Chapter 12
TWELVE
PAUL
Isee her leave.
I’m in the dock office going through charter bookings for next month when I hear the engine—the particular sound of Dawson’s Boston Whaler, which I know the way I know every engine on this dock because I’ve maintained most of them and listened to all of them and can tell you which boat is starting up from inside the office with my eyes closed.
I look through the window. Emma is behind the console, camera bag slung across her body, hair pulled back, moving through the no-wake zone. She’s heading east. Past the channel markers. Toward open water.
I watch her clear the no-wake buoys and accelerate. The Whaler’s bow lifts and levels. She’s got decent trim. Dawson must have taught her, or she figured it out, or—knowing Emma—she watched a video on her phone and decided that qualified as preparation.
She’ll be fine. She’s a grown woman with a life jacket and a GPS and she’s not my responsibility.
She’s my tenant. My neighbor. A woman I almost kissed on a beach and have been carefully not-mentioning for the past week while we pass each other on the dock and say things like “good morning” and “looks like rain” and “the bilge pump on C-3 needs a new float switch” as if maritime maintenance is a substitute for actual conversation.
I go back to the bookings. Charter for the fourteenth. Two families want the same time slot. I need to call back the Hendersons about their deposit.
My phone buzzes.
Weather alert. Small craft advisory starting at three. Storm system moving in from the southwest. Winds fifteen to twenty-five knots, gusts to thirty-five. Heavy rain. Lightning possible.
I look at the clock. One forty-seven.
I look out the window. The sky to the southwest is doing the thing that coastal skies do when they’re about to stop being friendly—the blue going flat, the clouds stacking up on the horizon in a way that looks solid, like a wall being built in real time.
I look at the empty slip where Dawson’s boat was.
She’s heading east. The storm is coming from the southwest. She might not see it building behind her. And depending on how far she’s gone —
I’m already standing. Already moving. My body has made the decision before my brain catches up, which is becoming a pattern with this woman—feet first, logic second, panic dressed up as practicality.
I grab my keys. My phone. The emergency kit from under the desk that I keep stocked because I’m the kind of person who keeps emergency kits stocked, not because I anticipated chasing my neighbor across open water on a Tuesday afternoon.
This is what I’m doing now. This is who I am.
Paul Spencer, forty-two years old, marina operator, chaser of women in boats.
If my father finds out about this, and he will because Harold finds out about everything, I will never hear the end of it.
The man will put it in his wedding toast if he ever marries Vivian.
My son once commandeered a vessel to pursue a woman into a storm.
He gets his romantic instincts from me, except I just brought Vivian coffee.
The dock is quiet. Justin’s out on a run. Harold’s at the house. Dawson and the kids are at the inlet—I know because Jenna told me this morning, casually, the way she shares information now like I’m someone who needs to know where people are.
I step onto my boat. Start the engine. Cast off the lines like I’ve done this ten thousand times.
I know where she’s going. There’s only one thing east of the channel that a photographer would want to see—Keeper’s Island.
Two miles offshore, nothing on it but scrub oak and sea oats and an old lighthouse that’s been abandoned since the Coast Guard decommissioned it in the seventies.
The paint is gone. The gallery railing is rusted through in places.
The lantern room has been dark for fifty years.
But the bones are solid. The thing has survived every hurricane the Atlantic has thrown at it for a hundred and twenty years, and it’s still standing. Weathered and forgotten and beautiful in the way that only things that have endured can be beautiful.
Emma would have seen it from the beach, or from the marina on a clear day—the silhouette on the horizon, the tower rising above the tree line of the little island.
She would have looked at it with her photographer’s eye and seen what I see when I look at a well-built boat—something worth paying attention to.
I push the throttle forward. The bow lifts. The marina shrinks behind me.
The water is still calm—the storm hasn’t reached the surface yet, but I can feel it in the air. That pressure. That weight. The way the atmosphere gets heavy before it breaks open. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before the wind picks up and the water goes from flat to ugly.
