Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
SCARLETT
“Abort! Abort! Abort!”
I jolt awake at the sound. My skin goes cold. I know that cadence. I’ve heard it squawked from a perch in a boat cabin, repeated with perfect mimicry by a bird who picks up whatever its human says when the human isn’t performing for an audience.
Captain says “Abort” like a party trick. Dean says it like someone is dying.
“Abort! Abort! Abort!”
His hand reaches. Fingers splayed, grasping at empty air. His breathing has gone shallow—short, tight pulls that don’t reach his lungs. A sheen of sweat covers his forehead despite the room’s chill. The scar through his eyebrow stands pale against flushed skin.
“Dean.”
He doesn’t hear me. His eyes are open but fixed on something twelve years and eight miles of open water away. His chest hitches on the next inhale. A sound escapes him—not a word, something lower, wounded. The sound a man makes when he’s watching something happen, and he can’t stop it.
“Dean,” I say it louder. I put my hand on his shoulder.
He jerks. His whole body goes taut, then collapses inward like a sail losing wind. His eyes find the ceiling, then the wall, then me. They don’t track right. He’s still half inside whatever memory has him by the throat.
“Hey.” I keep my voice low. “You’re okay. You’re at the B&B. Room three. Shea’s place.”
His breathing rasps. He swallows. His throat works. The arm that was reaching drops to the mattress, and his fingers curl into the quilt. He’s looking at me now, really looking, and the relief when recognition finally lands in his eyes is so sharp it hurts my chest.
“Scarlett.”
“Yeah.” I don’t touch him yet. I wait. His skin is clammy under my palm, and the muscle of his shoulder twitches in sporadic bursts, like his nervous system is still firing signals from somewhere else. “Bad dream.”
He closes his eyes. Opens them. Looks at the ceiling again. “Shit.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not.” He pushes himself upright. The quilt falls away from his chest. He’s wearing the same shirt from last night, salt-stiff and wrinkled, and his hair stands in damp spikes where he’s been sweating. “I should go.”
“Stay.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” I don’t say it hard. I say it the way you state a fact about the weather. The sky is blue. The tide is out. You are not fine. “And that’s allowed.”
He stares at me. The darkness in the room is the thick, pre-dawn kind that turns everything to silhouette.
The digital clock on the nightstand reads 4:17.
Outside, the harbor is quiet. No boats moving.
No gulls. Just the low, constant murmur of water against shore, eight hundred yards down the hill.
“I’m going to make coffee,” he says.
“You’re going to sit here until you stop shaking.”
He looks down at his hands. They are, in fact, shaking. A fine tremor runs through his fingers, the kind that comes after adrenaline, when the body has burned through whatever reserves it had and has nothing left but the aftershocks. He closes his fists. Opens them. The tremor doesn’t stop.
“I don’t talk about it,” he says.
“I know.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“Because you don’t have to talk about it.” I shift on the mattress until our shoulders touch. Just that. Shoulder to shoulder, heat passing through two layers of fabric. “But if you want to, I’m listening.”
He goes quiet. The house creaks. Somewhere downstairs, a pipe knocks. Shea’s probably already awake, because Shea is the kind of person who wakes at four-thirty out of spite for the very concept of sleeping in.
Dean’s breathing slows. Not all the way. But the ragged edge smooths, and his hands settle on his thighs, and when he finally speaks, his voice has the same flat quality I heard in his sleep. Stripped. Clinical. A man reporting facts he has recited to himself so many times they’ve lost their edges.
“2014. Coast Guard rescue swimmer. Stationed out of Port Angeles. Night call. Fishing vessel taking on water twenty miles offshore. Storm conditions. Worse than forecast. Visibility near zero. We got two people in the water by the time we reached coordinates.”
He stops. His jaw works. The scar through his eyebrow catches what little light filters through the curtains.
“Two people,” he says. “I had to choose which one to reach first.”
I don’t say anything. The silence between us is heavy, deliberate. I know what lives in that silence. I’ve interviewed enough veterans to recognize the shape of the story he’s not telling.
“I got the first one to the basket. Went back for the second. Took too long. Current had shifted. Storm had worsened. By the time I reached the coordinates, she was gone.”
