Chapter 1 #3
And Rory, who had spent the entire drive from Marsh's office building a wall out of every good and righteous reason he had to hate this man, watched the wall not fall exactly, but — flex.
Because Theo Vann's face did a thing when he saw Rory that Rory hadn't budgeted for.
For half a second, before the smile, there was something underneath.
Something tired and scared and a long way from home, there and gone so fast that if Rory hadn't spent nineteen years reading faces across a pass — reading the difference between a man who wanted his eggs runny and a man who wanted somebody to ask how his week had been — he'd have missed it entirely.
He didn't miss it.
Then the smile came up over it like a shade being drawn, and it was a good smile, that was the infuriating part, it was warm and quick and it reached all the way across the street, and it came with a chipped front tooth that undercut every expensive thing about the rest of him, and it came with a voice.
"Okay," Theo said, spreading his hands, taking in the diner, the sign, the whole crooked weathered town, and Rory standing at the bottom of the stairs like something the tide left. "Before anybody says anything — I know exactly how this looks."
"Do you," Rory said.
"I do. I look like a guy who left for fifteen years and showed up the second there was something to inherit.
" The smile held, but the eyes flicked, once, quick, cataloguing Rory's apron, his forearms, the flour still on him, the bent cap in his fist — reading him back, and doing it fast, and not being subtle enough to hide that he was doing it.
"For the record, I'm not here to ruin your life.
I'm here to ruin it slightly, and then leave. There's a difference."
Dee had come out onto the diner steps. Wyatt was behind her.
Half the front windows of the businesses on Water Street had people in them, because it was Merritt Harbor and a strange car had been parked crooked outside The Foghorn for four whole minutes and by suppertime the entire peninsula would know Theo Vann was back and by tomorrow they'd know what Marsh had read and by the day after they'd have opinions, all of them, delivered to Rory's face over the counter with their coffee.
Rory looked at the man he was chained to for a year.
One year, Marsh had said. Both of you, or neither, or Colson.
"You leave," Rory said, "and it's sold. He put that in on purpose.
You knew that when you got on the plane.
" He came up off the last step, and he had a good six inches and forty pounds on Theo Vann, and he used none of it, just walked past him close enough to smell the airport on him, coffee and recycled air and something clean that didn't belong anywhere near a kitchen, and he put his hand on the screen door that had slapped shut behind three generations of his people who weren't even his people, not by blood, by nineteen years, which was better.
"Kitchen's there," he said, not turning around. "Don't touch anything."
He let the screen door slap.
Through the window, half a second later, he watched Theo Vann look up at the sign one more time — that braced look, back again, the one from before the smile — and Rory stood at his own pass in his own kitchen with his heart going like he'd sprinted the length of the dock, and he told himself it was anger.
It was mostly anger.
Wyatt came in after him. He didn't sit this time. He stood at the end of the bar with his radio muttering static on his collar and his arms crossed and the specific stubbornness of a man who'd known you since you were both getting thrown off the same dock.
"You're not seriously gonna do this," Wyatt said, low, under the diner noise. "A year. With him."
"You heard Marsh. It's a year with him or it's Colson. You want condos where the co-op dock is? A marina you can't afford to keep your own boat in?" Rory didn't look up from the tickets. There were no tickets. He straightened them anyway. "Nobody wants this. It's not about wanting."
"I'm not talking about the diner, I'm talking about you.
" Wyatt leaned in, dropped his voice further, so it was just the two of them and thirty years.
"I watched you sleep on that cot two winters.
Watched you run yourself into the ground for that old man and never once complain.
Now he's gone, and he's handed half of everything you bled for to a kid who couldn't be bothered to show up for the funeral, and you're gonna — what.
Cook next to him. Live over the shop with him.
Wait around a year for him to take the money and run.
Because that's what he does. That's the only thing Theo Vann's ever been good at. "
The thing about Wyatt was that he was right.
He was saying the exact sentence Rory's own head had been running since Marsh read the name, which was why it landed the way it did — not because it was cruel but because it was already inside him, and hearing it in Wyatt's mouth made it real.
Made it a thing the town would say. Was already saying.
Would say for a year over their coffee while they watched to see who broke first.
"He'll be gone by fall," Rory said. "Won't have to wait the year. Guy like that doesn't last a month in a real kitchen." He looked up. "And when he goes, it's on him. Will's clear. He walks, he's the one who sold Eddie's place out from under the whole harbor. Not me."
"That'll be a great comfort," Wyatt said, "when it's a parking lot."
He let himself out. The screen door slapped.
"Well," Dee said, coming in behind him, hanging up her sweater, entirely too calm. "He's got Eddie's mouth on him, I'll give him that."
"Don't," Rory said.
"Didn't say a word." She tied her apron. Reached for the mugs. And then, quiet, almost to herself, in a voice that had known Eddie Vann longer than Rory had been alive: "Wonder what he's running from this time."
Out on Water Street, the rental's warning chime started dinging again.
Theo had left the key in it. Second time.
Rory watched him not notice, standing in the road, looking up at the place that was now, God help them both, half his — and Rory thought, with the flat clean certainty he brought to a broken freezer or a bad delivery or any other problem that had walked into his life uninvited: he's not going to last a week.
He almost believed it.