Chapter 7 #2
She finishes the herbs. Then she goes to the big chest freezer in the corner—the kind that requires commitment, the kind that says I am a person who plans ahead—and lifts the lid and rummages through it with the practiced ease of someone who knows exactly what’s in there and where.
“Here,” she says, and sets a large ziplock bag on the counter. Lumpia, a full batch, frozen in neat rows. “Pork and vegetable. They fry straight from frozen, four minutes each side. Don’t crowd the pan.”
I look at the bag. There are at least thirty pieces in it.
“Liana—”
“You’re going to have a complicated summer,” she says, simply, and goes to check the oven. “You should have lumpia on hand. It doesn’t solve anything but it helps.”
I pick up the bag. It is cold and solid and generous in the way that Liana is generous: without theater, without requiring acknowledgment, as though feeding people well is simply the obvious response to them being in the world and occasionally having a difficult time of it.
“Thank you,” I say.
She pulls a tray of biko from the oven. The smell of it arriving all at once, brown sugar and coconut cream, the kakanin my grandmother made on Sunday afternoons, Liana’s version close enough to catch me somewhere unguarded in the chest the way it always does.
“The rectangular pan,” she says. “That one’s for you. Not the tourists.”
She looks at me then, properly, over the oven tray. Her expression is kind without being careful. The kind of kind that doesn’t need to dress itself up.
“He stayed,” she says. “He stayed to work with you when he thought you’d moved on.”
“It’s a professional situation,” I say, one more time, with somewhat less conviction than the previous attempts.
Liana cuts the biko into squares with the clean authority of someone who has done this a thousand times. “Sure,” she says. “Take the lumpia. Come back when the biko’s cool and I’ll pack it up for you.”
I take the lumpia.
Nugget is waiting on the porch when I come out, sitting back on his haunches with his wings neatly folded and his blue-bronze head tilted in the manner of a creature who considers himself responsible for all arrivals and departures on this property.
He is, up close, extremely large. He smells like warm metal and something faintly woody, like embers.
He looks at me with amber eyes.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
He makes the not-quite-growl, not-quite-chirp sound. It has a quality that I can only describe as knowing.
“You’re a chicken dog,” I say. “You don’t get an opinion.”
He watches me walk down the path with the patient attention of an animal who understands more than is convenient, and I carry the frozen lumpia and the smell of biko and the warmth of having been fed by someone who knew what I needed before I did, all the way back across town to the lake.
The fury lasts until Tuesday, which is longer than Rex predicted and shorter than I would have liked.
On Saturday afternoon, I come back from Liana’s to find that the third plank from the left on the main dock—the one I have been stepping carefully around for six weeks, the one that has been on my mental list of things to address since before the season started, the one I keep meaning to get to on a day when I don’t have tours—has been replaced.
New plank. Correct wood. Flush with the others, the nail heads set properly, the edges sanded. It is, objectively, a better repair job than I would have done myself.
I stand on it. It doesn’t flex.
I look at the equipment shed.
Muir is inside, returning the tools to their correct places.
He doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t come out to show me, doesn’t gesture toward it, doesn’t arrange to be nearby when I notice.
He is putting tools away because tools belong in their places, and when he is finished he nods at me once over the shed door—professional, clean, not waiting for anything—and goes back to the rigging check he was running before the plank project apparently presented itself and he addressed it.
I go inside the Snack Hut and rearrange the display case with more care than strictly necessary.
Sunday morning arrives with the kind of quiet that only comes before the week properly starts. I’m checking the equipment inventory when Muir comes in from the dock, carrying the clipboard with the week’s dive logs.
“Morning,” he says, setting it on the shelf. “Rigging’s all checked.”
“Thanks.” I don’t look up from the life vest I’m inspecting. “I heard you and Rex had dinner the other night.”
There’s a pause. Not long enough to be awkward, just long enough to acknowledge that we both know what that dinner was about.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice level. “Just worked some things out. Logistics for the summer schedule.”
“Right.” I fold the vest carefully. “Well. Good.”
