Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Scarlett
I had no idea Dean lived anywhere but his boat and didn’t know what to expect when he drove me up a winding dirt road two days later.
Something spare, probably.
A cot and a coffee maker, a single fork, a cage for Captain and a bed for Doug.
What I get is a beautiful little cottage.
Weathered cedar gone silver, a white picket fence, a gate that latches with a sound like a small satisfied click. There’s a window box under the front window with something green and half-dead in it that somebody’s clearly been trying, and failing, to keep alive.
“You have a picket fence,” I say.
“Came with the place.”
“You have a window box.”
“Shea planted it. It’s dying. Don’t tell her.”
He gets the door open, and I don’t make it two steps inside before ninety pounds of English bulldog launches off the couch and hits my shins like a furry wrecking ball.
I go down to my knees on the entry rug, and Doug climbs into my lap like he’s a quarter of his actual size, wheezing with joy, jamming his flat face into my neck. I laugh and hug him back.
“He missed you,” Dean says.
“He met me twice.”
“He falls in love easily.”
“Unlike this owner.”
“Yeah,” he says with his infuriating little smirk. “Very much unlike his owner.”
From a perch by the window, a green blur with a crooked crest fixes me with one beady, unimpressed eye.
Captain sidesteps down his bar, ruffles up, and announces, at full volume, “Fuck me sideways.”
“He missed you too,” Dean says.
“I very much doubt that.” I eye the bird. “And I know you got that line from Mimi.”
“Fuck off, feather duster,” Captain says.
Dean drops my bag by the couch and crouches to scrub Doug behind the ears. “The bird’s a filing cabinet. My dad taught him half of it before he died. You wind him up enough, you get a dead man’s whole vocabulary back.”
Captain, delighted to be discussed, bobs his head and offers, in a rasp that isn’t his own—older, gravelly, an old man’s cadence—“Not dead yet.”
Dean goes still for half a second. Then he huffs something that isn’t quite a laugh.
“That one’s my father’s. He said it every morning of his life.
Coffee, then ‘not dead yet,’ then he’d go untie the boat.
” He straightens up. “Captain said it at the funeral, and everybody laughed. I’m sure Dad was slapping his knee in heaven. ”
“I think I would’ve liked your dad.”
Dean looks wistfully toward a photograph on the wall. It shows a man who had the same blue-gray eyes Henry gave to all his kids, and Dean’s smirk. “He would’ve loved you, Hollywood.” He shakes his head and straightens. “Well, let me show you around.”
The cottage is small and worn, and every single thing in it is load-bearing.
Three mugs in the cabinet, one chipped past saving and still in the rotation.
A dent in the left couch cushion where he sits.
A shelf of paperbacks so cracked and swollen they’ve clearly all been read in the rain.
And in the back, a wall of windows offers a breathtaking view of the whole harbor, the water flat and pewter in the afternoon light, his boat small at its slip.
“Oh. Dean. This is…” I trail off. I don’t have words.
“I know.” He makes me coffee without asking how I take it—two sugars, cream until it goes the color of wet sand—because he watched me make it once, at the diner, and filed that away too.
We drink it at the little table by the windows. Doug arranges himself across both our feet.
“I know what I’m writing,” I say. The idea has been bubbling in the back of my brain since before the storm, but I didn’t settle on it until I was waiting for Dean to wake up in the hospital.
Nothing good will ever come of the treasure hunt story.
But I do have another story to tell that might just help someone who feels like they are drowning.
Dean looks up. “You’re still writing a story?”
“Yes, but not about the treasure. Not the Merricks, the feud, Evangeline… not any of it.” I turn the mug in my hands. “I’m going to write my story.”
He still doesn’t say anything, but his hand comes across the table and covers mine.
“It’s a breast cancer piece. Reconstruction.
What it’s like to rebuild your body and your entire career at the same time, in public, while the internet decides you’re a punchline.
” My throat closes and I push through it.
“Not an inspirational one. Not sunshine-and-survivor. Just true. The version I was too proud and too scared to tell while I was busy being the girl who fell apart on camera.”
“Good,” Dean says.
One word. No speech. He says good the way he says everything he means—flat, level, no decoration—and it lands harder than any huge, declarative speech could have.
“I’m not giving up the work, though.” I lace my fingers into his. “The asking. The listening. Finding the story under the story. That part I loved. I’m just done performing the rest of it.”
“Then don’t give it up. Write what’s true. The rest is noise.” His thumb runs over my knuckles, then he reaches into his jeans pocket and sets something on the table between us.
A key.
Brass, old, worn smooth at the shoulders from years of riding around in the same pocket.
“And I want you to write it here. Right here at this table, overlooking my harbor, with my parrot cursing at you and my dog snoring at your feet.”
I pick it up. It’s warm from his body. I close my hand around it, and the teeth press into my palm, not hard, just enough to be real.
“Okay,” I say.
He kisses me across the corner of the table, slow, unhurried, a kiss with no clock on it, and Doug groans in protest at the disruption to his bed, and Captain mutters something obscene in Mimi’s voice.
But I pull back before he can deepen it. “But there’s one thing we need to do first.”
His brow furrows. “What’s that?”
“The box on No Name. I need to see what’s in it.”
The box has been on No Name for a hundred years. It survived the storm that took Abel and nearly took Dean. It survived the storm that sank Evangeline’s journal to the bottom of the sound where no one will ever read it again.
