Prologue #3
I think, too, about the marina, and the licensing, and the expansion projects, and all the ways I've let being useful stand in for being known.
My father used to say a man builds two things in his life that matter — the work he leaves behind, and the people he lets close enough to actually see him doing it.
I've spent thirty years perfecting the first one.
I'm only just beginning to understand how badly I've neglected the second, and how one particular person has been standing right beside me the entire time, patiently waiting for me to notice the neglect wasn't hers to fix.
There's a version of tonight where I pick up the phone and call her right now, at midnight, and try to say some fumbling, half-formed version of what's sitting in my chest. I actually consider it.
I get as far as pulling up her contact, my thumb hovering over the call button, before I lose my nerve and set the phone face-down on the nightstand instead.
Not tonight. I'm not ready tonight. But something in me registers the fact that I got as far as I did — further than I ever have before — and files it away as evidence of how close to the surface this has finally risen.
Outside, the harbor keeps doing what it's always done, tide sliding in and out on its own indifferent schedule, utterly unconcerned with the small human dramas playing out along its edges.
Anchor Bay sleeps the way it always sleeps, boats creaking gently at their moorings, the neon sign outside The Crow's Nest still glowing faintly down the block, Sullivan probably closing up the bar right about now the way he does every night, Margot's laugh likely still echoing somewhere behind him if the last few weeks are anything to go by.
Life in this town keeps moving whether or not I'm ready for the next chapter of mine. My father used to say the ocean doesn't wait for anyone to be ready. It just keeps coming in, steady and patient, until eventually you either learn to move with it or you get left behind by it entirely.
I think about Wren's laugh, about the specific sound of it, about how it's been the background music to almost every good memory I have.
I think about the ten thousand small moments that have quietly, invisibly built toward whatever's about to happen next, none of them dramatic enough on their own to notice, all of them together impossible to ignore now that I've finally started looking.
Fifteen years. I turn the number over one more time before sleep finally takes me, and somewhere in the last conscious thought I have before the dark pulls me under, I understand — dimly, imperfectly, but for the first time with something like real clarity — that the story I've been telling myself about my own life has been missing its most important character the entire time, standing right there in the room with me, waiting for me to finally read the whole page instead of skimming past the parts that scared me most.
Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow I'll go see her, and maybe, finally, I'll start paying attention.
I don't dream, or if I do, I don't remember it by morning. What I do remember, when my alarm goes off six hours later, is waking up with her name already in my head, the way it so often is lately, and reaching for my phone before I've even opened both eyes.
There's a text waiting, sent an hour ago, timestamped somewhere in the small hours when neither of us should have been awake.
Wren: Don't forget. 2pm. And bring actual answers this time, not vague noises about being "fine."
I lie there a moment, staring at the ceiling, that same unfamiliar warmth spreading through my chest again. I type back a single word.
Me: Deal.
It's such a small exchange. It shouldn't mean anything. It's the kind of message we've traded a thousand times in a thousand forms over fifteen years, utterly unremarkable on its surface.
But I get up that morning feeling lighter than I have in weeks, and some part of me — quiet, patient, finally awake after fifteen years of dozing — already knows exactly why.
I shower, dress, make coffee I don't finish because I keep checking the clock, counting down hours to a routine physical like it's something more than that.
By the time I lock up the house and head for the truck, I've almost convinced myself I'm being ridiculous, that this is nothing, that today is a day like every other day I've spent orbiting Wren Calloway without ever quite landing.
I don't yet know how wrong I am. I don't know that this ordinary Tuesday is about to be the first domino in a chain that ends with everything — the club, the town, my own carefully guarded heart — rearranged into a shape I never let myself imagine.
All I know, driving toward the clinic with the morning light coming up gold over the harbor, is that I'm looking forward to seeing her more than I have any reasonable right to be, and that the feeling, whatever it is, isn't going away this time.
Fifteen years of waiting are about to run out of road.