I don’t think about why I’m doing this. I don’t think about the fact that I could have called her. I have her number. I could have sent a text—storm coming, head back now—and gone back to my charter bookings and let her handle it.
I didn’t call. I didn’t text. I got on my boat.
There’s probably a metaphor in there. I’m choosing not to examine it.
I see Dawson’s Whaler before I see the island—tied off to the old dock on the leeward side, rocking gently in water that’s starting to get ideas. The dock is half-collapsed, more memory than structure.
I pull alongside and tie off my own boat. She’s used the one piling that’s still solid. Good knot. Dawson definitely taught her that. The wind is picking up—not dangerous yet, but purposeful. The kind of wind that’s going somewhere and wants you to know it’s coming.
Two boats tied to a crumbling dock on an uninhabited island with a storm rolling in. This is a scenario from a survival manual, not a love story. Although, given how the last few weeks have gone, I’m starting to think my life doesn’t know the difference.
The island is small—maybe three acres of sand and scrub.
The lighthouse stands at the center, rising out of the vegetation like it grew there.
Up close, it’s exactly what I expected—white paint long gone to gray, the brick underneath showing through in patches like an old coat wearing thin.
The door at the base is open. Not broken—just open.
The latch rusted away years ago and nobody came to replace it.
She’s inside. I know because her camera bag is on the step, and because I can hear her—not her voice, but the sound of her shoes on the iron stairs. The spiral staircase that winds up the center of the tower, every step ringing out in the hollow space like a bell.
I step inside.
The lighthouse is cool and dark and smells like salt and rust and old concrete.
The stairs spiral upward in a tight helix, the iron treads worn smooth by a century of keepers who climbed this same path to tend a light that kept people from crashing into the rocks.
The walls are curved and close. Light comes from above—the lantern room windows, grimy but intact, letting in a gray glow that shifts as clouds move across the sky.
“Emma.”
The footsteps stop.
“Paul?” Her voice comes from above, echoing down the stairwell. “What are you—how did you —”
“Storm’s coming. There’s a small craft advisory starting at three.” I’m climbing now, my boots on the iron stairs, the sound ringing in the cylinder of the tower. “You need to head back before the wind picks up.”
“I checked the weather this morning. It said partly cloudy.”
“It changed. Weather changes on the coast. That’s why you check it more than once.”
“I was going to check again before I left.”
“When? After the lightning starts?”
I reach the landing where the stairs open onto the watch room—the level just below the lantern room, with windows on all four sides. She’s standing at the south-facing window, camera in her hands, her face lit by the gray light coming through the salt-crusted glass.
She’s been shooting. I can tell by the way she’s holding the camera—not ready to shoot, but just finished. Satisfied. The way she looks when she’s captured something she’s been seeing in her head and finally got it on the sensor.
“The light in here is incredible,” she says. “The way it comes through the glass—it’s diffused and directional at the same time. I could shoot portraits in here that would make people cry.”
“People are going to cry if we don’t get off this island before that storm hits.”
She looks past me, toward the south window.
The sky has changed in the twenty minutes since I left the marina.
The wall of clouds is closer now, darker, the kind of dark that means business.
The water below has gone from blue-green to steel gray, and the whitecaps are starting—small ones, but building.
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah. Oh.”
“How long do we have?”
I cross to the window and look. The wind is bending the sea oats on the island flat. The air pressure has dropped enough that I can feel it in my sinuses. And to the south, the first flicker of something bright inside the cloud wall.
“We’re not leaving,” I say.
“What?”
“The wind’s already too high for the Whaler. Dawson’s boat sits low. It’ll take water over the bow in this chop. And if there’s lightning —” I shake my head. “We’re staying until it passes.”
“How long?”
“Could be twenty minutes. Could be two hours.”
The first crack of thunder rolls across the water like a drum. Not close yet, but coming. The lighthouse windows rattle in their frames.
“We’re stuck here,” she says.
“We’re sheltered here. This lighthouse has stood through worse than a summer squall.”
“We’re stuck in a lighthouse.”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“I’m processing.”