Chapter 2
Lena
I made it exactly to the corner of the harbor path before my hands started shaking so badly I had to set the vegetable bag down.
I braced both palms against the low stone wall that ran along the water and stared out at the boats, willing my pulse to slow, willing the whole afternoon to rewind itself back to the version where I'd simply gone home with tomatoes and nothing else had happened.
An old fisherman I half recognized from the market glanced over, concerned. "Signora? You need help?"
"I'm fine," I said, in the bright, brittle voice I'd perfected over years of being asked that exact question by well-meaning strangers. "Just the heat."
He didn't look convinced, but he nodded and went back to coiling his rope, and I was grateful, not for the first time, that Cala Sirena had learned to leave me to my own business.
It was one of the strange mercies of small towns — everyone knew everything, and yet everyone also understood, instinctively, when a woman standing alone by the water needed to be left entirely alone.
I thought about the way his voice had cracked on my name. Tomas, I'd called him, and it had landed on his face like a blow, like I'd hit some nerve he hadn't braced for, even though I was the one who'd been ambushed.
Six years of practicing what I'd say if this exact moment ever came. Six years, and every rehearsed line had evaporated the second I actually saw him standing there.
I picked the vegetable bag back up and made myself walk the rest of the way home, counting my steps the way I used to when Nico was a colicky newborn and counting was the only thing that kept me upright through the worst of the sleepless nights.
Ten steps. Twenty. The church bell tolled four as I passed it, indifferent to the fact that my entire world had just cracked down the middle.
Six years. Six years of careful mornings and quiet evenings and a life built brick by brick around one enormous secret, and it took him ten minutes back in town to walk straight into the middle of it.
"Breathe," I told myself, out loud, which probably made me look unhinged to the elderly couple walking their dog past me, but I didn't care. "Just breathe."
I breathed. It didn't help nearly as much as the self-help books promised it would.
By the time I got home, my heart rate had settled into something closer to a dull roar instead of a full alarm, which I counted as progress.
I let myself in the front door and found Nico exactly where I'd left him, sprawled on the living room floor with a comic book and a bowl of crackers, six years old and utterly unbothered by the fact that his mother's entire world had just tilted on its axis in a fish market.
"Mama, you're back!" He didn't even look up. "Did you get the good olives?"
"I got the good olives."
"The ones with the pits still in them? Not the fake ones?"
"The real ones. With the pits. Which you are not allowed to eat because you're six and you'll choke."
"I'm very careful," he said, with the total, unearned confidence of a child who had never once in his life been careful about anything.
I set the bag down in the kitchen and stood there for a minute, hands braced on the counter, staring at nothing.
He was here. Hawk was here, in Cala Sirena, walking around like he had every right to just show back up after six years, and somewhere in the same square mile as that fact was a six-year-old boy with his exact eyes eating crackers on my living room floor.
The math wasn't complicated. It never had been. That was always the problem.
My phone buzzed. Esme.
Esme: Rafael just told me Hawk's back. Are you okay??
Esme: Lena. Are you okay.
Esme: I'm coming over.
I typed back a quick I'm fine, don't that I knew wouldn't stop her for a second, and sure enough, twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door, and Esme Hale stood on my porch with a bottle of wine in one hand and an expression that said she wasn't leaving until she'd extracted every detail.
"I said I was fine," I told her.
"You texted 'I'm fine' with a period at the end. That's not fine, that's a hostage situation." She pushed past me into the kitchen, already reaching for two glasses. "Sit. Talk. I brought the good wine, the one Gabriel keeps hidden behind the boat manuals."
"He's going to notice that's missing."
"He notices everything eventually. By then this bottle will be ancient history." She poured, handed me a glass, and sat across from me with the particular focus of a marine ecologist who'd spent her career watching things very carefully to figure out what they'd do next. "Okay. Tell me."
So I told her. The fish market, the way the whole harbor had seemed to hold its breath, the way six years had collapsed into about thirty seconds the moment his eyes found mine.
"He said he's home for good," I said. "If the club will have him."
"They'll have him. Rafael says Reaper's been treating that man's old bike bay like a shrine for six years. Nobody's turning him away."
