Chapter 5
FIVE
EMMA
Harold's boat is called The Good Life, and it looks exactly the way a seventy-two-year-old man who eats fish and takes afternoon naps would want it to look.
Not flashy. Not new. Just well-loved—the hull white with a navy stripe that's been repainted so many times it's developed its own texture.
The captain's chair has a sunbleached cushion with a permanent indent from Harold's backside.
A cooler is strapped to the stern that I suspect has never once been empty.
Two o'clock. Sun directly overhead, turning the sound into a sheet of blinding white. I've got my hand over my eyes, watching Harold conduct what can only be described as a pre-departure briefing for his crew.
His crew is three eight-year-olds.
“First Mate Aidan.” Harold stands at the helm with the bearing of a naval officer. “Status report.”
“Gerald's family is accounted for.” Aidan salutes. It's not a good salute—wrong hand, wrong angle—but Harold accepts it with a solemn nod. “Steve was spotted near the south post at thirteen hundred hours.”
“Thirteen hundred hours. Outstanding. And the new recruits?”
Olson and Mitch stand at attention. Or their version of it, which involves Olson vibrating slightly and Mitch holding a coil of rope he found that I desperately hope was not attached to anything important.
“Deckhands Roberts, reporting for duty,” Olson says.
“Did you practice your bowline knots?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Show me.”
Olson holds up the rope. There is a knot in it. Whether it's a bowline or simply a tangle is unclear, but Harold examines it with the focused attention of a jeweler appraising a diamond.
“Adequate,” he declares. “We'll work on it.”
Lottie is sitting on the bench at the stern, legs tucked under her, face tipped up to the sun with her eyes closed.
She's been in Twin Waves for approximately six hours and she already looks different—not relaxed, exactly, but like the rigid thing in her spine has started to loosen.
The breeze off the water is pulling strands of red hair from her bun.
When Mitch accidentally steps on her foot while scrambling past, she doesn't even open her eyes. Just moves her foot.
“How long has it been since you've been on a boat?” I ask her.
“Ryan took me on a dinner cruise for our anniversary two years ago.” She opens one eye. “He spent the whole time comparing it to the ferry system in Seattle. Efficiency metrics. Load capacity. I think he timed the turns.”
“Romance.”
“He tipped fifteen percent. Exactly. He'd calculated it on his phone before the bill arrived.”
Millie is settled at the bow with her book, though I give it four minutes before the wind makes reading impossible. Jenna is next to her, cross-legged, texting with the intense focus of a teenager pretending she isn't texting Finch.
“Jenna, phone.”
“I'm fine.”
“You said that last month. Then Aidan got dive-bombed by a seagull and you dropped it in the sound.”
“That was not my fault. And it came back on after the rice.”
“After four days in rice.”
“Still counts.”
I'm counting heads—a reflex that's become as automatic as breathing since I became a single mom.
Three boys on the deck with Harold. Millie and Jenna at the bow.
Lottie accounted for. Seven. Harold makes eight.
I look back toward the dock, where the light is hitting the weathered boards at an angle that turns everything amber, and my heart does a stutter-step.
Paul is walking down the dock.
He's not hurrying. He's not smiling. He's carrying a water bottle with rigid deliberateness.
My pulse picks up, which is annoying. Physically annoying. I press my thumb into the side of my coffee mug and focus on the ceramic edge.
“Well,” Lottie murmurs from behind me. “Look who left his cave.”
“Don't start.”
“I'm observing. The man who grunted at me this morning is now voluntarily boarding a boat full of children. That's character development.”
Paul reaches the boat and stands on the dock looking down at The Good Life with an evaluating squint. Then he looks at Harold, who is beaming with the radiant satisfaction of a father whose bluff just worked.
“Thought I'd check the south posts from the water side,” Paul says. “Different vantage point.”
“Sure.” Harold doesn't blink. “Grab a seat. We're about to shove off.”
Harold turns to me. “He does this. Has since he was twelve. Can't just enjoy himself. Has to invent a practical reason first.”
Paul steps onto the boat without responding. The whole vessel shifts slightly under his weight—he's solid, built from years of dock work, and something warm spreads through my chest that I immediately file under not relevant.
He could at least have the decency to not look like that. Faded T-shirt. Tanned arms. Hair pushed back like he ran his hand through it once and forgot. I've seen this man every day for nine months and my body still hasn't gotten the memo that we don't like him.
