Chapter 18
eighteen
The guy in the pickup was named Earl, and he wanted to talk about lobster.
"Hm," Jack said.
"My brother-in-law traps out of Rockland. Says his catch is down thirty percent. Thirty percent! And the dealers want to pay him less per pound, not more. Explain that math to me."
"Can't," Jack said.
Earl took this as encouragement and launched into a detailed analysis of the lobster supply chain that Jack absorbed none of.
He sat in the passenger seat with his bag on his lap and watched the coast scroll by through the window — rocky beaches, pine trees, the occasional white steeple of a church poking above the treeline.
Towns appeared and disappeared. Gas stations, antique shops, lobster shacks with hand-painted signs.
He'd done this a hundred times. The road. The ride. The small talk with a stranger who'd forget his face by dinner. This was the rhythm of his life — the thing he'd chosen, the freedom he'd chased, the clean simplicity of being nobody in particular on the way to nowhere specific.
It had never felt this empty before.
"Where'd you say you were headed?" Earl asked.
"Camden."
"Nice town. Tourist-heavy but nice. Got a job lined up?"
"Something like that."
"Smart man. Too many people drifting these days. No direction." Earl glanced at him. "You alright? You look like you left something behind."
Jack almost laughed. "Yeah. Something like that too."
Earl dropped him in Belfast, which was as far as he was going. Jack thanked him, shouldered his bag, and stood on the sidewalk of a town he'd never been to and felt absolutely nothing about.
He found a motel. The Harbor Rest, which didn't rest on a harbor and probably hadn't been updated since the nineties. Thirty-eight dollars a night, cash. The woman at the desk didn't ask questions. Handed him a key — an actual metal key, not a card — and pointed down the hall.
Room 7. Beige walls. A bed with a floral comforter that had seen better decades. A TV bolted to the dresser. A bathroom with thin towels and a shower that probably ran lukewarm at best.
Jack had stayed in a hundred rooms like this.
Two hundred. They were the set pieces of his life — interchangeable, forgettable, designed for people passing through.
He used to find comfort in their anonymity.
No history. No expectations. Just a bed and a door and the knowledge that tomorrow he'd be somewhere else.
He sat on the edge of the bed and set his bag on the floor.
The bag was light. That was the point — had always been the point. Travel light. Keep your possessions to what you can carry and your attachments to what you can leave. Seven years of practice and he'd gotten good at it. Everything he owned fit in one bag. Everything he needed fit in his hands.
Except now the lightness felt like subtraction.
Not freedom — absence. He'd left the blue mug on the shelf.
The pencil on the windowsill. The half-finished cable railing.
The cedar sealant that would last for years.
All the pieces of himself he'd embedded in that lighthouse, pulled out one by one and left behind like teeth.
And Clara.
He'd left Clara standing at the dock with bright eyes and a tight jaw and a voice that broke when she told him not to be kind.
Jack pulled the Camden job number from his pocket.
Smoothed the scrap paper on his knee. Harlan Goss.
Historic inn restoration. Six months, housing included.
Good work. Honest work. The kind of project he would have jumped at three months ago — a beautiful old building that needed saving, a fresh town, a clean start.
He picked up his phone. Dialed the first four digits. Stopped.
Set the phone on the bed.
Picked it up again. Put it down again.
The room was very quiet. Outside, a car passed on the street. Someone laughed in the parking lot. The ice machine hummed through the wall.
Jack lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. No plaster cracks. No character. Just flat, featureless white — the ceiling of a room that didn't know him and wouldn't remember him.
He thought about Clara's ceiling. The spiderweb cracks he'd been planning to patch.
The old iron light fixture he could have restored if he'd had the right parts.
The way the morning light hit the plaster and turned it gold, and Clara's hair spread across the pillow, and the whole room smelled like salt and her shampoo and the coffee he'd made while she was still sleeping.
He closed his eyes and replayed the conversation. Every word. Her face when she saw the bag. The way she'd set down her pen — aligned it with the edge of the table, buying herself time. The steadiness in her voice when she asked if this was about the job or about fear.
