CHAPTER TEN
The clubhouse is different that evening, fuller, louder, string lights strung up along the garage bay rafters for what Gunnar calls a low key thing, nothing formal, just the charter blowing off steam after a hard week, and I find myself pulled into the middle of it before I've fully decided whether I want to be.
It starts with the supply run schedule, a member asking, half joking, whether anyone actually knows how to read the old inventory logs anymore, and I hear myself answer before I've thought better of it, correcting a miscount on the med kit restock without looking up from the plate of food someone's handed me.
Ten minutes later I'm standing at the end of the oak table with three members and a printed manifest, walking them through what needs restocking before the next run, the old rhythm of it settling over me like a coat I forgot I still owned.
My father's voice keeps surfacing while I work, unbidden, threading through the noise of the party like a current under the surface of a river.
Whatever it takes, Niamh. Just think about it.
I catch myself, twice, glancing toward the corner of the table where my chair should be, half expecting it to look different now that I know the truth of why it's stayed empty, though it looks exactly the same, scarred oak and worn edges, patient in a way that feels almost accusatory.
"You're doing it again," Gunnar says, appearing at my elbow with a beer he doesn't offer me, since he already knows I won't take it, three years apparently not long enough to erase that particular habit either.
"Doing what?"
"Running this place like nobody left." He says it warmly, not an accusation, and clinks his bottle lightly against the water glass I'm holding. "Feels good, doesn't it. Being useful somewhere that actually needs you."
I don't answer that directly, because the honest answer is more complicated than a nod, but I let myself feel it anyway, the specific, uncomplicated satisfaction of being good at something in front of people who remember exactly how good I used to be.
It's easier here, in this loud, string lit garage bay, than it was in the sterile calm of my apartment three hours away, where competence never felt like belonging, only like proof I could survive without it.
Ravinia is across the room, laughing at something one of the older members says, easy and unguarded in a way that still catches me off balance every time I see it.
She's good at this too, I notice, the specific work of making a room feel steadier just by being present in it, and I find myself watching her with something that isn't quite resentment and isn't quite admiration, some complicated third thing I don't have a name for yet.
Thane is at the far end of the garage bay, deep in conversation with two members I don't recognize, and I catch him glancing my way more than once across the noise and the string lights, quick, unguarded looks that he redirects the second he notices me noticing.
I don't know what to do with the specific warmth that spreads through my chest each time it happens, except to name it honestly to myself, once, quietly, and then set it aside for later, because the party is loud and my father is in a hospital bed asking for a chair I still haven't decided whether I'm brave enough to sit in.
It's one of the younger prospects, Dax actually, arm freshly splinted and clearly proud of the dramatic sling he's been given, who says it, loud enough that half the garage bay hears him over the music.
"Hargrove, you're basically running this whole restock. Somebody get her chair back before she starts charging us consulting fees."
A ripple of laughter moves through the group nearest us, easy, affectionate, the kind of joke that would land as nothing at all in any other context.
Except the room goes quieter around the edges almost immediately, a few members glancing toward Ravinia with the specific, involuntary awkwardness of people realizing what's just been said and where she's standing when it landed.
Ravinia's expression doesn't change, not really, just a small, practiced smoothing that I recognize because I've spent three years perfecting the exact same skill.
"Might not be the worst idea," she says lightly, raising her glass slightly toward Dax, defusing it with more grace than the moment probably deserves.
"I hear the last person to sit there ran a tighter ship than I ever will. "
The laughter picks back up, easier now, the awkward moment folding itself back into the general noise of the party, but I catch Ravinia's eyes across the room in the half second before she turns away, and something passes between us that isn't hostile at all, more like two people acknowledging, silently, that they're both standing in the middle of something neither of them fully chose.
She finds me twenty minutes later, near the coffee station, both of us retreating from the noise at roughly the same moment, and there's a beat where neither of us says anything, just two women standing side by side with mugs we're not really drinking from.
"I should say something about earlier," she starts, careful, direct in the way I'm coming to recognize as simply how she moves through hard conversations. "Dax's joke."
"You don't owe me an explanation for a joke you didn't make."
"Maybe not. But I think we should probably stop pretending we don't both know what's actually happening here.
" She turns to face me fully, something steady and unflinching in her expression.
"I've known for a while that this arrangement was never going to be a love story, Niamh.
I went into it with my eyes open. My charter needed stability, my father's health was already declining, and Thane needed the same thing from a different direction.
It made sense on paper. It's made considerably less sense every day since you walked back through that door. "
The honesty of it lands somewhere I'm not braced for, and I find myself gripping my mug a little tighter, unsure what to do with a rival who refuses to actually behave like one.
"I'm not trying to take anything from you," I say finally, because it feels important to say out loud, even if it's not entirely true, even if some part of me has wanted exactly that since the moment I saw her sitting in my chair.
"I know." A small, tired smile. "That's almost the strange part.
I don't think you are, not really, not on purpose.
I think you're just standing in the middle of your own life again, and it happens to have a very inconvenient overlap with mine.
" She sets her mug down, something decided settling into her posture.
"I'm not going to fight a war over something that was never really mine to keep.
I'm not built for that kind of resentment, and frankly, neither is he.
But I'm also not going to pretend I don't need some time to figure out what happens next, for my charter and for myself, before I watch the rest of this play out in real time. "
"That's fair," I manage, and I mean it, more than I expected to.
She studies me a moment longer, something almost gentle in it despite everything sitting underneath the conversation, and then excuses herself to rejoin the party, leaving me standing alone near the coffee station with a mug gone cold in my hands and a conversation I didn't expect settling heavy and unresolved in my chest.
I don't go back into the noise after that. I slip out through the side door instead, into the cold night air, grateful for the sudden quiet after the string lights and the music and the specific exhaustion of being watched by an entire room that remembers exactly who I used to be.
The night has gone properly cold, the first real bite of the season, my breath visible in front of me as I lean against the cannery's outer wall, arms wrapped around myself, replaying Ravinia's words, Dax's joke, the whole strange, layered evening.
Above the waterfront, the fog has cleared just enough that a few stars are visible, faint and cold, the kind of sky Halloway Bay rarely offers this time of year, and I find myself grateful for it anyway, some small mercy on a night that otherwise feels overfull.
I don't know what to do with any of it, the chair that apparently was never really given away, the woman who won't let herself hate me for wanting it back, the man who still hasn't finished the sentence he started in that diner booth two days ago.
My father's request sits underneath all of it like a stone I keep circling without picking up, whatever it takes, Niamh, and I don't know yet whether I have anything close to whatever it would actually take.
I stand there a long time, cold seeping through my jacket, watching my own breath fog and disappear, and it's only when the side door opens behind me, spilling warm light and music out into the dark for a brief second before closing again, that I realize I'm no longer alone out here at all.