We do not like him.
He sits on the bench across from Lottie. Nods once. She nods back with a smile that contains entirely too much information, and I shoot her a look she ignores completely.
“All hands accounted for,” Harold announces. He turns the key and The Good Life's engine rumbles to life. “First Mate Aidan, cast off the bow line. Deckhands, cast off the stern.”
There's a brief, chaotic moment where all three boys attempt to untie ropes at the same time and Mitch nearly goes overboard, but Harold corrects him with a calm “other side, son” and the line comes free.
We drift out of the slip, Harold guiding us through the channel with one hand on the wheel, pointing out landmarks for the boys.
“That's the old oyster bed,” he says, nodding toward a stretch of shallow water where the grasses bend in the current. “Used to harvest from there when I was your age. Best oysters on the coast.”
“What's an oyster taste like?” Olson asks.
“The ocean. In a good way.”
“What's the ocean taste like in a bad way?”
“Swallowing it when you fall off a boat. Which you will. Everyone does. When it happens, keep your mouth closed and your eyes open.”
We pass through the channel and the world opens up.
The marina falls behind us, shrinking into a cluster of shapes against the tree line.
The sound stretches wide and flat ahead—pale green close to shore, deepening to a blue that looks almost painted where the channel drops off.
To our left, the barrier island curves south toward Emerald Isle, the dunes pale and windblown above a thin white line of beach.
To our right, the mainland is a dark ribbon of pines and live oaks across the water.
Between us, scattered through the shallows, the little marsh islands sit low and green—just tufts of spartina grass rising out of the water, barely bigger than a living room, ringed with oyster shells that catch the light.
I love this part. The moment the land lets go and it's just water and sky and the hum of the engine underneath you.
Nine months in, and this view still makes my throat tight—not with sadness, but with fierce, startled gratitude.
I almost stayed in Chattanooga, in a house with a man who loved trains more than me, because staying was easier than believing I deserved something better.
I close my eyes and let the salt air press against my face. The sun is hot on my bare shoulders. The breeze smells like warm spartina and tidal mud and the faintest edge of diesel from the engine.
When I open my eyes, Paul is watching me.
He looks away immediately. Picks up his water bottle. Studies the label like it's suddenly fascinating.
But I caught it. The way his face went soft for half a second—unguarded, open, the grump stripped back to whatever lives underneath. It lasted maybe two heartbeats. Enough to make my stomach flip in a way I'm going to blame on the boat rocking.
“Dolphins tend to show up in the shallows past the sandbar,” Harold tells the boys.
He's steering us south along the coastline, where the shore curves and the water turns shallow over a series of sandbars that glow pale beneath the surface.
“They follow the baitfish. You'll see birds diving first—where there's fish, there's dolphins.”
“What if there's a shark?” Aidan asks.
“Sharks don't bother boats this size.”
“What if it's a big shark?”
“Then we name it and give it the respect it deserves.”
“Can we name it Steve?”
“Aidan, you can't name everything Steve,” Millie says from the bow, not looking up from her book. The wind has, as predicted, made reading nearly impossible—she's holding the pages down with both hands—but she's committed.
Harold cuts the engine as we approach the shallows. The sudden quiet is enormous—just the water slapping the hull, the breeze, and the distant cry of an osprey wheeling overhead. The boat rocks gently in the current.
“Now we wait,” Harold says, settling into the captain's chair. “Dolphins don't run on schedules.”
“Neither do you,” Paul says.
“Where do you think I learned it?”
The boys lean over the railing, scanning for fins.
Lottie has her phone out, framing Olson and Mitch against the low line of a marsh island—the kind of light you can't manufacture in a studio, late and golden, cutting sideways across their faces.
Her photographer's eye never shuts off. Exhausted, freshly divorced, sitting on a boat in a town she moved to six hours ago, and she's still composing shots.
“You're burning good light,” I tell her. The photographer in me can't help it.
“I've been shooting since we left the dock.” She tilts her phone—forty-seven photos, mostly the boys, but a solid ten of Harold's hat from various angles. “Not everything has to be for work. Some of us just take pictures of our kids like normal moms.”
“That hat deserves its own account, though.”
“It has more personality than Ryan. Lower maintenance too.”