There's another thing,” I say.
“What?”
“Emma's the photographer.”
Justin's mouth twitches. Not a smile—Spencer men are incapable—but adjacent to one.
“Don't,” I say.
“Didn't say a word.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to say that's a big opportunity. For her.”
“It is.”
“Sounds like you've given it some thought.”
“She'll need dock access. Power for her equipment. A staging area.” I keep my voice flat. “It's logistics.”
“Logistics. Right.”
“Justin.”
“I agree completely.” He stands, wincing before he straightens—he thinks I miss that, but I always catch it—and heads for the door. “She's good, you know. Jo showed me the pictures from her and Dean's wedding. Really good.”
“I never said otherwise.”
“You haven't said anything about her at all. Which tells me plenty.”
He leaves.
I sit in the silence and hate that he's right.
The thing about Emma Mills—and I'm only thinking about this because we're about to spend weeks coordinating a celebrity wedding, and I need to understand the dynamics—is that the money is going to change things for her.
Her finances aren't a mystery. Not because I'm keeping track.
Because I run this marina and the checks cross my desk and a camera-for-hire in a town this size earns what it earns, and the rest is arithmetic.
Three kids, an ex-husband whose support probably doesn't stretch halfway, and a houseboat with wiring that should keep me up at night.
Not because I care. Because one bad spark and my dock goes up with it.
That fee Levi offered her—she almost cried.
I wasn't watching. I was heading down to tighten a loose rope and her face was right there, open and stunned, like she just realized she might actually be okay.
Not rich. Just... okay. Not lying awake calculating how to make a single season's income cover a full year of groceries and boat repairs and shoes that get outgrown every four months.
My throat tightens. I swallow against it.
I recognize that expression. I've worn it exactly once—the day Dad handed me the marina and the debt came with it, and then three years later when I finally broke even and could stop running numbers at midnight.
The money is earned. She's good—Justin's right, and it costs me to admit it, even silently, even where no one can hear me.
She's got an eye. The way she chases light.
I've watched her on the dock at sunset, camera up, finding beauty in a thing I walk past every day without noticing, and for a second the world through her lens looks warmer than the one I live in.
Not that I'm watching her. I'm monitoring dock activity.
When this wedding is over, she'll have enough to fix that wiring herself, and I won't have to lie awake thinking about whether her coffee maker is going to burn down my marina.
The fire hazard. That's what I care about.
I look at the number on the invoice. At my list. Out the window at the dock where I've spent every morning for ten years trying to keep this place alive.
Emma's on deck, camera bag over her shoulder, heading out to her shoot. Coral sundress. Hair in a ponytail. On the phone, probably with Delilah, already building this wedding in her head like it's a photograph she hasn't taken yet.
The wide smile is on. The kind that rewrites her whole face. Either she believes the world is fundamentally good or she's the best actress on the Eastern Seaboard.
Up the dock she goes without glancing toward the office. I don't look away fast enough. Doesn't matter. Already gone, and I'm still here, holding a number that could fix this place and a weight behind my ribs I won't touch.
Holly would have made me touch it. She would have sat on the edge of this desk, crossed her arms, and waited until I cracked. She had the patience of a woman married to a Spencer—patience with everything except my pigheadedness, which she treated like a personal challenge she intended to win.
She always won.
I pick up my pen and add one more line to the list:
Port running light—slip twelve. Fix it myself. She's never going to do it.
Not a gesture. A safety issue.
That's all.