Chapter Four – Crew
The farm wakes up mean and pretty, same as always.
Dawn smears orange streaks across the pastures, and the barn smells like hay and rust and a childhood I keep trying to pick up without breaking.
I’m in the gym corner of the old barn before the sun clears the pecans, band looped around the fence post, shoulder whining like it filed a complaint overnight.
“Easy,” Marcus says, stepping in to adjust my elbow. “Mobility first, heroics never.”
“You say that like you’ve met me,” I grunt.
“I keep hoping repetition will work where common sense has failed.”
I snort and keep moving. The band pulls, and I breathe. The joint remembers we’re doing this for the long haul, not the highlight reel. Sweat stings my eyes. Somewhere outside, Mom hums to her hens.
When we finish, Marcus jots notes and gives me the look he gives right before he says something I don’t want to hear.
“What?”
“Rest this afternoon,” he says. “And by rest, I mean rest. No acrobatics. No lifting hay bales to prove a point.”
I lift my good shoulder. “What about lifting my mouth into a smile at a town function against my will?”
“That’s cardio.”
“Great. Consider me compliant.”
He cracks a rare smile. “Harvest Bash?”
“Apparently, I’m pie-adjacent.” I grab a towel. “The committee thinks ‘community engagement’ will remind folks I’m a person and not a cautionary tale.”
“Are you bringing the person you keep not talking about?”
I stare him down. He lifts both hands like a cop in a sitcom and walks away whistling.
By the time I hit the kitchen, passing my brother, Rowan, and my brother-in-law, Dean, along the way, Lila’s at the table with three to-do lists, and Mom’s filling Tupperware dishes like the county might run out of food.
“There he is,” Lila says. “The reluctant celebrity.”
“Don’t say celebrity,” I say, opening the fridge.
“Bailey texted me a photo of your rope work from last night. You didn’t embarrass us.”
“Us?”
“The family.” She sips her coffee. “And civilization.”
I ignore the way my pulse perks at Bailey’s name. “She did most of it. I just followed instructions.”
“Growth,” Mom says without looking up, which is both encouraging and rude.
Lila leans her chin on her hand. “So. Are you going to ask her to go to the Bash with you, or are you planning on pining like a handsome barn ghost in flannel?”
“I don’t pine.”
“That’s adorable,” she says. “Tell it to your face.”
“Leave him alone,” Mom says mildly, sliding a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me. “But also, if you are going to pine, at least take dessert to share.”
I fork eggs into my mouth to avoid words. Neither woman is fooled.
My phone buzzes on the table. David again. I ignore the first call. The second. On the third, I give in.
“Wright,” he says, voice caffeinated and already disappointed. “I’m sending media to the Bash. Local team with small-town fluff. Smile, hold a pie, pretend you love humanity.”
“I do love humanity,” I say. “I just prefer the parts that aren’t holding microphones.”
“Too late. They’re coming. Be charming.”
“Define ‘charming’.”
“Not the version where you brood and glare like a Regency duke at war with feelings.”
I hang up to preserve the friendship.
“Agent?” Lila asks.
“Saboteur,” I correct.
I escape before they can interrogate me more.
The hours drag until dusk, because that’s what time does when you’re waiting to put your body somewhere your brain already is.
I take a long shower that does not fix my personality, stare at my reflection until the man in the mirror looks back, as if he might be the kind who can say what needs saying, then pull on a navy Henley. Jeans. Boots. Jacket. Keys.
At the cove, the park by the marina is dressed up like a memory.
String lights zigzag from oak to oak. Booths line the path with homemade jam, carved birds, and Holt’s questionable T-shirts that should require a permit.
Kids run feral in tidy shoes. The band on the gazebo plays something that sounds like three different songs at once and, somehow, still works.
People notice me. There’s an initial pop of attention—eyebrows, whispers, a few brave “Hey, man, good to have you back”—and then it settles.
Coral Bell Cove gets bored with its own gossip faster than outsiders think.
The town wants you to belong more than it wants to punish you for leaving.
It’s not a trap; it’s a door you can walk through if you quit being dramatic.
Daisy materializes at my elbow with a pie I’d fight God for. “No touching,” she warns. “That’s for the auction.”
“What if it falls and I heroically catch it with my face?”
“Then I sell you napkins,” she says, shoving a fork into my hand anyway. “Emergency taste test. I need to know if the new crust ratio is illegal.”
I take a bite and see colors. “This is a crime.”
