Chapter 16
sixteen
Tuesday.
Jack knew it was Tuesday before he opened his eyes. Not because of a calendar or alarm or any external signal — just a heaviness that had settled into his bones overnight, familiar and annual, like a weather system that arrived on the same date every year regardless of where he was standing.
His dad had been dead for fourteen years today.
Clara was asleep beside him, curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek.
Her breathing was slow and even. In the gray pre-dawn light, she looked younger.
Unguarded. The sharp edges she wore during the day — the wit, the defensive posture, the raised eyebrow that could level a man at twenty paces — all of it smoothed out in sleep.
This was the Clara underneath. The one who pressed her cold feet against his calves and mumbled into his shoulder and trusted him enough to be soft.
Jack watched her for a long time. Longer than he should have.
Then he got up, pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, and went out to the gallery.
The ocean was steel-gray in the early light.
Flat. Patient. The kind of calm that felt indifferent — the water didn't care what day it was, didn't know that Paul Callahan had died in his own woodshop on a Tuesday afternoon with sawdust on his hands and a half-finished cabinet on the bench.
Heart attack. Massive. Gone before the ambulance arrived, which in Lockport meant gone before his neighbor Frank heard the fall and came running.
Jack gripped the railing — the one he'd repaired, the post he'd sealed with marine-grade sealant meant to last for years — and breathed.
Fifty-four. His dad had been fifty-four.
A whole life in one town, one shop, one marriage, one house with a porch he'd built himself.
A man who measured twice, cut once, sanded with the grain, and never once considered leaving.
Who'd taught Jack everything he knew about wood and nothing about what to do when the person who taught you everything was suddenly, permanently absent.
And then Joel. Five years later. Thirty-three years old.
Driving home from a night shift at the hospital in a storm, hydroplaned on the highway, went into the median.
Truck coming the other way couldn't stop.
Joel, who'd stayed. Who'd become a nurse, lived ten minutes from home, did Sunday dinners, fixed things around the house.
Who'd carried the family the way load-bearing walls carry a structure — invisibly, essentially, noticed only when they're gone.
Jack had left Lockport six weeks after Joel's funeral. Temporary, he'd told Josie. Just need to clear my head.
Seven years.
He stared at the water and thought about calling his mother.
Picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Her number was right there — three taps and he'd hear her voice, and her voice would crack the way it always did on this day, quiet and steady until it wasn't, and she'd ask if he was okay and he'd say yes and they'd both pretend that was true.
He put the phone down.
Some calls required a kind of bravery Jack didn't have today.
He told Clara he needed to pick up hardware in town. She looked up from her coffee — those green eyes scanning his face with the quiet attention she'd been giving him for days, reading the shifts the way she read the water, noting what had changed without demanding an explanation.
"Okay," she said. "Drive safe."
"Always."
She didn't ask what hardware. Didn't ask why he wasn't eating breakfast. Didn't mention that he'd been up since before dawn or that his eyes looked like they'd forgotten how to sleep.
She just said "okay" and let him go, and the grace of it nearly broke him.
The truck rattled down the coastal road — the same twenty minutes he'd driven a dozen times, past the same granite ledges and salt-bent pines, the same stretch of ocean appearing and disappearing between the hills.
He knew this road. Had learned its potholes and blind curves, the spot where the pavement buckled near the third mile marker, the place where you could see the lighthouse if you looked back at exactly the right angle.
He didn't look back.
Town was quiet. Mid-morning lull. A few tourists wandering the sidewalk, a lobster boat chugging out of the harbor. Jack parked at the marina and sat in the truck for a minute, his hands on the wheel, his father's anniversary pressing on his chest like a hand he couldn't push away.
Dale was on the dock, doing something to a winch with the focused intensity of a man who had been maintaining the same equipment for forty years and intended to maintain it for forty more. He looked up when Jack approached. Nodded once. The Dale version of a warm greeting.
"Callahan."
"Dale."