You're doing the math alone and calling it love.
The accuracy of it had hit him at the time.
Now, lying on a motel bed in Belfast, it hit harder.
Because she was right. He'd looked at Clara and calculated what she could handle and decided to leave because the math told him to.
His math. His formula. The one he'd been running for seven years: attachment plus time equals loss, therefore minimize attachment.
What the fuck was wrong with him?
He picked up the phone. Not the Camden number this time. Josie's.
She picked up on the fourth ring. Background noise — TV, a child's voice, the clatter of dishes. Normal life.
"Jack?"
"Hey, Jos."
A pause. She was reading his voice. Josie had always been able to do that — decode him in two syllables, the way their dad used to read wood grain at a glance.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"I left."
"Left where? Left the lighthouse? Left Clara?"
"Yeah."
The TV sound disappeared. A door closed. When Josie spoke again, the background was quiet. She'd moved to another room. Given this her full attention, which meant she already knew how bad it was.
"Tell me what happened."
So he told her. The job in Camden. The bag.
The conversation — his fear, Clara's line in the sand, the boat ride to the dock where she'd told him not to say anything kind.
Walking through town. Hitching a ride. The motel room in Belfast where he was currently lying on a bed that smelled like industrial detergent and the stale passage of time.
Josie listened. The whole time. Didn't interrupt once, which was so unlike her that it scared him more than yelling would have.
When he finished, the silence stretched.
He could hear her breathing. Could picture her — leaning against the wall of whatever room she'd escaped to, pinching the bridge of her nose, doing the mental math of how to handle a brother who was very good at building things and catastrophically bad at keeping them.
"Jack," she said. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly."
"Okay."
"Do you love her?"
He didn't hesitate. "Yes."
"And she loves you?"
"Yeah. She does."
"And you left because you're afraid that if you stay, something bad will happen. That you'll lose her. The way we lost Dad. The way we lost Joel."
His throat tightened. "Yeah."
"Okay." Another breath. "Now I need you to hear something, and you're not going to like it, but I've earned the right to say it because I know you best.”
Jack braced.
"You think leaving protects you from losing people.
" Josie's voice was steady. Not angry. Not gentle.
Just honest — the kind of honest that came from years of carrying a family by yourself while your brother ran.
"You think if you keep moving, keep things light, don't build anything permanent, then when the bad thing happens — and it will, because that's life, Jack, bad things happen — it won't hurt as much.
Because you were never really there. You never really had it. You can't lose what you never claimed."
"Jos—"
"I'm not done." No heat. Just the quiet authority of an older sister who was done watching him self-destruct.
"You left Lockport six weeks after Joel's funeral.
You told me it was temporary. And then you spent seven years leaving every town, every job, every person who got too close.
And every time, you told yourself the same story: I'm protecting myself.
I'm staying free. I'm not going to get attached because attached people get destroyed. "
"That's not—"
"But here's what you missed, Jack. You didn't avoid loss.
You've been losing people for seven years.
You lost Dad's crew. You lost your friends.
You lost every woman who cared about you.
You lost seven years of Mom's life — seven years of Christmases and birthdays and Sunday dinners and the chance to sit at that kitchen table and just be her son.
You lost me, Jack. Not all the way — I'm still here, I'll always be here — but you lost the version of us where you're present.
Where you show up. Where I don't have to wonder if my brother is alive or dead because he doesn't answer his phone for three weeks. "
Jack's eyes burned. He pressed his forearm across them.
"And now you've lost Clara." Josie's voice cracked. Just barely. "A woman who loves you. Who pulled you out of the ocean and gave you a home and asked you to stay. And you walked away from her because you're afraid of losing her."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Jack had ever heard.
"Do you hear it?" Josie asked quietly. "Do you hear how that works?"
He heard it.
He'd heard it before — the whisper at the edges of his logic, the flaw in the formula that he'd been papering over for seven years. But hearing it from Josie — the one who'd held their mother together, who'd carried the weight he'd dropped — hearing it from her made it impossible to ignore.