Chapter 7
SEVEN
EMMA
Six people on a houseboat built for two, and the only bathroom has been occupied by a sixteen-year-old for twenty-three minutes. This is the hill I will die on.
I'm standing in the galley with a mascara wand in one hand and my gear bag in the other, trying to do my makeup in the reflection of the microwave door.
Millie is eating cereal at the fold-down table, unbothered, because Millie is always unbothered.
Lottie is on her knees behind the bench seat, fishing for one of Mitch's shoes, which has ended up inside the cushion storage compartment.
“How,” she says, arm deep in the bench. “This has a latch.”
“Mitch can get into anything,” Olson says from the floor, where he's tying his other shoe. “He opened the hotel safe in Chattanooga. Mom cried.”
“I didn't cry. I took a breath and called the front desk.”
“Your breaths are loud.”
Outside on the deck, Aidan is doing a thing I've decided not to investigate. The words “Steve” and “transport vessel” and “relocation program” drifted through the wall, and whatever is happening with that crab can wait until after I've blended my foundation.
“Jenna.” I knock on the bathroom door with the mascara wand, leaving a small black dot on the wood. “I have a client in forty-five minutes.”
“I'm almost done.”
“You said that twelve minutes ago.”
“Time is relative.”
“Not when your mother needs the mirror.”
The door opens. Jenna emerges in a cloud of floral perfume that costs more per ounce than my moisturizer, her dark hair pulled into a braid that looks effortless and probably took the full twenty-three minutes.
She gives me a once-over—pajama shorts, mascara on one eye, gear bag hanging off my elbow.
“You look unfinished,” she says.
“Thank you. Get your brother.”
“Which one?”
“The one relocating marine life.”
She heads for the deck. I slide into the bathroom, which is approximately the size of a closet. The mirror is fogged. I wipe it with my sleeve and stare at my half-mascara'd face.
I used to get ready for shoots in silence.
Our bathroom in Chattanooga was enormous—double vanity, a soaker tub Matt used once, a walk-in closet with enough room for his 3D-printed train accessories that migrated from the garage like tiny plastic refugees.
All that space and no one to share it with.
I'd get dressed, walk past the garage where the tiny locomotives ran their tiny routes, and leave the house without anyone looking up.
Twelve years of marriage and I don't think Matt ever once said you look nice.
Not on the way to a wedding. Not on date nights that I planned and he attended with the enthusiasm of a man being driven to a dental appointment.
He'd glance up from whatever tiny bridge he was painting and say “have fun” and go back to his tweezers.
I stopped getting ready in front of the mirror and started getting ready in front of the microwave because at least the microwave had the decency to reflect me back.
Now I can't put on mascara without getting elbowed. I'll take it.
I finish my face in four minutes. Grab my gear, kiss Millie's head on the way past, step over Olson's shoe situation, and pause at the deck door.
“Aidan.”
My son is crouched at the railing with a plastic bucket and a length of rope. Steve the crab is sitting in the bucket, claws up, looking like a tiny furious passenger.
“I'm moving him to a better habitat,” Aidan says. “Crabs need vitamin D.”
“They absolutely do not.”
“How do you know? Are you a marine biologist?”
“Put Steve back. I'll be home by lunch.”
He sighs the sigh of a misunderstood conservationist and begins lowering the bucket over the side.
The marina in the morning is one of my favorite versions of this place. The light is still low enough to be golden instead of white, the dock boards cool under my sandals, the air carrying that early smell of salt and diesel before the heat bakes it all into one shimmer.
By noon this dock will be hot enough to cook on—I've watched Aidan test this theory with a slice of American cheese, and he wasn't entirely wrong—but right now it's perfect. A cormorant is drying its wings on the nearest piling, arms spread like it's accepting applause.
The intracoastal is flat and green, barely moving. Across the water the mainland pines are dark against a sky that's already turning white at the edges. It's going to be brutal today. I can feel it building.
I'm halfway down the dock, gear on my shoulder, when Justin's shrimp boat rounds the breakwater.
White hull, outriggers folded up, nets bundled tight, every surface gleaming.
Finch is with him—jumping from the boat to the dock, already tying off the stern line without being told.
Sixteen, wavy brown hair, arms that come from hauling nets instead of a gym membership, and the reason my daughter has been braiding her hair before breakfast for months.
Justin starts unloading coolers. The briny, clean scent of a fresh catch reaches me across the dock.
“Good haul?” I ask.