Silence. Dale tightened something. Jack stood there, hands in his pockets, watching the harbor. This was how conversations with Dale worked — you waited until he had something to say, and if he didn't, you stood in comfortable silence until one of you left.
"Heard about a job," Dale said, not looking up. "Fellow in Camden needs a finish carpenter. Historic inn, full restoration. Six months, maybe more. Housing included."
He said it the way he said everything — flat, factual, no editorializing. The way you'd tell someone the tide schedule or the price of diesel.
"Good work if you want it," Dale continued. "Man should work if he's able. Number's on my desk if you need it."
Jack's mouth went dry. "Thanks, Dale."
Dale grunted. Went back to his winch.
That was it. No subtext. No agenda. Just a working man passing along a lead because good jobs shouldn't go unfilled and idle hands were a waste of God's engineering. Dale had probably mentioned the same job to three other people this week.
But Jack was the one standing here with a hollow chest on his father's anniversary, and the job was in Camden — ninety miles up the coast, far enough to be gone, close enough to pretend it wasn't running.
He found the number on Dale's desk. A scrap of paper, pencil, neat block letters: HARLAN GOSS, CAMDEN INN RESTORATION. A phone number.
Jack put the paper in his pocket.
It felt like picking up a loaded gun. Not because the job was dangerous, but because a version of Jack that had existed six weeks ago would have called already.
Would have been excited — a new town, a new project, six months of purpose without attachment.
The open road and the clean slate and the familiar, comfortable absence of anything that could hurt him.
That version of Jack had been dying since he washed up on a beach and a woman with red hair and a sharp tongue had pulled him out of the water and given him a place to heal.
He sat in the truck in Dale's parking lot with the phone number in his hand and tried to figure out which Jack he was today.
He didn't drive back to the lighthouse.
Instead, he pulled off the coastal road at the overlook — the spot where the guardrail was rusted and the shoulder widened enough for one truck.
Below, the ocean churned against black rocks.
The lighthouse was visible from here, small and white on its point, the gallery railing catching the midday light.
He could see the sections he'd replaced. The new cable he'd started running. The post — the southwest one, the first repair he'd made — standing solid and straight, sealed against years of weather he wouldn't be here to see.
Jack turned off the engine and sat in the silence.
He was going to leave.
The knowledge arrived without fanfare. No dramatic moment, no single deciding factor.
Just a quiet certainty settling into place like a joint finding its groove — the recognition that he'd been building toward this exit for days, maybe weeks, that every deflected question and half-smile and too-early morning had been preparation for this.
He loved Clara.
He could admit that here, alone, with the engine off and the ocean below and nobody to hear it.
He loved her. Loved her prickliness and her courage and the way she yelled at seagulls and drew her way through every emotion she couldn't name.
Loved the cold feet on his calves at midnight.
Loved the way she said Callahan like it was simultaneously an insult and an endearment.
Loved the lighthouse and the town and the drafting table and the mug that had become his without anyone deciding it should.
He loved all of it. And that was exactly the problem.
Because Jack knew what happened to the people he loved.
They died. Not metaphorically, not in the slow erosion of a relationship going stale — they died.
His father's heart stopped in a woodshop.
His brother hydroplaned on a highway. The two men who'd anchored his life, gone in the space of five years, and what Jack had learned from that — the lesson branded into his bones — was that love was a countdown.
Every good day was a day closer to the day it ended.
Every morning you woke up happy was a morning you'd eventually look back on and wish you could return to.
He'd tried telling himself it was different with Clara. That not everyone left. That staying didn't automatically mean losing.
But the fear was older than reason. Deeper than logic. It lived in the part of him that had stood in a cemetery twice before thirty and decided, without words, that the only way to survive loss was to never accumulate anything worth losing.
And then Maeve's voice: She stopped eating for two weeks. Tim brought soup every day and I'd find the containers on the porch untouched.
He knew what his leaving would cost Clara. Maeve had made sure of that — not cruelly, just honestly, the way Maeve did everything. And the knowledge sat in him like a splinter he couldn't reach.