Chapter Fifteen
S itting at the picnic table that overlooked the marina, Sophie was getting a blow-by-blow of the dinosaur exhibit, complete with Cooper wandering away at one point.
“Did you find him? Is he still lost?” Sophie lowered her cone to tease.
“He was in the gift shop.” Biyen’s lips were orange and black with the tiger stripe he’d ordered.
“Stopped my heart for a minute,” Reid admitted, drawing out his phone and frowning at whatever text he’d just received.
He handed it across to her so she could read that it was from Logan.
Take Biyen. I have to talk to Sophie alone.
Reid looked past her so Sophie glanced over her shoulder to see Logan walking toward them. He had his sunglasses on. His expression was impossible to read, but a preternatural chill swept through her, one that raised goosebumps all over her body.
Reid took his phone back and said to Biyen, “Let’s go see Trys. Logan wants to talk to your mom.”
“Work?” Biyen asked, making a face.
“Probably. I’ll see you in a minute.” She swung her legs out of the bench seat and stood as Logan approached the table. “What’s up?”
“Do you have the keys to the store?”
“Yeah.” She removed them from her pocket and offered them.
He took them and waved her to come with him.
“You’re being weird.” The ice cream started to feel like gravel and acid in her stomach. Her hands were going cold so she dropped the cone into the bin near the door and she followed him inside. “What’s up?”
He waited until the door jangled closed behind them, then locked it, and steered her to the stool behind the cash desk. He waved for her to sit on it.
“What?” She sat and tucked her feet on the rail, hands in her lap.
“I don’t know how to do this, Soph, so I’m just going to say it.” He took off his sunglasses, revealing red, agonized eyes. He swallowed. “Art has passed away.”
“What?” Another of those chilling sensations went through her. A cold wraith. Something that stole a big chunk of her soul on its way by.
“I found him in his chair. I don’t think he suffered. I think he just… stopped living. I’m so sorry, Sophie. I’m so so sorry.”
The pain in her hand was him squeezing it, she realized. She didn’t say anything about it, didn’t try to pull it away.
“But he was fine,” she insisted. He hadn’t been fine, though. He hadn’t been feeling well for weeks. “I was going to take him to the doctor this Thursday.”
“I know.”
“No.” She tried to stand up, but her legs were noodles. When he tried to catch her, to keep her from stumbling, her limbs stiffened in rejection. Not of him, but of this news. “You’re wrong. I’ll go—”
“Listen first,” he said, gentle, but firm, still holding on to her. “I called the hospital in Bella Bella. They said the coroner will come as soon as they can. A couple of hours maybe. You can go and sit in the house with him if you want to, but we can’t move him or anything. Okay? Do you understand?”
“You’re wrong , Logan.”
“I’m sorry, Sophie. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop saying that.” She shoved at his hands, forcing them off her, then she leaned weakly against the cash desk, realizing she was shaking so hard her bones were rattling.
She knew how to do this. She’d been through it before. Get a grip. But it hadn’t been like this. The last time she had had time to prepare herself, even though she hadn’t been prepared. Not really. She had known what to do, though, because she and her mother had talked about it. Gramps had been there to help her…
Oh God.
Tears formed behind her clenched eyelids, leaking onto her lashes. He wasn’t here for her. The emptiness of that emptied her mind, making it impossible to form a clear thought. She couldn’t move and only knew she was breathing because each inhale felt forged in fire, each exhale nothing but noxious smoke.
“I’ll walk down with you,” Logan said, voice sounding far away. “Or I can stay with Art if you would rather not, but I need you to tell me what you want to do with Biyen? Trys will keep him. Or Reid and Emma. You can wait to tell him later if you want to.”
Clarity arrived. “No. I have to tell him. Oh my God, Logan.” Now it was coming. The agony of loss was seeping past her shock. It was becoming real.
“I know.” His arms came around her, holding her together as she shook and fell apart. “I know. I know.”
He did know. That was the excruciating, consoling, unbearable truth as she clung to him and massive sobs convulsed her. Many would mourn her grandfather, but no one else would cry this hard with her. While she wet the shirt under her cheek with her tears, he clenched his fingers against her back and released choked noises against her hair. He moaned in anguish, same as her. For long minutes, they were captives racked in the shared cage of losing someone precious.
Eventually, her nose was in danger of running all over him so she broke away and grabbed a tissue.
He took a couple for himself and ran them across his cheeks, eyes bloodshot, face lined as if he’d aged ten years. She must look equally devastated.
“Will you get Biyen for me?” she asked, voice rusty and thin.