"That's what I said too. Practically word for word."
"Great minds." Esme took a sip of her wine, studying me over the rim of the glass with the patient, assessing look she probably used on tide pools. "How'd he look?"
"Older. Harder, maybe, around the eyes. Like he'd spent six years carrying something heavy and hadn't quite figured out how to put it down yet.
" I turned my own glass slowly on the table, watching the wine catch the light.
"He still has the same laugh lines, though.
I noticed that. Which is a stupid thing to notice. "
"It's not stupid."
"It felt stupid. Standing in the middle of a fish market having a full nervous breakdown and also cataloging the man's laugh lines like some kind of lovesick teenager."
"You're allowed to be more than one thing at once, Lena.
Terrified and still noticing his laugh lines.
Both true." Esme reached for the bottle, topped off both glasses without asking.
"For what it's worth, I don't think there's a version of this where you don't feel something seeing him again.
Six years doesn't erase that kind of history. It just buries it for a while."
"Buried things have a way of getting dug back up."
"Story of this entire club, honestly. Half the couples in this town started exactly that way.
" She smiled, small and a little rueful.
"Runaway brides. Secret pasts. Silver foxes who turn out to have hearts of gold under all that gruffness.
If Cala Sirena wrote a tourism brochure, it'd basically just be a list of complicated love stories that worked out anyway. "
"Mine's more complicated than most."
"I know." Her smile faded into something gentler, steadier. "That's why I'm here instead of just texting you a sympathetic emoji and calling it a day."
"And Nico doesn't know," Esme said quietly, once I'd finished.
"Nico doesn't know."
"Does Hawk—"
"No." I said it fast, the way I always did when the question got too close to the thing I couldn't say out loud without my whole chest caving in. "He doesn't know either."
Esme was quiet for a moment, turning her wine glass slowly on the table. She'd never once pushed me on this, in all the years I'd known her — not when I first showed up pregnant and unattached, not when Nico was born, not through any of it. She'd just been there, steady, the way good friends are.
"You have to tell him," she said finally, gentle but unmistakably firm. "Lena. You know that."
"I know that."
"He's not some stranger who wandered into town. He's the boy's father."
"I know that too." My voice cracked on it, just slightly, and I hated that it did.
"I've known it every single day for six years, Esme.
It's not a math problem I need help solving.
It's — it's the timing. It's how. It's what happens to Nico once the whole club knows, once the whole town knows, once whatever chased Hawk out of here in the first place knows there's a child—"
"You don't know that there's still danger."
"I don't know that there isn't."
She reached across the table and took my hand, and for a second neither of us said anything, just sat there in the fading evening light with a bottle of stolen wine and six years of careful silence sitting heavy on the table between us.
"For what it's worth," Esme said eventually, "Gabriel says Hawk looks like a man who's done running. Whatever it was that pulled him away — Rafael thinks it's actually over. Not hiding-over. Actually over."
"That's what he told me too."
"So maybe—"
"Maybe nothing." I pulled my hand back, not unkindly, just needing the space to breathe. "Esme, I've spent six years building a life where Nico is safe and happy and doesn't ask questions he can't handle the answers to. I can't just blow that up because a man rode back into town looking sorry."
"Did he look sorry?"
I thought about the fish market. About the way he'd looked at me like I was the only fixed point in a world that had been spinning out from under him for six years. About the wavering steadiness in his voice when he said I came home.
"He looked wrecked," I admitted quietly. "Which isn't the same thing."
"Isn't it, though?"
I didn't have an answer for that. Esme let it sit, mercifully, and refilled both our glasses instead, and we spent the next hour talking about anything else — Gabriel's latest reef survey, Juliet's plans for Lucia's birthday, the ridiculous new recruit at the garage who apparently used to be a locksmith — until Nico wandered in demanding dinner and the conversation dissolved into the ordinary chaos of feeding a six-year-old who had strong, specific opinions about pasta shapes.
"Not the spirals," he informed me, with the gravity of a diplomat delivering terms. "The spirals get stuck in my teeth."
"Since when?"
"Since forever. Everybody knows that."
"I did not know that. I've been serving you spirals for years."
"I've been very patient with you about it."
"Duly noted."