Chapter 5 #2
“Good boy,” Rone said, down on the planks, both hands reaching without thinking.
One slid around the dog’s wet ruff, the other braced his shoulder.
Echo leaned into all of it, shaking once, hard.
A spray of dark water arched and patterned their faces, and Isobel laughed again, this time without the edge.
She knelt and palmed the dog’s chest, feeling the heavy pound of his heart.
Echo bumped her chin with his nose as if to say, See? Do you not trust me by now?
“You followed him?” she asked, checking the dog’s legs, the pads of his feet, the meat of his shoulders. No cuts, only scrapes. A smear of soot along one flank made him look rakish. Echo sneezed as if in agreement.
Rone looked down the row where smoke still smeared the air, smoothed Echo’s ears, and didn’t hide the shake that ran through his fingers after.
Echo stood and leaned into Rone’s knees, then did the same to Isobel, distributing his weight like he was reinforcing both of them. It worked. Some rib-deep tightness let go.
“Home.” Rone pointed to her boat, not his.
They walked back slowly. People had started to drift inside, conversations dissolving into the clink of cups in sinks, the murmur of doors shutting. The dockmaster made notes, like handwriting could keep the night from happening again. Somewhere, a radio crackled, someone reporting “contained.”
By the time they reached Family First, the air inside was almost cool.
It was absurdly comforting, that low hum—a machine doing what it promised.
Echo leapt into the cockpit and executed a full-body shake that would have mortified him if he were human.
He looked pleased with the arc of droplets he flung across Rone’s shirt. Rone didn’t complain.
He grabbed the handle and winced.
“Sit,” she said softly, opening the door to the salon.
“Isobel—”
“Please.” She didn’t lace it with force this time. Only care.
He obeyed like the word itself had eased something shut down in him.
He sank onto the settee, the ache in his shoulders visible now that urgency had let go.
Echo hopped up beside him without permission and pressed against his thigh, panting, tongue lolling.
Rone’s left hand found the dog’s collar and held.
Isobel got a bowl and filled it with cool water.
She knelt in front of Rone. Closer than before. The room felt smaller with Echo taking up the middle and the night crowding the windows. Close wasn’t unwelcome. It felt like the right size for hearing truth.
“Let me see,” she said.
He offered his hand. Not sheepish, not dramatizing. Simply giving her the thing she’d asked for. The bandage had held through all the running and the dock crawl. The edges were damp now. She peeled the tape back carefully.
The crescent was angrier. Heat radiated from it, a little pulse of complaint. The skin hadn’t blistered deep, thank God. “Still within what we can handle,” she murmured.
He exhaled, as if he’d been prepared to argue and had decided not to. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“You did enough fooling tonight,” she said, mouth quirked. “You should’ve told me Echo was Shade’s.”
“And I told you, Echo decides who he wants to be with.”
Not a lie technically. “An omission of truth is a gateway to a lie. I want the truth, no matter what. Understand?”
He gave a curt nod.
“That guy tonight… What do you think my father has that I don’t know about? If I give it to him, then he’ll leave me alone.”
He flinched—not away, but toward, subtle and telling. “You give him what he wants and you’re dead. Best to disappear. Warned Shade to do that a few days before his drowning.”
“He said,” she continued, because once she’d begun it felt wrong to stop, “if I ever want to see my father again, I’ll give it back.”
Rone’s breath went rough for a single beat. He covered it with a small shift of his shoulders, glanced down at Echo as if the dog had opinions. Echo thumped his tail once, then stared at nothing, protecting them both by keeping his eyes on the middle distance.
“I wanted to get more out of him,” Isobel said.
“I thought, if I asked the right way, if I said the right word—” she shook her head, “But he wasn’t there to talk.
He was there to deliver a message and watch it land.
Even if he’d said something true, I couldn’t do anything with it alone but die faster. ”
Rone’s throat worked. She wondered if he knew she saw the place where memory and decision met and ground against each other.
He didn’t fill the space with useless promises.
He didn’t say I won’t let that happen, because men who said that were either liars or fools or got dead trying.
He only nodded once, a motion so small it would have been easy to miss if she hadn’t been this close.
“You’re not like her,” he said, so softly she almost didn’t hear it.
“Like who?”