He nodded and picked up his sunglasses, putting them on as he walked outside.
*
This was the worst day of his life.
Logan felt as though he walked through glycerin. The air felt thick enough to make every movement an effort. He could hardly breathe it in. His lungs were clogged and his throat was tight.
“What’s going on?” Reid asked as Logan strode down the wharf toward him.
Biyen was on the deck of the Storm Ridge , putting on the life preserver Trystan handed him.
“Trystan is going to take me to the fueling station,” Biyen said. “Is Mom coming?”
“Bud, I’m sorry. Your Mom needs to talk to you. She’s up at the hardware store. Can you go see her right now?”
“Aweh.” He glumly handed back the jacket.
“I’ll wait for you,” Trystan promised.
“What’s going on?” Reid asked.
Logan held up a hand as he watched Biyen walk up the wharf and ramp, then break into a run toward the hardware store when he reached solid ground.
“It’s Art. Can you…” Fuck this was hard. He scrubbed across his stubbled jaw, trying to make his numb lips work. “The coroner is on the way.”
“Oh fuck,” Reid breathed.
“Sophie’s at the hardware store? I’ll go sit with her.” Trystan tried to hand off the keys to the Storm Ridge to Logan.
“ I’ll stay with her,” Logan snarled.
For a minute, they held a staring contest through the lenses of their reflective sunglasses.
“I lost him, too.” It felt almost childish to say it, but Logan’s grief was too colossal to downplay. This wasn’t like losing their father, where they all held a certain ambivalence about the man who had raised them. Art had been his teacher. He had patiently answered Logan’s questions and helped him understand this world—the one filled with the smell of salt and the creak of wood and the endless rhythm of tides. When he was here, he was never lost.
There was nothing Logan could do about Art being gone, but he needed to be with Sophie, to look after her while she went through this. He needed to go through it with her.
Trystan gave a jerky nod. Then he abruptly clasped his shoulder and pulled him into a brief, hard hug, smacking his back once.
“I’m sorry, man. We all feel this one. I’ll go ask her if she wants me to take Biyen for a while.”
“Thanks.” Logan swayed after Trystan released him.
Reid’s hand on his shoulder steadied him.
“Have you called your mom?” Reid asked.
“Not yet.” So many people would have to be told, not just here in Raven’s Cove. Art was well known up and down the coast. They had just done this for Wilf, yet Logan couldn’t pick apart the steps to figure out what needed to be done first. All he knew was that he had to do it so Sophie wouldn’t be burdened by it.
“I’ll call Glenda. Go see what you can do for Soph.” Reid squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Logan.”
“Thanks.” With boots made of lead, he started back to the hardware store.
*
The local search and rescue crew arrived shortly after the coroner. They assisted in taking Gramps to the coroner’s boat. Given his many health problems, his death was attributed to age and natural causes. Sophie would have to go across to sign paperwork, then he would be cremated and his ashes scattered on the same beach where he had scattered Sophie’s grandmother’s ashes.
She sat down on the steps of the porch next to his empty lawn chair. She wanted to cry again, but her taps had run dry for the moment. Her eyes were sandpaper, her throat a desert.
Logan sat down beside her. He’d been here the whole time as they waited, neither of them saying much. He’d made coffee and answered a few texts and looked over the copy of the will she had pulled from the freezer.
He had answered the phone a couple of times. Word was getting out. People would start arriving soon. Sophie knew how this went and it was a necessary purge of the collective sadness, but she dreaded it. It made it all the more real.
“We should have given him a last ride in his Gator,” she murmured as her gaze fell on the shed and the rickety old machine he had kept running for so long. “To take him to the boat.”
“Oh Christ, Sophie.” Logan choked out a ragged laugh.
“Gramps would have thought that was funny.”
“He really would.” His chuckle became a near sob. “I feel like I wasted years when I should have seen more of him.”
“Don’t do that to yourself.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve done a lot of stupid, selfish things.”
“Have you? Gosh,” she said with mock horror. “Are you human like the rest of us? How sad for you to find out like this.”
“Oh shut up.” There was no heat in his words. He slid closer and looped his arm around her back, tilting her into him. His hand touched the side of her head, urging her to rest it against him so he could set his chin on her hair. “As much as I told myself I hated this place, I always expected it to stay the same. Everything would be here exactly as I left it if I ever came back.”
Her included? Was that what he meant?
She didn’t ask, just closed her eyes, allowing herself to lean into his warmth and strength, absorbing the comfort and closeness as they sat in this moment of quiet grief.