“Excellent,” she says and vanishes in a flourish of apron.
A familiar laugh skates over the noise, and my spine recognizes it before my head finishes turning.
Bailey stands by the cider tent talking to Lila and Ivy, and for a second, I forget the concepts of feet, earth, or weather.
She’s not overdressed, not showy—just…her.
Soft sweater the color of late peaches, skirt that looks like it was cut from a cloud, and boots that could fight a hurricane.
Her hair’s half up, the other half conspiring with the wind, and there’s a streak of flour on her wrist like she lost a fight with Daisy’s kitchen.
She tips her head back to laugh again at something Lila says, and I have to fight the urge to walk into traffic just to reset my brain.
I’m moving before I tell myself to. The crowd parts on muscle memory. People say my name like we share a secret that’s not mine to keep. Ivy spots me first and grins like she’s emceeing fate.
“Wright,” she singsongs. “We were debating whether you’d last longer than the five minutes of hellos.”
“Lucky me, I made it ten,” I say, eyes on Bailey because lying is rude.
“Hi,” Bailey says, and the word settles like a landing I’ve been missing for years.
“Hi,” I say back, very sophisticated.
Ivy pops a caramel in her mouth. “God, I love being right in the middle of this.”
“Go sing to people,” Bailey tells her, even though we all know Ivy just finished up a worldwide tour.
“In thirty,” Ivy says. “In the meantime, we have a pie auction to rig.”
“Rig?” I echo.
“Strategically influence,” Lila corrects. “Don’t you want to raise money for the library roof?”
“Yes,” I say. “I also want to survive the evening without becoming a meme.”
“Impossible,” Ivy chirps. “Okay, lover boys and girls, to the gazebo. The auction’s starting.”
We shuffle toward the stage. I end up beside Bailey on the bottom step, our shoulders almost touching.
The air is bright and cold and tastes like cinnamon and nerves.
A kid runs past and smacks my thigh by accident.
I catch him by the back of his hoodie and set him upright.
His mom mouths, “Thank you,” like I did something heroic.
Onstage, the mayor taps a mic until it shrieks. I flinch. Bailey grins without looking at me.
“Nerves?” she murmurs.
“Just don’t like being told when to be loud,” I say.
Her mouth curves. “Same.”
The first pies go fast. People bid like it’s a sport, which here it is.
Daisy’s triple-berry sparks a fight between two retired Coast Guard chiefs that ends with the mayor threatening to call their old CO.
Holt auctions a Butter Bars monstrosity that shouldn’t exist and still goes for $110 because Coral Bell Cove has lost its mind.
“Next up,” the mayor crows, “a Wright family classic: Mom Wright’s pecan pie—baked under the supervision of her semi-competent sons!”
The crowd roars. Mom blushes. Lila screams her bid of twenty. The number rockets to seventy, then ninety, then a hundred and thirty because nostalgia is a drug.
I clap and do not think about microphones or expectations or the way people still want us to be fine in public, even when, in private, we are all lopsided. Then the mayor says my name, and I remember the thing about microphones.
“And now—” he booms, winking like a magician about to saw a volunteer in half.
“A special lot. Donated by A Page in Time and our very own lighthouse lady: a Literary Lovers’ Basket—rare romance hardcovers, handpicked by Bailey, and one private after-hours story hour for two at the lighthouse—tea and cookies included. ”
The crowd oohs like it has rehearsed.
My ears ring. Beside me, Bailey goes very still and then very composed, like a cat deciding whether to panic in public.
She leans toward the mayor. “That’s not what I called it.”
“Artistic license,” he stage-whispers. “Roll with it.”
A man near the front yells, “Fifty!” and a woman from the boardwalk counterbids with “Seventy!” and suddenly, there’s a whole buffet of strangers trying to buy time in a room I’ve only just remembered how to breathe inside of.
Something territorial and irrational rises in me like a tide that didn’t check the schedule.
I do not like that feeling. I also do not ignore it.
“Two hundred,” I say, hand up because apparently I like escalation.
The crowd pivots. Bailey’s head whips toward me, eyes wide with startled amusement that she tries to throttle into exasperation and fails.
“Two ten,” calls a fisherman I’ve known since I was ten.
“Two fifty,” I say, because reason is on lunch break.
“Crew,” Bailey murmurs, voice low. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” It’s not smooth, and it’s not a line. It’s simply the truest sentence I have spoken in public in years.
