Chapter 6
SIX
I know this because I am standing in the dock office with a cup of coffee that is still too hot to drink, staring at the electrical panel like it personally insulted me, when the light above my desk flickers once and dies.
The shore power indicator for slip twelve goes red.
Slip twelve. Emma's slip.
I set down my coffee. Take a breath. Count to five because counting to ten feels excessive at this hour.
Then I grab my tool bag and head outside.
The marina at dawn is one of the few things in my life I've never gotten tired of.
The water is settled—not calm, because the intracoastal is never truly calm, but quiet, like it's deciding what kind of day to be.
The dock boards are cool under my boots.
A heron is standing on the far piling, surveying its kingdom with the dignity of a creature that has never once questioned its purpose.
I envy that heron.
The houseboat comes into view as I round the boathouse.
I can already see the problem. There are approximately six hundred things plugged in on the aft deck—a string of fairy lights, a phone charger running through the window, a small electric fan aimed at a beach towel draped over the railing.
New additions since yesterday: a tablet plugged into an extension cord and a portable speaker sitting on the bench like it lives there.
Lottie. The friend. Who arrived yesterday with two eight-year-olds and apparently an entire electronics store.
I step onto the dock beside the houseboat and check the shore power connection. The cable is warm to the touch, which means it's been drawing more than it should. I crouch down at the junction box. Nothing fried, but the amperage reading tells me everything I need to know.
This houseboat is pulling thirty amps on a twenty-amp circuit, and multiple people decided that a vessel built in 1987 can handle the electrical demands of six people and what appears to be a personal charging station.
I stand up. The curtains are drawn. Nobody's awake yet. The sensible thing to do is reset the breaker from the office, leave a note about load management, and go back to my coffee.
The door opens.
Emma is standing in the doorway in a faded blue T-shirt and pajama shorts, holding an empty coffee mug, squinting into the sun like it showed up unannounced.
“The power's out,” she says.
“I know.”
“Did it just go off?”
“Breaker tripped. You're pulling too much amperage.”
She blinks. Then looks down at the extension cord running through her window like she's seeing it for the first time. “That's Lottie's tablet charger.”
“It's not one device. It's everything running at once. Fairy lights, fans, chargers, the tablet, and I'm guessing the coffee maker and the toaster were going at the same time.”
“I haven't made coffee yet. That's the problem.”
She says this with such genuine distress that my ribcage does a thing I refuse to acknowledge.
“The circuit is twenty amps,” I say. “It's been twenty amps since your aunt docked here. If you want more capacity, that means rewiring the junction box, running a new cable, and probably replacing the inlet on the boat.”
“How much would that cost?”
“More than it should.”
She's quiet for a second. Then she looks at me over the rim of her empty mug—both hands wrapped around it even though there's nothing in it—and says, “Can you at least turn it back on? I have three children and a recently divorced woman in there who needs caffeine more than oxygen.”
“I can turn it back on. But if the coffee maker and the toaster run at the same time again—”
“I will stagger my appliances. I will create a schedule. I will establish a rotation system with color-coded time slots if that's what it takes.”
I almost smile. Catch it just in time and convert it to a nod. “I'll reset it from the office.”
“Thank you.”
I turn to leave.
“Paul.”
I stop. She's leaning against the doorframe, the morning light hitting the side of her face in a way I am choosing not to notice.
“Thanks for checking on it. Instead of just leaving a note.”
“That would have been more efficient.”
“But less you.”
She goes back inside. The door closes. I stand on the dock for approximately three seconds longer than necessary, then walk back to the office.
Dawson is in the boathouse when I get back, already working.
He's got the outboard from the rental skiff pulled apart on the workbench, parts laid out in the precise order I taught him when he was thirteen.
The kid's got good hands—better than mine, if I'm honest, though I'd rather eat a barnacle than say it out loud.
“Breaker trip?” he asks without looking up.
“Slip twelve.”
“Shocker.”
Deadpan. No expression change. Just keeps working on the impeller housing. But I can hear the amusement underneath because he's my son and I know what his version of a smirk sounds like even when it doesn't reach his face.