“She.”
He flinches. Just once. A small, involuntary contraction of muscle around his right eye. “Yeah.”
The word sits between us. I don’t reach for his hand.
I don’t fill the silence with platitudes about impossible choices or the cruelty of circumstance.
Those are things people say when they want to feel better about someone else’s pain.
Dean doesn’t want to feel better. He wants the pain to mean something, and twelve years hasn’t given him that answer.
“I never told anybody the whole thing,” he says.
“Not Bodhi. Not Henry. Definitely not Zade. He was there. Different boat, different sector, but he heard it on the radio. He knows the broad strokes. He doesn’t know...
” He trails off. Rubs the back of his neck.
The tremor has moved from his hands to somewhere deeper, a vibration I can feel through the mattress where our shoulders press together.
“Captain picked it up. The abort call. I was shouting it into my radio. The boat was taking on water. The basket was compromised. I knew we were losing her and I couldn’t—” He stops.
Starts again. “The bird hears everything. Especially the things you don’t mean for anyone to hear. ”
I think of Captain on his perch, repeating “Abort” with perfect mimicry, and the tourists who laugh when he says it because they think it’s cute.
A parrot with a dirty mouth. Quirky local color.
Nobody knew they were laughing at the worst night of a man’s life, broadcast on loop for the entertainment of strangers.
“That’s why you hate the drones,” I say.
He looks at me. Something shifts in his expression—surprise, maybe, that I connected those dots. “Yeah. That’s why.”
“The noise. The way they hover. Reminds you of the basket.”
“The basket was quieter.” He scrubs a hand over his face. The stubble makes a rough sound against his palm. “I should’ve reached her first. The second one. She was closer to the boat. Better odds. I went for the father instead because he was struggling harder. Made the wrong call.”
He says it like he’s stating a navigational fact. The water is eight fathoms deep. The channel runs east. I made the wrong call. No emotion. Just the flat, exhausted certainty of a man who has carried this verdict for so long it has become part of his skeleton.
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I know exactly that. I had the coordinates. I had the current data. I had twelve years to run the math. I chose wrong.”
“Dean—”
“Don’t.” His voice hardens, but I know he’s not angry at me. “Don’t do that. Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. It was my call. My training. My responsibility. The fact that the conditions were shit doesn’t change whose hands were on the line.”
I bite my tongue. He’s right. Not about the choice—I wasn’t there, I can’t know—but about what he needs. He doesn’t need me to absolve him. He needs me to hear him. To sit in the dark beside a man who has been punishing himself for twelve years and not offer the easy out.
So I don’t. I sit. I listen. I let the silence hold what his words can’t.
His breathing evens. Slowly. The tremor in his shoulders subsides. Exhaustion pulls at him visibly now—his eyelids heavy, his posture softening by degrees until he’s leaning into me without seeming to realize it and his head drops onto my shoulder. His breathing has gone deep and regular.
The nightmare has released him, and exhaustion has taken its place. sweep his hair back from his face, and all at once realization hits me…
I am falling in love with him.
Oh. My. God.
I am in love with Dean Kinsella.
I love the scar through his eyebrow. I love the way he holds a coffee mug.
I love the set of his jaw when he’s trying not to care about something and failing completely.
I love that he talks to a parrot like the bird understands him, and the bird probably does.
I love that he searched a storm for two strangers because it was the right thing to do, and I hate that he will carry the weight of that choice for the rest of his life.
I love him, and the knowledge of it frightens me more thoroughly than any shadow on a balcony.
Loving Dean means wanting something I cannot control.
It means opening a door I welded shut eighteen months ago, when the diagnosis landed, and I decided, with the cold clarity of absolute terror, that I would never again put myself in a position to lose something I couldn’t survive losing.
I rebuilt my life around that principle.
Work I could walk away from. Connections that ended at a professional handshake.
A smile that kept everyone at exactly the distance I needed them.
Then I came to Port Haven and met a man who saw through the smile on day one, and now I am sitting in the dark beside him with my heart beating too fast and the knowledge that I am already in too deep to walk away without getting hurt.
The thought should terrify me.
It does terrify me.
It also, inexplicably, feels like coming home.