“I’m going to move back in here, if that’s okay. I can’t sleep in that shitty little bed at the house, wondering what you’re dealing with over here.”
“You’d rather the shitty bed upstairs?” She straightened. “You know Glenda will show up as soon as she hears? I should call her,” she realized.
“Reid already did. Between me and Randy, we’ll cover everything at work for the next week or so, but…” His brow furrowed. “I need to be here as much as I can, making sure you and Biyen have everything you need.”
This was what she needed, she secretly acknowledged to herself. This feeling that he cared about her. About them.
A movement on the hill caught her attention.
“Here comes Emma.” She was glad, but also immediately tired. And so it starts. “Will you text Trystan? Let him know he can bring Biyen home?”
“Sure.” He patted for his phone.
Biyen had been devastated when she told him. They had talked briefly about whether he should see Gramps a final time and Biyen had decided he preferred to remember his grandfather alive and joking over jelly beans, asking him to fetch his glasses, and admiring a near-perfect score on a spelling quiz.
Biyen would want to be home now, though. And she needed him. He had got her through the loss of her mother, not that she wanted to put emotional labor on him, but she knew his spirit would bounce back quicker than her own. He would help her do the same just by being himself.
She glanced at Logan’s haggard profile. Maybe Biyen would help him, too.
“Yes,” she said. “Move back in.”
*
The days passed in a blur. Sophie didn’t leave the house, but she was kept busy and rarely alone. Logan moved in. Glenda arrived and took Biyen’s bed while Biyen came into Sophie’s bed with her. Aside from doing Gramps’s laundry and making his bed, Sophie left his room alone. He had always kept it tidy and free of clutter anyway.
Emma spent a lot of time with them, sometimes bringing Storm, often taking home casseroles and other food to store in their freezer since Sophie’s was overflowing after the first day.
People came and went in intermittent bursts. They were kind and sorrowful and they all asked her, “What are you going to do now?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I just want to get through this week,” she kept saying.
It was a lie. She thought constantly about what she would do next. There was no pressing reason to leave, but she didn’t have to stay. That was the stunning reality she kept crashing into, each time she walked out of her bedroom and looked through the open door into Gramps’s empty room. Each time she reached into the cupboard to check his meds. Each time she saw someone else sitting in his chair instead of him.
Biyen liked it here, but he was a resilient kid who easily made friends. He would fit in anywhere. She was very employable and didn’t even have to sell this house. She could rent it out and have a nice little income to supplement whatever life she chose beyond Raven’s Cove.
There was no hurry to make a big decision, but she had spent years feeling trapped here. Left here. Suddenly, the dam had broken open and she had options. Her thoughts couldn’t help but flow outward, exploring all of them.
Why stay when she could go?
“Dude.” Logan’s deeply ironic voice broke into her weighty contemplations. “I cannot express strongly enough how much that isn’t going to happen.”
Sophie had come onto the porch with a casserole dish she had just washed.
It was drizzling and Biyen was on a playdate, taking a much-needed respite from people who wanted to hug him and tell him he had to be strong for his mom. He needed to be what he was—snuggly and kind and entertained by the silliest things so she could be, too.
“My son lost his grandpa,” Nolan said. “I’m here to see if he’s okay.”
Sophie set the borrowed dish with the rest of them in the box on the lawn chair and moved to the end of the porch where she saw the two men standing in the spitting rain, Nolan with his backpack on his shoulder and an overstuffed duffel at his feet.
“Biyen is out right now. I’ll text you when he’s back. Meanwhile, your shit is not coming into that house. It stays on the lawn.”
“Is this your house now? You live here?” Nolan scoffed.
“I’m renting a room. And pro tip? If you want to ask Sophie if you can move in, you fucking ask . You don’t show up expecting it. Especially not before her grandfather is put to rest. Give your head a shake.”
“Nolan,” Sophie called. “You can pitch your tent by the shed until after the service.” That was tomorrow so it would only be two nights. “If you want to take Biyen camping after that, he’d probably like that.”
“I’m staying here,” Nolan told her. “Like, I’m going to find a place here so I can be here and see Biyen more.”
“You and Karma broke up?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you do you, but don’t make any big changes on our account. I don’t know what I’m doing. We might not stay. I haven’t decided.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Logan snapped his head around. His face was sprinkled with rain, his hair beginning to flatten.
“Exactly what I said. I don’t know what I’m doing. I won’t leave you in the lurch at work, but…” She heard the phone ring inside and thought, Gramps will get it.
God, grief was so horrible, constantly hitting you out of the blue.
Glenda picked it up, but Sophie moved inside, expecting it was for her anyway.