“It’s fine,” he says, and there’s something in his tone that’s almost gentle, which is worse somehow than if he’d been defensive. “Everything’s fine.”
I nod, still not looking at him. The conversation has already ended, really. There’s nothing more to say about it—nothing that matters, anyway. He’s here. Rex told him the truth. We’re all moving forward in the same professional direction, maintaining the same careful distance.
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks for the plank, by the way. You didn’t have to—”
“It needed doing,” he says simply. “It’s done.”
He leaves before I can respond, heading back out to the dock with the same unhurried efficiency he brings to everything. I watch him go, then return to my inventory, and the morning settles back into its ordinary rhythm as if nothing has shifted at all.
Except everything has.
On Monday, there is a boy.
He is nine or possibly ten—I am not good at children’s ages, they all seem simultaneously younger and more capable than I expect—and his name is Tomás, and he has been brought to the dock by his grandmother, who is visiting from Rochester and has decided that this summer her grandson will learn to swim if it takes the entire month of July.
Tomás does not want to learn to swim. This is evident from the way he is sitting on the dock’s edge with his arms folded and his feet—in swimming trunks, his grandmother has at least won that battle—hanging over the water with the expression of a child engaged in a principled protest.
“He’s afraid,” the grandmother tells me, in a quiet aside. “We tried lessons in the pool last year but pools felt—enclosed, she said. The instructor thought open water might be better. Fresh start.”
I look at Tomás. Tomás is looking at the lake with the specific expression of someone who has decided they and the lake have irreconcilable differences.
“Hey,” I say, sitting down beside him. Not crouching—sitting, properly, with my legs hanging off the dock the same way his are. “What’s the problem with the water?”
“It’s very deep,” Tomás says.
“It is,” I agree.
“You can’t see the bottom.”
“Not from here. You can in the shallows, at the south end.” I look at the water with him. “You know what’s interesting about not seeing the bottom?”
He looks at me with cautious nine-year-old skepticism. “What?”
“It means the lake has a lot of space to put things it wants to keep private. My grandmother used to say that bodies of water with deep centers are the ones with the most secrets. And I’ve found, in my experience, that the secrets are usually the good kind.”
Tomás considers this. “Like what?”
“Like the fact that the eastern shelf has a colony of freshwater mussels that have been there for decades. Or that the pickerel in the north end of the lake are very old and very opinionated and will absolutely swim up to you if you hold still long enough. The deep part isn’t the danger. It’s the—backstory.”
He looks at the water again. Something in his expression has shifted fractionally, from closed to merely uncertain.
I am about to offer to walk him into the shallows myself when Muir comes along the dock behind us, returning from the gear shed with a coil of rope that needs mending. He takes in the situation in one quiet assessment and stops.
“The south shallows are good this time of day,” he says, to no one specifically, leaning on the dock railing with the rope in his hands. “Sandy bottom. You can see straight to it in the sun. Water’s about knee-deep for the first stretch.”
Tomás looks at him. “How deep does it get after that?”
“Gradually,” Muir says. “It doesn’t rush. The lake’s patient.”
There is something in how he says it that lands differently than the same words would from someone performing reassurance. Tomás appears to receive it as such.
“I’ll go to the knee-deep part,” Tomás announces, to his grandmother, who makes the face of a woman receiving an unexpected gift.
I look at Muir. He’s already reading the situation—the way I’ve positioned myself slightly back from Tomás, the careful distance I’ve maintained, the way I offered information instead of hands-on guidance.
He knows how I move around children, about the discomfort that lives in my chest when it comes to teaching them anything in the water.
I don’t know how he knows this. Four years away and he still reads me like the lake reads the weather.
“I can take him down to the shallows,” Muir says, straightforward, not making it a question. “You finish the equipment check. We’ll be back in an hour.”
It’s a rescue, the way he frames it. A division of labor, practical and clean, but a rescue nonetheless.
“That would be—” I stop. Start again. “Thank you.”
Muir nods, already turning to Tomás with the rope still in his hands. “Come on then. Let’s see what the lake wants to show you.”