“Don't start.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to ask if the fairy lights are still up.”
“They are.”
“Cool.” He holds the impeller up to the light, checking for wear. “Grandpa called. He wants the boys at the boathouse this afternoon. Knot lessons.”
“Which boys?”
“All of them.”
I process this. “All of them” means Aidan, who has named every crustacean within a hundred yards of the dock and once tried to set a crab trap using a shoelace and a Ziploc bag.
It also means Olson and Mitch, who I spent an entire dolphin tour with yesterday during which one asked me if I'd ever been attacked by a shark and the other untied a dock line while I was standing on it.
“Fine.”
“Also, Grandpa said to tell you the dolphins were a hit.”
“The dolphins were there. I didn't arrange them.”
“He said you stayed on the boat the whole time.”
“I was checking the south posts.”
Dawson puts down the impeller. Looks at me. He's got his mother's eyes—dark brown, warm, the kind that see more than you want them to—and when he looks at me a certain way, it's like she's in the room.
“Dad. You don't check the south posts from a boat full of kids watching dolphins.”
“I multitask.”
He goes back to work. Doesn't push it. He's been watching me bottle things up for ten years, and at some point he learned to let me have my walls. Whether that's wisdom or resignation, I haven't figured out yet.
“The impeller's fine,” he says. “Just needed cleaning. Want me to put it back together?”
“Go ahead.”
I sit at the workbench across from him and pull the logbook toward me. Morning routine. Tide schedule, slip assignments, maintenance notes from overnight. The familiar rhythm of running a marina—the thing I can do without thinking, the thing that makes sense when nothing else does.
Holly died when Dawson was six.
I don't talk about it. Not because it hurts—though it does, the way old injuries ache when the weather changes—but because I don't know what to say that would be enough.
People want a narrative. They want “It was the hardest thing I've ever been through, but I came out stronger.” They want recovery arcs and silver linings.
What it taught me is that you can love a person completely and lose them, and no amount of preparation changes that math.
So I stopped trying to change it. I built a life around reliability.
Tide charts and dock lines and things that follow rules.
Dawson. The marina. Dad, who is too stubborn to age properly and too cheerful to leave alone for long.
It's been a good life. A small one, maybe. But functional. Predictable. Mine.
Then Emma Mills docked her rattletrap houseboat in slip twelve with three kids, a dangerous number of electrical appliances, and a smile that makes me forget what I was annoyed about.
I stare at the logbook. The page is blank.
“Hey, Dad?” Dawson says.
“Yeah.”
“You've been staring at that page for two minutes.”
I pick up my pen and start writing.
By eleven, the marina is in full chaos mode.
It's a regular Tuesday, which means the rental boats are booked, the fuel dock is busy, and I've already dealt with two tourists who can't figure out a trolling motor and one regular who insists his slip fee should be prorated because he was out of town for a week.
(“You were out of town. The slip wasn't.”)
But the new element—the one that has turned my orderly marina into a daycare with better waterfront access—is the children.
Aidan and the Roberts twins are on the dock with my father, who has set up what he's calling “Knot School” using thirty feet of line, a whiteboard he got from who knows where, and the patience of a retired man with nothing to do and all day to do it.
“The bowline is the king of knots,” Harold is saying. He's standing at the edge of the dock with his hat tilted back, holding a length of rope between his hands. “You can tie it with one hand, in the dark, while the boat's moving. But first, you learn it on dry land. Like everything worth doing.”
Olson is staring at the rope like it contains the secrets of the universe. Mitch is watching a cormorant dry its wings on the nearest piling. Aidan is trying to tie a bowline around Steve the crab's bucket, which is ambitious.
“Rabbit comes out of the hole,” Harold demonstrates. “Goes around the tree. Back down the hole.”
“What if the rabbit gets lost?” Mitch asks.
“Then you start over. Rabbits always find their way.”
My father is in his element—teaching practical things to kids who are too young to realize they should be bored.
He did the same with me, and with Dawson after.
Line handling and weather reading and the right way to fillet a fish.
The kind of knowledge that belongs to a specific place and the people who stay in it.