Chapter 14
fourteen
Jack stared at the phone for a solid ten minutes before he hit the call button.
He was on the gallery, leaning against the railing he'd repaired, the afternoon sun warm on his face.
Below, the ocean did its thing — waves, rocks, the endless patience of water against stone.
Inside, Clara was on a call with that literary agent, her voice a muffled rise and fall through the open window.
She'd been pacing for twenty minutes. Jack had decided to give her space.
And to stop being a coward about his sister.
Josie picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Hey Jos, it’s me, Jack.”
“Jack! Oh my God. Oh my GOD. He's alive. He's actually alive. Hold on — Brody, put the hamster down! Not on your sister! I said DOWN!"
Jack winced. "Hey, Jos—"
"Three weeks, Jack. THREE WEEKS. No call, no text, no email. All of my calls went straight to voicemail. I didn't know if you were alive or dead in a ditch somewhere—where are you?”
“I’m in a small town called Beacon’s End, it’s on the—"
"I don't actually want geography right now. I want an explanation for why my brother fell off the face of the earth for three weeks and left me imagining him dead in a ditch somewhere while I'm trying to keep two kids alive and Mom from calling the Coast Guard."
"Mom knows I'm—"
"Mom knows NOTHING because you haven't CALLED her either! Brody! HAMSTER! NOW!"
A crash in the background. A child's shriek. The sound of something falling that probably shouldn't have fallen.
"Sorry," Josie said, not sounding sorry at all. "You were explaining why you're a terrible brother."
Jack rubbed his face. This was going exactly how he'd expected. Josie operated at one speed: full. She talked the way other people breathed — constantly, without pause, and if you tried to interrupt, she just got louder.
"I bought a boat, then sank my boat," he said, squeezing the words into a gap between her breaths.
Silence. Actual, genuine silence, which from Josie was more alarming than the yelling.
"You what?"
"I bought a boat from a guy in Portsmouth. Sailed it up the coast. Hit a storm. It sank. I washed up on shore and a woman pulled me out of the water."
"You — Jack. You could have died."
"I didn't die."
"You could have DIED and I wouldn't have known for WEEKS because you don't CALL—"
"Jos. I'm fine. I'm okay. I've been staying at a lighthouse while I recovered."
Another pause. Shorter this time. He could hear the gears turning — Josie processing information, sorting it, filing it into the mental system she used to manage everything in her life that was falling apart, which was most things.
"A lighthouse," she repeated.
"Yeah."
"With the woman who pulled you out of the water."
"Yeah."
"For three weeks."
"...Yeah."
"Jack Callahan. Are you sleeping with the lighthouse woman?"
He should have seen that coming. He absolutely should have seen that coming.
"Her name is Clara."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a—look, it's complicated."
"It's not complicated. You're either sleeping with her or you're not. This is a yes-or-no situation. Even Brody can handle yes-or-no questions and he's six."
"Yes."
"HA." The triumph in her voice could have powered a small city. "I knew it. The second you said 'lighthouse' I knew it. You had that voice."
"What voice?"
"The voice. The one you get when something actually matters and you're trying very hard to sound like it doesn't." She paused. "Tell me about her."
So he did.
Not all of it — not the details that were Clara's to share, not the Sam stuff, not the late-night conversations about fear and hiding and what it cost to be brave.
But the shape of it. The lighthouse. The town.
The drafting table and the webcomic and the way she yelled at seagulls and the fact that she'd pulled a drowning stranger out of the ocean and given him a place to heal.
The way she looked at him like he was worth knowing.
Josie listened. Actually listened, which meant it was serious, because Josie didn't do quiet unless something mattered.
"She sounds great, Jack," Josie said when he finished. Her voice had changed — softer now, the anger banked. "She sounds really great."
"She is."
"So what are you going to do?"
The question sat there. Simple. Direct. The kind of question Josie specialized in — the kind that had one honest answer and a dozen ways to dodge it.
"I don't know," he said.
"Yes, you do."
"Jos—"
"You know what you want to do. You're just scared to do it because, well, you have your reasons —“ She stopped herself.
Took a breath. "Listen. I'm not going to lecture you.
That's a lie, I'm absolutely going to lecture you, but not right this second.
Right this second, I need to tell you something. "
Jack's stomach tightened. He knew that tone. That was Josie's transition tone — the gear shift between busting his ass and delivering news she wished she didn't have to deliver.