Tomás follows him without hesitation, his earlier uncertainty evaporating in the face of Muir’s calm certainty.
I watch them walk down the dock together—Muir pointing out the way the light hits the water differently at different depths, Tomás asking questions that Muir answers with the patience of someone who genuinely believes nine-year-olds deserve real information.
They’re gone for fifty-three minutes. When they return, Tomás is soaked and grinning, his grandmother taking photographs with the enthusiasm of someone who has witnessed a minor miracle.
Muir emerges from the water with water streaming off his shoulders, his ponytail half-loose and dripping, and I have to force myself to look away.
That’s all it takes—the sight of him moving through the shallow water with Tomás, the way the afternoon light catches him as he turns to answer another question.
Then he opens his mouth.
“—the difference between the sandy shelf and the drop-off,” he’s saying to Tomás, his Scottish brogue rolling through the words like stones in a river, and I forget how to breathe.
That accent. That voice. Four years and it still does something to me that I don’t have words for.
“The lake tells you things if you pay attention to how the water feels.”
When they leave, Tomás looks back at the dock and waves at Muir, who’s already returned to his work—coiling rope, checking rigging, moving through the ordinary tasks of dock maintenance with the same unhurried focus he brought to teaching a frightened boy that the deep water wasn’t something to fear.
He lifts a hand in acknowledgment, not making it into a moment, just a simple recognition that yes, he sees the boy, and yes, it was good.
I get in the Snack Hut and rearrange the biko display.
On Tuesday, the coffee appears.
Not offered—simply there. Three cups in a cardboard carrier, one each for me and Rex and whoever else needs one, sitting on the equipment shed’s outer shelf at seven fifty when I arrive, which means Muir went to the marina coffee cart, which opens at six-thirty, before he came to the dock.
I open the carrier. There is a cup with my name on it and another with Rex’s and a third with no name on it, presumably Muir’s own, and they are all still hot, which means he timed it correctly, which means he has been paying attention to what time I arrive.
I drink my coffee.
Mine is exactly right—the correct amount of milk, the sweetness I don’t always order but always want—and I think about whether I mentioned how I take it at any point in the last three weeks.
I cannot remember specifically saying it.
I think about what it means that he knows it anyway.
My defenses were built for grand gestures, for speeches and apologies and dramatic arrivals in the rain, for things that announce themselves and are easy to dismiss.
Steadiness is not something I have a defense for.
Steadiness arrives like water does. Without announcement, finding all the available space.
I’m noting information. That’s all.
Phineas is at the dock edge when I come out with my coffee, sitting on the lower rung of the dock ladder with his feet in the water and a small collection of mussels in a bucket beside him, which means he has been doing his rounds in the north inlet and has found something worth checking.
“Morning,” he says, in that soft way of his, looking up with his yellow eyes.
“Morning, Phineas.” I sit on the dock above him. “What did you find?”
“The mussel colony on the eastern shelf is expanding.” He sounds pleased in the cautious way he always sounds pleased, like he is not entirely sure good news is something he is allowed to report. “Dr. Davis will want to know. I took samples.”
“I’ll mention it next survey dive.” I look at the bucket. “You heard anything interesting lately? In the waterways?”
Phineas is the best intelligence network in Harmony Glen. He does not know this about himself. He swims every connected waterway from the lake to the outer marsh, and the fish are not bright but the water is, and Phineas listens to both without prejudice.
He tilts his head, thinking. “There’s a selkie doing something with the water in the north cove,” he says.
“Not magic, just attention. Like someone paying attention to a place. I hear it when I swim through.” He picks up a mussel and turns it in his fingers.
“The water feels different in a place where someone is paying real attention to it. It makes a kind of—warmth.”
I look at my coffee.
“That’s interesting,” I say, in a completely neutral voice.
“Mm,” Phineas says, and sets the mussel back in his bucket with the focused care of someone who treats all living things as being worth the effort.
The morning tour group arrives at the end of the dock, and I go to meet them, and I do not think about north coves or warmth or the way coffee tastes when someone has paid attention to how you take it.