I need to see if it’s still there. I don’t entirely know why. Dean doesn’t ask me to explain it, which is one of the four hundred reasons I’ve fallen in love with him.
We go out on a clear morning ten days later, the water finally calm, the sky the washed-out blue of a Pacific spring.
Dean takes the No Name out himself, easy at the helm, and I stand beside him with my shoulder against his arm.
Doug rides in the cockpit zipped into a canine life jacket the color of a traffic cone, deeply affronted by it, and Captain sways on a perch Dean rigged in the companionway, keeping up a running commentary at the gulls.
As we clear the breakwater and Gull Shit Rock comes up on the bow—two acres of granite and bent evergreen, ugly and small and mean—Captain sidles down his perch, considers the open water, and screams, “Abort! Abort! Abort!”
“He’s not wrong,” Dean says. “Last time we came out here it didn’t go great.”
“Last time you fucked me in a storm.”
“Like I said. Didn’t go great.” But he’s fighting a smile, and he takes us in toward the east cove with the tide with us this time, timed right, no drama.
The climb up to the fissure is easier in good weather, though Dean still keeps a hand at my back on the slick stretches and lets go slower than he strictly needs to.
Doug, we leave in the cockpit, where he stands with his front paws on the gunwale, supervising, betrayed.
Captain rides up on Dean’s shoulder like a small green pirate and mutters the whole way.
The chamber is exactly as we left it. Twelve feet deep, cold, still, smelling of wet stone and time.
My flashlight finds the carvings on the left wall—the crosses, the circles, the dates.
1887. 1889. 1891. I picture someone standing here, year after year, cutting proof of themselves into rock nobody was meant to find.
Thomas. It had to be Thomas.
And on the shelf, wedged where it’s been since before either of our families started lying about why they hate each other: the cedar box.
I lift it off the shelf. It’s lighter than it looks, and it holds together in my hands, salt-grayed and solid. Whatever’s inside doesn’t shift.
“Not here,” I say. “I don’t want to open it in the dark.”
Dean nods and takes it from me while I climb, cradling it against his chest with one arm the whole way down like it’s something that could still be hurt.
Doug loses his entire mind when we drop back into the cockpit—wheeling, snorting, slamming his ridiculous body against both our legs, outraged and overjoyed in equal measure that we dared to leave him.
I go down on the deck and let him climb half into my lap before Dean sets the box between us on the cockpit sole.
The morning is bright and flat. The water slaps lightly against the hull. Captain hops down from Dean’s shoulder to the coaming and cocks his head at the box.
The hinges have rusted to lace. They don’t so much open as surrender, flaking apart under my thumbs, and the lid lifts with a sound like a held breath let go.
Inside: oilcloth, gone dark and brittle. And folded within it, water-stained, foxed brown at every edge, a single sheet of paper covered in handwriting I would know anywhere. I’ve spent months with it. The long formal loops. The hard downstroke on the capitals.
Evangeline.
Most of it is gone. A hundred years of damp in a sea cave has eaten the ink to ghosts, whole lines dissolved to a brown wash, the paper so soft in places I don’t dare touch it.
The date is 1904.
I read it three times to be sure. Eleven years after she vanished. Eleven years after the story both families have told for a century says she was gone, she wrote this letter.
My dearest Thomas…
She was alive in 1904.
“Scarlett.” Dean’s voice is quiet. “What does it say?”
My eyes are wet, and I blink past the tears. “That she lived.”
He looks at the paper a long time. Then at me. He doesn’t ask the next question—so where did she go, so what happened—and I love him for that too, because those are exactly the questions the old me would already be chasing with a camera and a thesis and a headline.
The old me would have this documented six ways before we left the water.
Photographed, color-corrected, a forensic paper expert on retainer by Tuesday, the story—the missing heiress lived, exclusive—half-written before we made the breakwater.
It would be the biggest thing I’ve ever put my name on.
It would prove the feud is built on a lie.
It would remake my whole career in a single stroke.
Evangeline ran for her life and stayed hidden on purpose, letting the world believe her dead because being dead was the only way she got to stay free.
She spent a century making sure no one would find her.
I’m not going to be the one who does.
I get to my feet. My legs are steady under me for the first time in longer than I can say.
I hold the letter out over the water, the ruined paper light as a moth in my fingers, and Dean doesn’t stop me, doesn’t say wait, doesn’t reach.
He just watches with those gray eyes, steady, letting it be mine.
I open my hand.
The paper drops. It touches the surface and goes dark, drinking the sea in an instant.
The green water closes over it and takes it down to where the journal already is.
I watch the pale shape of it dim and shrink and vanish.
Then there’s just water. Bright, flat, ordinary water, giving nothing back.
I stand there until I’m sure it’s gone for good.
Dean’s hand finds the small of my back. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” And I am. “I’m going to write mine. Hers stays down there.”
He doesn’t tell me I did the right thing. He doesn’t have to. He just gathers me in, my back to his chest, both his arms crossed over me, and we stand in the cockpit of his father’s boat and look at the place in the water where a hundred-year-old secret disappeared.
Doug leans his whole weight against my shins and sighs like the day has cost him something.
And Captain—who watched the paper fall, who watches it still, head tipped at the flat green water where the pale thing disappeared—lifts his crooked crest, and in an old man’s voice, gravel and salt, says, “Not dead yet.”
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