"What?"
"Dad's anniversary is next week. Tuesday."
Jack gripped the railing. He'd known it was coming. Always knew — the date lived in some back room of his brain year-round, quiet until it wasn't.
"I know," he said.
"Mom wants to do the cemetery thing. Just us. She asked if you'd come home."
Home. Lockport. The house he grew up in, with the porch his dad built and the kitchen table where two empty chairs sat across from each other like a conversation nobody wanted to have.
"I don't know if I can do that, Jos."
"I know." Her voice was gentle, which was worse than the yelling. "But she asked. And I told her I'd pass it along."
"Is she okay?"
"She's Mom. She holds it together and then she doesn't. Same as every year." A pause. "She misses you, Jack. I know you know that, but I'm saying it anyway. She misses you and she's too proud to beg you to come home, so she asks once a year and then pretends she's fine when you say no."
Jack closed his eyes. The sun was warm on his face. The ocean was steady below. Inside the lighthouse, Clara was talking to a literary agent about her future.
And here was the past, reaching for him the way it always did — with gentle hands and a grip that never loosened.
"I'll think about it," he said.
"That means no."
"It means I'll think about it."
Josie sighed. "Fine. Think about it. And call Mom, you jerk. She doesn't bite."
"She cries."
"Yeah, well, maybe she's earned that. Maybe let her." Another crash from Josie's end. "brODY JAMES CALLAHAN, IF THAT HAMSTER IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE I SWEAR TO—sorry. I have to go. My son is staging some kind of rodent uprising."
"Kiss the kids for me."
"Call your mother and I'll consider it." Her voice softened one more time. "Jack? This woman — Clara. If she's what I think she is? Don't be an idiot about it. You've been running for seven years. That's long enough."
She hung up before he could answer.
Jack stood on the gallery with the dead phone in his hand and the weight of his dad’s anniversary pressing on his chest like a stone.
He went to town the next morning in the old truck. Needed lumber for the cable rail project. That's what he told himself.
What he actually needed was noise. People. Something to fill the space in his head that Josie's phone call had hollowed out.
He got more than he bargained for.
"Jack! Perfect timing!" Mrs. Conley appeared from behind a display of ceramic angels in the general store like she'd been lying in wait. Which she possibly had. "I need a strong pair of hands."
"Mrs. Conley, I'm just here for—"
"The church hall stage has a wobble. Father Duncan nearly fell during his homily last Sunday.
It was dramatic — not the good kind of dramatic, the lawsuit kind.
Ed was supposed to fix it but Ed has done something to his back, don't ask me what because the man refuses to see a doctor, very stubborn, very male—"
"I'm really just picking up—"
"It'll take twenty minutes. Thirty at most. I'll make you a sandwich."
This was how Mrs. Conley operated. She didn't ask. She stated her need, assumed your compliance, and offered food as compensation before you'd agreed to anything. Saying no required more energy than Jack had today.
"Fine. Twenty minutes."
"How WONDERFUL!" She clapped her hands together with enough force to startle Father Duncan, who was reading a newspaper in the corner and clearly had not been consulted about any of this.
The church hall stage didn't wobble. It swayed. The cross braces underneath had come loose — not rotted, just poorly installed in the first place. Whoever had built this thing had used finishing nails where they needed lag bolts, which was like putting a Band-Aid on a broken arm.
"This is going to take longer than twenty minutes," Jack called up to Mrs. Conley, who was hovering near the stage like a foreman.
"Take all the time you need, dear. I'll make two sandwiches."
Don Patterson wandered in around the twenty-minute mark, drawn by some invisible signal that a man was working on something nearby. He watched Jack from a folding chair, offering commentary.
"My nephew Gary would've used screws for that."
"Screws would strip out. The wood's too soft."
"Gary would disagree."
"Gary would be wrong."
Don considered this, decided he liked it, and moved on to a story about how Joan's brother had once tried to build a deck using only a hammer and determination. The deck lasted three months.
Mrs. Conley brought the sandwiches. Ham and swiss on white bread, mustard on one side, mayo on the other. She'd also brought sweet tea, a slice of pie "from yesterday, still perfectly fine, don't listen to anyone who says otherwise," and a ziplock bag of cookies for Clara.
"For Clara's young man" would have been more accurate, since the cookies were clearly a bribe, but Jack took them with a thank-you and didn't push it.