He glances up. Gray-blue eyes, same jawline as Paul. “Current pushed the schools close to shore.” Not unfriendly. Just economical.
“You any good?” he asks, tipping his chin at my bag.
That's the first personal question a Spencer has asked me. Nobody asks if I'm good. They ask what I charge.
“Yeah,” I say. “I'm good.”
He nods like that's the right answer. “I pulled extra today. You cook?”
“I do.”
“Take some.” He flips open a cooler—ocean, clean and sharp. The shrimp are gorgeous. Gray-pink, translucent, piled on ice and still curling. “Can't sell what The Salty Pearl didn't order. Hate wasting good product.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don't offer twice.”
I take the bag. Two pounds, at least. My brain is already running—garlic, butter, lemon, white wine. Shrimp scampi. The real thing, not the frozen-bag version.
“Thank you,” I say, and my chest goes warm the way it does when you watch a person take pride in their work.
Justin grunts. The Spencer men and their grunts. Harold's the only one in the family who uses full sentences.
I'm turning to leave when the crash happens behind me.
A yell, a clatter, a splash, a second yell in a different register, followed by a word I'm fairly sure Justin Spencer has never said in front of a teenager before.
Olson and Mitch—who were supposed to be on the houseboat with Lottie—have found the dock cart stacked with coolers and discovered that it rolls.
Well enough that when one twin stands on the back rail and the other gives it a running push, it achieves a speed that is genuinely impressive for industrial equipment on a wooden dock.
The cart hit Justin's gear. A full cooler tipped, bounced once, and went into the water.
Fresh-caught shrimp are now floating in the marina.
Justin is standing at the edge, staring down at the water where his morning's work is dispersing in a slow, expensive cloud. His jaw could cut glass.
The twins are frozen mid-getaway. Olson still has one foot on the cart. Mitch is three feet away, arms out, caught in the posture of a boy who was running and then suddenly realized he shouldn't be.
“That,” Justin says, very quietly, “was my delivery for The Salty Pearl.”
Olson steps off the cart. “It was an accident.”
“That cooler had thirty pounds of shrimp in it.”
“We didn't know it would roll that fast.”
“It's a cart. On wheels. On a flat surface. What did you think it would do?”
Mitch's lower lip trembles. Just barely—he's too proud for more. Olson steps in front of his brother. One shields, one feels.
Lottie arrives at a walk. Not a run. The measured pace that means she checked from the deck, confirmed nobody was bleeding, and decided sprinting would only make it worse.
“Boys. Come here.”
They go to her. Mitch tucks into her side. Olson stands apart, chin up.
Lottie looks at Justin. “How much was in the cooler?”
He tells her. She doesn't flinch.
“I'll pay for it,” she says.
“You're right you will.”
“I just said I would. You don't need to confirm it.”
Justin's eyes narrow. He's not used to a person matching his energy without raising their voice.
“Your kids were on my dock unsupervised.”
“They were supervised. They moved faster than I expected.”
“They used my dock cart as a skateboard.” His voice is tight. Controlled. “I've got a restaurant waiting on a delivery that's currently feeding the fish.”
Lottie doesn't blink. “So net some more.”
The silence could shatter glass.
Justin stares at Lottie. Lottie stares back.
She's standing the way she stands at parent-teacher conferences—spine straight, voice level, refusing to crumble because a man is angry.
She has weathered worse. The quiet, corrosive kind that leaves the room instead of filling it.
At least Justin is here. At least his anger is hot and present and aimed directly at the problem. That's more than Ryan ever gave her.
My throat tightens watching her. She has no idea how strong she is. She thinks she's barely holding it together, but she's standing on a dock in a town she drove to yesterday, facing down an angry shrimper twice her size, and she hasn't blinked.
“I said I'd pay for it. The boys will apologize, and they will mean it. And if you need extra hands this afternoon, I'll send them down to clean your gear. They caused it. They can fix it.”
Behind the boathouse, Harold's voice carries across the morning air with perfect clarity.
“Two sons and they're both useless with women. I should've had daughters.”
Justin turns toward his father's voice with an expression that could strip varnish. Lottie uses the moment to steer the twins back toward the houseboat, one hand on each boy's shoulder, unhurried—she's won and doesn't need to gloat.
She passes me on the dock.
“Don't,” she says.
“I didn't say anything.”
“You didn't have to.” She glances back toward the dock. “Go to your shoot. I need coffee and possibly a new identity.”