Chapter 15
fifteen
Clara woke to the sound of hammering.
Not the easy, rhythmic kind — the kind that meant Jack was building something. This was fast, aggressive, a man swinging with his shoulders instead of his wrists. The kind of hammering that said I am doing something with my hands so I don't have to do something with my mouth.
She rolled over. His side of the bed was cold.
The clock on the nightstand read 6:14 AM. Jack was an early riser — but this was different. This wasn't making coffee early. This was fleeing the bed before dawn to attack lumber.
Clara lay there for a minute, listening to the hammering echo off the rocks below the gallery.
Steady. Relentless. The cable railing project.
He'd mentioned it casually a few weeks ago — September, maybe — like it was a distant plan, a reason to still be here when the leaves turned.
Now he was doing it in July, at six in the morning, with the urgency of a man trying to finish before something caught up with him.
She sat up. Pushed her hair out of her face. Her gaze caught on the bedroom doorway, and she stilled.
Jack's duffel bag — the salt-stained one he'd arrived with, the one that had lived in the back of her closet since the second week, buried behind her winter coat like it had been absorbed into the architecture of her life — was on the floor near the door.
Not in the closet. On the floor. Leaning against the wall with its straps loose, like someone had set it there on the way to somewhere else and hadn't quite decided whether to keep going.
Clara looked at the bag.
The bag looked back.
She got up. Made coffee. Didn't mention the bag.
Through the kitchen window, she could see Jack on the gallery, shirtless in the early light, measuring a section of railing with the focused intensity he brought to every project.
His pencil was behind his ear. His shoulders were tight.
He moved with precision but without joy — none of the easy pleasure she'd grown used to watching, the way his hands usually softened when they found the grain of a board, the half-smile he wore when a measurement came out right.
He was building like he was running out of time.
Clara poured two mugs. Carried one outside.
"Morning," she said, holding it out.
Jack looked up. Smiled — the half-smile, the one that used his mouth but not his eyes. He'd been doing that for three days now, and every time it landed in Clara's chest like a stone skipping across water that was getting shallower.
"Morning. Thanks." He took the mug. Their fingers brushed. He didn't linger.
"You're up early," she said. Casual. Light. The tone of a woman who was absolutely not cataloguing every micro-shift in her boyfriend's behavior like a seismologist tracking tremors.
"Couldn't sleep. Figured I'd get a jump on this." He gestured at the railing with his mug. "The existing spindles are in worse shape than I thought. If I'm going to run cable, I need to reinforce the posts first."
If I'm going to. Not when. Not before the fall storms, the way he'd said it on the boat that night, planning months ahead with the ease of someone who intended to be here for them.
If.
Clara sipped her coffee and said nothing.
She lasted until eleven.
The hammering had slowed to a methodical pace — Jack settling into the work rather than attacking it — and Clara had spent the morning at her drafting table accomplishing precisely nothing.
She'd opened the file for her current panel three times.
Closed it three times. Stared at the half-inked page where Marina was standing at the prow of a ship, deciding whether to sail toward the storm or turn back, and thought about how her subconscious had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Her phone sat on the table beside her like a small bomb.
Nora's latest email — sent two days ago, polite and professional and quietly insistent — glowed in her notifications:
Hi Clara — Following up on our call. The editor I mentioned is very eager to move forward with a formal proposal.
I'll need your answer by end of week so I can set up the next conversation.
No rush on the big decisions yet — this is just about whether you'd like to explore the opportunity further.
But I do need a yes or no on representation itself.
End of week. Four days.
Clara locked the phone. Unlocked it. Locked it again.
Then she grabbed her keys and left.
"Going to town," she called toward the gallery. "Need supplies."
She didn't need supplies. She needed Lena.
Lena's studio was a converted boathouse at the end of Harbor Street, wedged between the marina office and a bait shop that had closed three years ago and now served as an unofficial seagull hotel.
The sign outside read RHODES STUDIO in hand-painted letters that were peeling in a way Lena claimed was "intentional weathering" and everyone else called "too lazy to repaint. "
Clara found her cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by half-squeezed tubes of oil paint and what appeared to be a six-foot canvas of the harbor at sunset. Or possibly sunrise. Or possibly on fire. With Lena's abstracts, it was sometimes hard to tell.
