Chapter 2
Half a Life
"—no, absolutely, I hear you, that's completely fair," Theo said to the man on the phone who was explaining, in the gentle unhurried voice of somebody reading off a screen, exactly how thoroughly Theo's life was over.
He was parked behind the diner because it was the one place in Merritt Harbor where nobody could see his face while he had this particular conversation, and he was learning that this was going to be a problem, because in Merritt Harbor there were approximately four places nobody could see your face and he was going to need all of them.
"The personal guarantee is enforceable," the man said. "I want to be clear about that, because I find it saves everyone grief. You signed it. When the restaurant defaulted on the lease, the guarantee came to you. That's not a gray area."
"No, and I would never suggest it was gray," Theo said, warm, easy, the voice he used on health inspectors and angry brides and the bank, the voice that had gotten him through nine years of hospitality and out the other side owing a hundred and forty thousand dollars.
"I'm just asking for a window. A short one.
I've had a — there's been a change in circumstances.
" He watched a gull land on the dumpster lid and regard him with contempt. "An inheritance."
Silence on the line, the good kind, the interested kind.
There it is, Theo thought. Everybody perks up for an inheritance.
"An inheritance," the man repeated.
"Property. Down east. It's — I'm here now, actually, getting it sorted.
It's going to take a little time to convert to something liquid, but the value's real.
" All true. Technically true. True the way the menu at his restaurant had said locally sourced about things that came off a Sysco truck.
"If your client can hold off on anything aggressive for, let's say, sixty days, I can come back to you with a real number and a real timeline instead of both of us pretending I have a hundred and forty grand in a coffee can. "
The gull left. The man on the phone made a note; Theo could hear it, the little keyboard clicks that decided things.
"Sixty days," the man said. "I'll flag the file.
But Mr. Vann—" A pause, and when he spoke again some of the reading-off-a-screen went out of it and he just sounded tired, one working man to another.
"Don't disappear on me. People in your spot, they always think disappearing is a plan. It's never a plan."
"I wouldn't dream of it," Theo said, and hung up, and sat in the rental with both hands on the wheel, and let himself be, for exactly as long as it took to count to ten, a person who was completely and specifically screwed.
One. The restaurant was gone. Two. The lease guarantee had eaten his savings, which had not been much, and then kept eating.
Three. Julian had stayed exactly long enough to watch the savings go and then had discovered, with the timing of a man who'd been waiting for an exit, that they wanted "different things.
" Four. The different thing Julian wanted, it turned out, was a boyfriend who could still pick up the check.
Five. His phone had a text from Julian in it from four days ago that said heard about the Portland place, you okay?
which Theo had not answered because there was no version of the truth that didn't sound like begging.
Six. He was thirty-one. Seven. He was sitting behind a diner in the town he'd sworn at seventeen he would never, under any circumstances, for any reason— Eight.
—and the only asset he had left in the world was half of a failing restaurant he was legally chained to a man who wanted him dead. Nine.
Ten.
The restaurant had been called Carol's. He'd named it after her — the one time in fifteen years he'd let himself say her name out loud in public and mean it — a small bright room in the East End with twelve tables and a private event space in the back that Theo had run like a conductor.
For two years it had been good. It had been reviewed.
It had been the thing people drove across the city for.
That was the part nobody wanted to hear when they said heard about the Portland place, you okay in that careful voice.
It hadn't failed because he was bad at it.
It had failed because the landlord tripled the rent when the block got hot and the math stopped working, and Theo had personally guaranteed a lease he'd signed at twenty-nine believing, the way you believe things at twenty-nine, that good was the same as safe.
He'd been the best he'd ever been at the exact moment the whole thing came down on his head.
There was probably a lesson in that. He'd been too busy losing everything to write it down.
Theo checked his face in the rearview — reflex, nine years of it, is the shop presentable — and put the smile back where it lived.
In his wallet, behind his one working credit card, was a business card he'd been given at a hospitality conference two years ago and kept the way you keep a spare key you hope you never need.
Heavy stock. Navy and silver. WADE COLSON, it said.
COLSON MARINE DEVELOPMENT. Reimagining the working waterfront.
The math on Colson's kind of offer wasn't complicated.
Theo had run enough of it in his head on the drive up that it had stopped feeling like a betrayal and started feeling like a spreadsheet.
If the parcel was worth what Marsh's face had implied it was worth, then his half — even split, even after everything the estate took — was a number that made a hundred and forty thousand dollars look like a rounding error.
He would not have to disappear on the nice tired man from the collections office.
He would pay him. He would pay everyone.
He would be, for the first time in two years, a man who was not doing math at four in the morning.
All he had to do was get one enormous, immovable, hand-scarred obstacle to agree to sell.
Or, said a smaller voice, one he didn't like, one that sounded younger than the rest of him, you could just leave, like you always do, before any of it can touch you.
Theo got out of the car.
***
Dee found him before he'd made it three steps into the dining room, which was the first genuinely dangerous thing that happened to him in Merritt Harbor, because Dee did the one thing he had absolutely no defense against.
She was kind.
"There he is," she said, coming around the counter with a dish towel over her shoulder, and she looked at him — not the way the two men at the counter were looking at him, which was the way you look at a raccoon that's gotten into the kitchen, but the way you look at somebody you used to know when they were small.
She stopped an arm's length away. Her eyes went over his face and did some private arithmetic and came back wet at the edges.
"Oh, you've got her chin," she said. "You've got Carol's chin exactly. "
And there it was. Fifteen years and four hundred miles and a whole invented adult life, and one woman with a dish towel said his mother's name and the floor of him just — dropped, the way it used to, the specific trapdoor that had been installed the year he was seventeen and had never once, in all that time, been repaired.
"Hi, Dee," Theo said. The smile held. He was proud of the smile. "You look exactly the same. It's genuinely upsetting."
"Oh, stop." She swatted the air, pleased, and then her face did the thing he'd been dreading since Portland, the thing that was the entire reason he'd sworn never to come back — it went soft, it went sorry, it filled up with the pity that this whole town kept in a reservoir behind its eyes with his name on the valve.
"We missed you at the — " She stopped herself.
Started over, gentler, which was worse. "It was a beautiful service.
Eddie would've hated it. Too many flowers. "
Don't, Theo thought. Don't be kind about it, I can do hostile all day, I cannot do this.
"He'd have complained about the parking," Theo said.
"He'd have complained about the parking," Dee agreed, and laughed, wet, and for one second they were just two people who had loved the same difficult old man, and Theo let himself have it, the second, before he took it away from himself because seconds like that were how you ended up staying.
"So." He clapped his hands, once, the sound of a man changing the subject, moving to the next item, running the room. "Practical things. I flew in on a red-eye and a prayer and I need to figure out where a person sleeps around here. Is the — there used to be an inn? The blue one, up by the church?"
"Closed. Retired to Florida, the both of them.
" Dee refolded the towel. "There's the Tidewater Motel out on Route 9, but they shut the rooms after Labor Day, it's just the bar now.
" She said it carefully, watching him, and he understood a beat too late that she already knew the answer to the question he'd asked, had known it before he walked in, and was waiting to see if he'd figure it out himself.
"There's really only the one place, hon. "
The swinging door to the kitchen banged open.
Rory came through it with a case of something on his shoulder, and he stopped when he saw them, and Theo watched the whole harbor-cold shutdown happen across a face that had, three hours ago on Water Street, shown him one bad unguarded second of something almost human.
Gone now. The man looked at Theo the way the harbor looked at a boat it expected to sink.
"No," Rory said.
"You don't know what I was going to ask."