Her throat works. The corners of her mouth soften. She looks away like the lights are too bright and then back at me like maybe they aren’t the point.
“Two seventy,” someone shouts.
“Three hundred,” I counter, because at this point I’m bidding on air and the right not to watch a stranger sit where I plan to apologize properly.
“Three fifty!”
“Four,” I say, and the murmurs go up an octave.
The mayor milks it. “Four hundred going once… going twice…”
“Sold,” I say under my breath at the same time he does out loud.
Applause like rain on a tin roof. Ivy wolf-whistles. Lila covers her mouth, eyes laughing. Mom dabs at her eyes like I just rode a bike without training wheels.
Bailey stands very straight, hands folded, cheeks pink. “Congratulations,” she says softly when the noise dips. “You just paid four hundred dollars for cookies.”
“Bargain,” I tell her. And then, because I cannot help myself, I ask, “Does the basket come with a translator for your sarcasm?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
The auction rolls on, and I don’t hear most of it. The band tunes behind the gazebo. People drift off toward cider and gossip and the dance lawn where couples start swaying out of habit. The sky goes that deep cobalt that makes the string lights look like constellations that sat down to rest.
“Walk?” I ask, when the crowd thins enough that we can slip away without three aunties drafting a marriage license.
She considers, then nods once. “One lap.”
We skirt the edge of the pier, boots thudding soft on planks gone damp with the evening. The bay lifts and lowers itself like it’s breathing. Far out, a buoy clangs, the sound as steady as the beat I can’t slow down.
“You didn’t have to bid,” she says finally, eyes on the water.
“I wanted to keep the lighthouse on our schedule,” I say. “Not the internet’s.”
She huffs something that’s almost a laugh. “You and Lila with your schedules.”
“I’m a middle child in a loud family,” I say. “Schedules are the only way to be heard.”
She glances over, amused. “You were very heard tonight.”
“Yeah,” I say, and rueful doesn’t even begin to cover it. “About that.”
We stop at the end of the pier. The town noise turns to a wash. The wind is a careful hand on the back of my neck.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words landing quieter than I planned, truer than I let myself hope. “For the hallway. For the way I didn’t stop him. For how I let silence do my talking and pretended that wasn’t the same as choosing a side.”
She closes her eyes, then opens them again. “You were a kid.”
“So were you,” I say. “And you deserved a man even then.”
Her breath fogs. “Heroics don’t fix it.”
“I know,” I say. “But I can tell the truth about it. And I can do better now if you let me. If you don’t, I’ll still do better. You just won’t have to see it.”
We look at each other long enough for the cold to find the open edges of our clothes. The lights back onshore swing in their own breeze. Somewhere behind us, Ivy’s voice climbs a scale and rides it like a bird that finally remembered the air is hers.
Bailey breaks first, but it’s not retreat. It’s mercy. “You paid four hundred dollars for cookies,” she says, mouth curving. “You get at least one.”
“Just one?”
“Don’t be greedy.”
“Can I be specific? Chocolate chip?”
“Chaos,” she says automatically, and then blinks because she already knows the whole stupid lexicon of my life.
We start back toward the park. On the last plank before dirt, my boot slips. Reflex has me grabbing for the rail with my left hand. Her hand hits my chest at the same time—steadying me, steadying us—and stays there a beat longer than gravity requires.
The air goes loud as blood.
“Careful,” she says, not moving her hand.
“I’m trying,” I answer, not moving mine when it finds her wrist.
We stand like idiots with our bodies inventing a language we’re barely qualified to speak. Then she slides her hand away. I let her, yet she doesn’t step far.
At the gazebo, the band counts off. Ivy leans into the mic, eyes on the crowd like she’s about to make trouble and call it harmony. I stand beside Bailey in the soft spill of light and pretend the beating thing in my chest is a drum the band can hear.
“Tomorrow,” I say, surprising myself because the word sounds like a plan.
She arches a brow. “What’s tomorrow?”
“Lantern inspection,” I say. “And cookies.”
She pretends to deliberate. “Bring your own thermos.”
“Always.”
We don’t touch again. We don’t kiss. We don’t make promises with our mouths that our bodies can’t hold. We just stand there while Ivy sings something that sounds like the start of a life, and for once, I don’t mind being seen.
When the song ends, and the crowd roars, and the night leans in close, I know two things with the clean certainty rehab never gives me: I am not running. And I am not playing to the cameras that secretly film my every move.
I’m playing to the light.
Which is to say, I’m playing to her.