"You have the face," Lena said without looking up.
"I don't have a face."
"You have the face. The one where your mouth says everything's fine and your eyes are doing that panicky sideways thing.
" Lena set down her palette knife and looked up.
Paint in her hair. Overalls splattered with cadmium orange.
Canvas tote bag on the stool beside her: I CAME, I SAW, I NEED A NAP. "Sit. Talk."
Clara sat on the floor next to her, back against the wall, and for a moment she just breathed.
The studio smelled like linseed oil and turpentine and the faint salt of the harbor through the open windows.
Familiar. Safe. The smell of a thousand afternoons spent in this room over the past three years, watching Lena paint while Clara sketched, neither of them needing to fill the silence.
"Jack's being weird," Clara said.
"Weird how? Weird like forgetting to put the toilet seat down, or weird like emotionally retreating into a fortress of unspoken feelings?"
"The fortress one."
Lena sighed. "Damn. I was hoping for the toilet seat."
Clara pulled her knees up. Wrapped her arms around them.
A posture she recognized — the same one she'd caught herself in after reading Nora's email, after hearing Sam's voice in her head, after every moment in her life when the ground shifted and she needed to make herself small enough that the shaking couldn't reach her.
"He got a phone call from his sister a few days ago," she said.
"I don't know what she said — he went out to the gallery to take it, and when he came back he was.
.. different. Quieter. He stopped whistling when he cooks.
He smiles but it's the wrong smile — like he's doing it from a script instead of from wherever his real smiles come from.
" She paused. "He's working on a railing project he'd planned for September.
He's doing it now. At six in the morning. "
Lena was quiet for a moment, processing. She had a way of listening that Clara had always valued — not the performative nodding and mm-hmming that some people did, but a genuine stillness, like she was letting the words settle before she decided what to do with them.
"Have you asked him what's wrong?"
"He said he was tired."
"And you believed him?"
"No. But I didn't push."
"Why not?"
Clara examined the paint-spattered floor. A drip of cerulean blue had dried in a shape that looked almost like a wave. "Because pushing feels like chasing. And I don't chase. Not anymore."
Lena's expression softened. She knew why. They both knew why.
"Clara. This isn't Sam."
"I know it's not Sam."
"Do you? Because you're sitting on my floor doing the knee-hug thing, and the last time you did the knee-hug thing in this studio you were telling me about the time Sam went silent for four days after you mentioned wanting to try selling your illustrations online."
The accuracy of that stung. Clara unhooked her arms. Put her feet flat on the floor. Tried to take up more space.
"Jack isn't punishing me," she said. "He's not... it's not that. He's going through something. His family, his brother — there's stuff he hasn't dealt with, and I think the phone call stirred it up. I can feel him pulling back, but it's not at me. It's just... away."
"And you think there's a difference?"
"There's a huge difference."
"Is there?" Lena said it gently, without accusation. "Because someone pulling away from you and someone pulling away from everything look pretty similar from where you're standing. The result's the same. You're alone in that lighthouse wondering what you did wrong."
"I didn't do anything wrong."
"I know you didn't. That's my point." Lena reached over and squeezed Clara's hand.
"I'm not saying Jack is Sam. I've met him.
He's kind and he's genuine and he looks at you like you invented color.
But a person leaving because they're scared hurts just as much as a person leaving because they're cruel.
The suitcase still ends up by the door either way. "
Clara's breath caught. She hadn't mentioned the duffel bag.
"What?" Lena said, reading her face.
"Nothing. It's — nothing."
Lena held her gaze for a beat too long, the way she always did when she knew Clara was editing, but let it go. "What about the agent thing? Where does that stand?"
"Nora needs an answer by Friday."
"And?"
"And I've been staring at her email like it's written in a language I don't speak."
"It's written in English, Clara. Specifically, it's written in 'someone thinks your art is brilliant and wants to give you money for it' English. Which is a pretty good dialect."
"It's not that simple."