Chapter 6
MUIR
My mother taught me about sirena voices when I was eight.
A sirena’s voice broadcasts emotional truth beneath the words—the frequency that lives in the chest and moves through air like water through rock.
That part can’t be controlled. It says what’s actually happening, regardless of what the words say.
Listen below the words, she told me. That’s where the truth is.
I heard it at the bonfire five nights ago.
Cora sang for the tourists and townspeople, her voice warm and calibrated, giving the audience exactly what it needed. Professional. Managed. But underneath—just for half a verse before she pulled it back—something slipped through. An ache so specific and so old I knew its shape immediately.
She is not settled.
She hasn’t been settled in four years.
I’ve spent five days not doing anything with that information because it wasn’t mine to have. She didn’t know I was there. Standing at the edge of her firelight receiving transmissions she didn’t send deliberately is not something a decent person acts on.
I know this.
I’m still thinking about it constantly.
I leave The Snack Hut as Rex and Cora are closing down and walk the shore path back toward the cottage.
The path bends through old pines, and there’s a gap between two trees. I take a detour to enjoy the less cultivated parts of Harmony Glen. The light is good, the trees add a crisp scent by the water, and I’ve been focused on tourists and equipment for six hours.
As I follow a random path, I hear her.
She’s singing.
Not the bonfire version. This is what the voice does when it thinks no one is listening. I’m too far for words, too far for melody, just close enough to catch the edge of it. Four years of unvoiced feeling given form in the acoustic space between her dock and the water and the early stars.
It’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever accidentally witnessed.
I make myself move. Quietly. She didn’t choose to give me this. And I refuse to take something she did not offer me freely.
I walk without looking back.
The frequency follows me anyway. The water carries things, and the water is everywhere here.
Rex is waiting in the marina parking lot when I arrive. He’s leaning against his truck with his arms crossed, backlit by the last of the evening light.
His shoulders are broad enough to block out half the sky—the kind of muscular that comes from being equally at home in water or on land, a surfer’s ease translated into something more dangerous.
His skin is deep brown, the tan of someone who lives in the sun and the lake without apology. Dark hair escapes from under a backwards baseball cap.
When he sees me, he straightens, and the movement is fluid, economical—a were-shark’s efficiency even in stillness.
“Thought I’d find you here,” he says.
I stop a few feet away. “I thought you told Cora you had a volunteer thing to do?”
“Yes. This is it.” He gestures toward the road. “Come on. Let’s get a beer.”
Hip Hops is a local pub with a deck in the back along the river. The interior is all weathered wood and worn floors, a place that caters to locals, not tourists. Old wooden tables scarred with decades of use, a bar that’s seen better days, string lights strung haphazardly across the deck outside.
We take a table in the corner where the sound of the river covers conversation, where the smell of old wood and water and fried food mingles with the night air.
The server who brings our beers is a woman in her fifties, compact and efficient, with the weathered face that comes from years of working riverside establishments.
Her arms are strong, her movements practiced.
She sets the glasses down with the ease of someone who’s done this ten thousand times, doesn’t linger, doesn’t pry. Just leaves us to it.
Rex drinks half of his in one pull, sets it down, and looks at me.
“I love Cora,” he says.
I go very still, and brace for what he’s going to tell me.
“Not the way you think,” he continues. His voice is even. Matter-of-fact. “We’re best friends. Family without the blood relation. That’s it. That’s all it’s ever been.”
I don’t say anything.
“Our romantic relationship isn’t real,” Rex says. “She panicked when she heard you were in town and said the first thing that came out. I covered for her because that’s what I do. We agreed to hold the line for the summer so she wouldn’t have to deal with—” He gestures toward me vaguely. “This.”
The information lands like a stone in still water.
“Right,” I manage.
Rex leans forward. His elbows hit the table. The golden retriever energy is gone.
What’s looking at me now is pure predator—sharp-eyed, assessing, utterly focused. His shoulders shift, muscles tightening under his skin like something ancient waking up. His jaw sets differently.
When he speaks, his voice is a half octave lower, and his eyes take on the black, fathomless depths of the deep ocean. His teeth grow longer, sharper—just enough for me to see what lies beneath the sunshiney cheer.
