Epilogue #3
But he's not wrong. I've seen that look before.
I wore it once myself, behind the ice, the night a prospect asked me whether the gulls were drawn or whether they happened.
There's a particular kind of trouble that walks in unannounced and rearranges your whole face, and Declan, the weathered elder, the man so settled in his solitude it's a personality, just had it walk into his yard with a toolbox and oil-stained coveralls and a refusal to be intimidated by his reputation.
We keep walking. The boardwalk's empty this late, just us and the shuttered carousel and the long string of dark shop windows, mine among them, Black Tide Ink in gold leaf I paid too much for and would pay again.
I think about the woman who painted that sign two years ago — the one who had a law of physics, Freya does not date the club, the one who kept her whole life on a separate shelf and dusted it alone.
She'd be horrified by me. Walking home from a gallery hand in hand with a patched King, the sergeant-at-arms's blessing finally won, her name beside his on a wall, the tower she swore she'd never enter now a place she visits every Sunday for dinner.
She'd be horrified, and she'd be wrong, the way I was wrong about almost everything that mattered.
Because I thought the danger was the club.
I thought the thing that would cage me was the lifestyle — the loyalty, the worry, the women who wait.
And maybe that's the danger for some people.
But it turned out my cage was never the club at all.
It was the certainty. The smartness. The wall I built so high that nothing could get in to hurt me, which meant nothing could get in at all.
I spent twelve years being the one who knew better, and the day I stopped knowing better was the day my actual life started.
A kid from the wrong side of Port Calloway taught me that. With a smuggled-pencil drawing of a harbor and an understanding I never asked for and a single word, always, that he kept saying like it was small.
It was never small. It was the biggest one he had. He told me that, once, and I didn't believe him, and now I've built a whole life on it.
So when I think about Declan tonight — forty-four and grim and settled, a man who's spent fifteen years being the one who knows better — I don't feel sorry for him.
I feel something closer to envy. Because somewhere south of here is a woman with oil on her hands and no patience for his reputation, and she's about to walk into his yard tomorrow and tell him his whole careful life is sentimental, and he's going to hire her even though it terrifies him, and the terror is the best thing that's happened to him in fifteen years. He just doesn't know it yet.
He's forty-four and suddenly aware of his own heartbeat.
She's twenty-six and not the least bit impressed.
Her name's Josie, Briggs said.
And somewhere south of here, at a boat yard at the end of the marina, an old fool who swore he'd never hire anyone is lying awake tonight wondering what, exactly, just hit him.
I take Kieran's hand and we walk home along the dark water, two names the same size on a gallery wall, and I think: good luck, Declan.
We let ourselves into the apartment above the shop — our apartment, now, his charcoal in a jar by the window and his boots next to mine by the door, no hiding left in any of it — and Kieran peels off the shirt he's been fighting all night with visible relief, and I make tea neither of us will finish, and we end up where we always end up, on the couch under the cracked window I still keep open even in winter, his arm around me and my head on the spot above his heart where my hand went flat that first night at the cove.
"Good show tonight," he says, into my hair. "You okay? You went somewhere in your head on the way home."
"I was thinking about the woman who painted that sign downstairs," I tell him. "Two years ago. How sure she was about everything. How she had a whole law of physics."
"Yeah? What happened to her?"
"A prospect bought a roll of paper towels he didn't need," I say, and I feel him laugh, the laugh moving through his chest and into mine.
"Worst thing that ever happened to her. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Turns out they were the same woman the whole time.
She just had to be wrong about one thing first."
He's quiet a moment, his thumb moving slow on my shoulder, over the freckles he drew before he ever saw them.
"I'd do all of it again," he says. "Every cold month. The fire stairs. Theo not looking at me for a year. The ribs." His arm tightens. "All of it. To get here. To this exact couch."
"Don't get sentimental," I say. "It's a Declan trait. We're not Declans."
"We're going to be a little bit Declan tonight. I'm calling it. One night a year, we get to be sentimental."
"Fine. One night." I turn my face up and kiss him, slow, the way he taught me, the way I taught him, neither of us sure anymore which way around it went. "But just one. Tomorrow we go back to being smart."
"Tomorrow," he agrees, and outside the cracked window the salt air comes in cold and the dark water moves, going somewhere, the way it always does, and downstairs my name is on the window in gold, and across the harbor a man is lying awake wondering what hit him, and I am exactly, impossibly, permanently where I'm supposed to be.
You don't get to take it back.
Reversibility was never really our thing.