Chapter 6 #3
And Theo turned — he couldn't help it, the reflex, checking the room — and there in the doorway of the diner, dish towel over his shoulder, having come to see who Dee was making that face about, stood Rory.
Freshly, actually slept. Something in his face still open from the dark, still soft at the edges in a way Theo had never seen in daylight, a man who'd let down every wall he owned in a bed four hours ago—
—watching Wade Colson shake Theo's hand and thank him for reaching out.
And Wyatt was there. Of course Wyatt was there — coffee, morning rounds, the harbormaster's standing seat — out on the landing behind Rory now, and Theo watched him take in the black car and the expensive coat and the envelope and the handshake, and watched him not say I told you.
He didn't have to. His whole face said it, and worse, it said it sadly — a man who'd rather have been wrong, looking at his oldest friend about to get hurt in exactly the shape he'd tried to warn him about.
Theo saw the whole thing arrive on Rory's face.
Saw the softness go. Saw the shape come back — the one who left, the one who'd sell — the shape Rory had told him in the dark he'd built to keep from getting hurt, sliding back into place brick by brick, except this time it wasn't a shape Rory was choosing to believe.
This time Theo had handed him the bricks.
"You reached out to him," Rory said. Not loud. That was the worst of it. Flat and quiet and carrying, the whole diner gone silent behind him. "In the boat you said— you looked me in the face in Eddie's boat and said you didn't want to—"
"Rory. I can explain. I was going to tell you this morning, I swear to God, I decided in the—"
But he heard it even as it came out of him. I can explain. I was going to tell you. The two oldest lies in the language, the exact shape of every omitted half he'd ever run, and he watched them land on a man who had spent his whole life being left by people who had a very good explanation.
Colson looked between them, unbothered, mildly curious, a man who'd closed a thousand deals and knew the sound of a complication he could wait out.
Colson looked between them — Rory in the doorway going hard, Theo on the landing coming apart — and he didn't press.
He'd closed a thousand deals; he knew the sound of a complication he could wait out.
But he wasn't unkind about it, and that was somehow the worst part, because Theo had wanted him to be a villain and he wasn't, quite.
"Look," Colson said, to Rory now, reading correctly who the obstacle was.
"I know how this lands. I get it in every town I go to.
But I've watched this harbor two years. Half the moorings are empty.
The fleet's a third what it was. You've got a diner bleeding ten months out of twelve and a tax base leaving for Portland one funeral at a time.
" He said it gently, factually, and every word was true — Theo knew, because he'd read the same ledger.
"What I'm offering keeps the lights on. Jobs, year-round.
A working waterfront that actually works.
I'm not the enemy of a place like this. Sometimes I'm the only thing that saves it. "
"I'll leave the offer with you," Colson said pleasantly, setting a heavy envelope on the landing rail.
"It's got a date on it — I don't do open-ended.
Read it together." He got in his black car.
"Think about what this town could be," he said, to both of them, to neither, and pulled away up Water Street.
For a moment nobody moved. The envelope sat on the rail. Dee had come to the door; the whole diner was pretending not to watch through the glass.
Then Rory walked out past Theo — close, not touching — and picked the envelope up off the rail.
He didn't open it. He weighed it in his scarred hand, this heavy expensive thing with a date on it, the price of everything Eddie had ever built, and he looked at Theo with a face that had gone all the way back to the first day: the harbor looking at a boat it expected to sink.
Except now there was something under it that hadn't been there the first day.
Something bruised. Because the first day Rory hadn't let him in yet, and now he had, four hours ago, all the way, in the dark.
"Was it real," Rory said. Quiet. "Any of it. Last night. Or was that just—" His jaw worked. "Keeping the other owner sweet till the check clears."
"Rory — no. God, no. Last night was the realest thing I've—"
"Don't." Rory pressed the envelope into Theo's chest, made him take it, made him hold his own betrayal in both hands. "We'll talk when I can look at you. Right now I can't."
He went back inside, and this time the screen door slapped — hard, the old flat wooden crack of it, the sound of somebody arriving or leaving whether you wanted them to or not — and Theo stood alone on the landing in the hard bright unforgiving noon, holding an offer with a date on it, with the tide, somewhere below, just beginning to turn.