“Here’s the thing,” he says. “I know there’s something more between you two. I’ve known since the first day you started with us. And I’m telling you this because every day that you’re here, flusters her more and more. I underestimated how much you meant to her.”
I nod once.
“So, I’m not sure about your intentions, if you just needed closure or whatever the hell…
but if you’re just going to break her heart again—” His eyes don’t blink.
Don’t waver. “Leave now. Walk away clean. Because if you stay and you hurt her again, I will tear you apart. Literally tear you apart.” A pause.
“And I’ll sleep soundly afterward. We both know I can do that. ”
The threat hangs in the air between us.
I believe him completely.
“I had to—” I start.
“No.” Rex’s voice cuts like a blade. “I don’t want to hear it.”
The server appears with a basket of wings. Rex takes one without breaking eye contact, bites into it with those still-sharp teeth, and sets it down.
“I made a mistake,” he says, wiping his fingers on a napkin before balling it up.
“I trusted you completely when you were just some anonymous guy looking for work. Gave you the job, brought you into our operation, didn’t ask the hard questions.
” He takes another wing. “Because of my lapse in judgment, Cora felt obligated to keep you on. Despite how uncomfortable it makes her because of your history.”
I go still.
“I won’t make that mistake again.” He finishes the wing and reaches for another. “So if you have something to say—anything to explain or confess—you say it to Cora. Not me. If she lets you.” His eyes are still black, still fathomless. “And if she doesn’t let you? That’s the pill you swallow.”
The server returns with Rex’s second burger. He nods his thanks, takes a massive bite, chews, swallows.
“Then why are you telling me this?” I ask. “Why tell me about the fake dating at all?”
Rex sets down the burger and leans forward again. “Because I see what it’s costing her. Every single day you’re there, working beside her, existing in her space—it’s tearing her apart.”
He picks up a fry, examines it. “This conversation? This is me protecting her too. Giving you information. Giving you a chance to understand what you’re dealing with and what’s at stake.”
He eats the fry.
“So maybe,” he continues, voice dropping even lower, “you’ll finally have the skin to actually talk to her. Without worrying I’ll be jealous. Without whatever excuse you’ve been telling yourself.”
The word lands with deliberate weight. Skin, not guts or balls, even. Skin.
The thing I shed and reclaim. The thing that defines what I am.
“I don’t need you to make me another obstacle to whatever you’re doing here, Muir. I never was, and I refuse to be now or going forward.”
The server appears again with a refill for Rex’s beer. He drains the last of the first one and slides it toward her, taking the fresh glass with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
“I’m not here to hurt her,” I say quietly.
“Then be all in.” Rex’s voice is flat. Final. He takes a long drink. “A hundred percent. No half-measures. No middle ground that looks like kindness but isn’t. You stay, you show up, you do the work.” He sets the glass down. “Or you leave now and never come back.”
“I’m all in.”
He holds my gaze for another three seconds, still holding a half-eaten fry. Then he leans back.
The server arrives with onion rings.
Rex’s entire demeanor shifts. The predator vanishes. His shoulders relax, dropping back to their normal span.
The fathomless black recedes from his eyes, replaced by warm brown. His teeth return to human proportions. He’s all smiles and sunshine once more, that golden retriever enthusiasm rising again like the sun.
He thanks the server with genuine warmth, reaching for an onion ring, making an appreciative sound.
“God, these are perfect,” he says, like he didn’t just threaten to dismember me and dissect my entire moral character two minutes ago. “You want some? They do this beer batter thing—”
I stare at him.
He grins and takes another ring, then reaches for his burger.
I pick up my beer and drink, watching him demolish food with the casual efficiency of someone who burns through calories like a furnace.
The whiplash from bloodthirsty protector to cheerful eating companion is genuinely impressive. His muscles work as he eats, easy and unselfconscious, the physical confidence of someone who’s never questioned his place in the world.
He signals the server for more wings.
“You’re terrifying,” I say.
“I know.” He doesn’t look up from his food. “But I’m also right.”
He is.
I have work to do.