He took a breath that went all the way down, like he was pulling air through gravel. He let the word trail. The end of it vibrated in the space between them like a struck string. “You’re brave but not stupid.”
“I’m trying.” Her mouth felt dry. “I’m desperate for answers.
I want to know who my father is and where he is and what I can do to ask him why he left.
And to get those answers, I think I’ll do anything, but fear wants me to run.
Pride wants me to stand in the middle of the dock and announce I’m not afraid. Neither seems smart.”
“Smart’s boring to most people,” he said, and she heard the aching fondness in it, like a man teasing a friend he wanted to keep alive. “But boring’s how people get old.”
“I’d like to try it,” she said, lips easing. “Getting old.”
For a beat, his gaze met hers full-on. The light from the lamp post outside cut a low gold into his eyes, brought warmth up from somewhere he probably didn’t show the world.
It caught her off guard. Not romance—she didn’t have room for that, not now, not with the smoke still in her hair and the taste of threat on her tongue.
Something smaller. Something that felt like standing on a porch beside somebody while the storm blew past and not having to be the one who said it would be all right.
She patted the burn dry, slicked gel with a careful finger, and taped fresh gauze. “There. Paid in full for that sunrise coffee you promised.”
The corner of his mouth kicked, near to a smile. “Echo, I think this is a shakedown.”
“Same result.” She tore a strip of tape with her teeth and smoothed it down. “You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
They both knew only one of them would.
She slid back on her heels and let her knees breathe. Echo shifted and put his head in her lap as if he’d been waiting for permission. She bent and pressed her forehead to his damp skull, inhaling brine and dog and extinguisher dust. “You scared me,” she whispered into fur.
Echo snorted like yes, well, you scare me sometimes, too.
“You’re the only family I have left in this world, you know. I have no siblings, and now my father’s dead. And my mom died from a broken heart the doctors called ‘the widowmaker’.”
Rone watched them with that quiet, attentive look she was learning meant he was thinking more than he was saying.
He flexed his wrapped hand once, testing.
The line between his brows smoothed a little.
“Sun’s coming up and there’ll be lots of people here working, so I don’t think anyone will try anything for at least a few hours,” he said, the logistics clicking back into place because that was how men like him fought—by stacking small certainties.
“I’ll show you how to start up the genie for power. ”
“Good.” The ordinariness of the plan steadied her the way a recipe steadied a messy kitchen. “I’ll make coffee at dawn regardless.”
“Isobel.” He stopped her with her name. She looked up. “You don’t owe anybody on this dock bravery. And you don’t owe a man who left you when you were young.”
“Maybe not.” She stroked Echo’s ear. “But I owe honesty to myself. And… I owe kindness where I can give it.” She glanced at his hand. “Including to men who pretend burns don’t hurt.”
He huffed. “It’s a good pretend.”
“It’s a lonely one,” she said, and surprised herself because that sounded truer than she’d meant to get tonight.
Silence met the admission. He leaned back into the settee, this time like the furniture might hold him. “You don’t have to be alone either,” he said, and then added, so quietly she barely caught it, “not in this.”
A quick, ridiculous swell of tears rose behind her eyes. She chased it with a breath and the memory of every moment today that had asked her to choose fear or hope.
From outside, a gull cried, the kind of sound that always sounded like bad news even when it was only hunger.
A boat line moaned where it rubbed. He pointed to what she needed to do between the electrical panel and the generator to get everything going then collapsed onto the settee while Echo grunted and stationed himself by the cockpit door as if giving a briefing to the air.
“Looks like Echo’s staying with you this morning.
” He stood and headed out the door. “Lock behind me.”
“I will.”
He paused at the door. “If he comes back,” he added, chin tipping toward the dark where the messenger had disappeared, “and I’m not in eyeshot—call. Don’t try and bargain him into truth.”
“I won’t,” she said, an answer she planned to keep even if her bones wanted something else. “Rone?”
He waited.
“What if… what if it’s true?” The words trembled, and she let them. “What if my father’s not—” the word died in her throat, and she shook her head. “What then?”
He didn’t hand her a single easy thing. He stood there and took the weight of the question like a man shouldered into a door so somebody else could get through. “Then we find the part of that sentence that keeps you breathing,” he said, and left.