Chapter 21
The first boat back on the lift was Cal Henning's lobster boat, and Dana had it running by Tuesday.
Squall leaned against the bay door frame with a coffee and watched her work the engine on the stand, her head tilted, listening to the idle with the specific concentration she brought to every motor — not thinking about it, just hearing it, the way some people heard music and he heard weather.
The engine caught, settled, ran smooth and clean, and she nodded once to herself and killed it.
"Done," she said. "Tell Cal he can pick it up after lunch."
"You want to call him?"
"You call him. I've got the Gutierrez skiff on the trailer and a bilge pump to replace on the Nordland trawler before three." She wiped her hands on the rag from her back pocket and looked at him with the evaluating squint she used on engines that weren't performing. "You're just standing there."
"I'm supervising."
"You're drinking coffee and watching my ass."
"Multitasking."
She threw the rag at him. He caught it, finished his coffee, and went to the bench.
This was what they'd become. Not the fire and the fury — though that was still there, banked low, ready when they wanted it.
This was the other thing. The morning thing.
The rhythm of two people working in the same space who'd figured out where the other one moved and adjusted accordingly, the way crew on a boat learned each other's footsteps and never collided.
The shop was coming back. Bay one was fully operational — new lift, new hydraulics, the bench reset and restocked with tools the brotherhood had sourced from half the coast. Bay two was framed and drywalled, the new lift arriving Friday on a flatbed from a marine supplier in Gloucester who'd given Dana a price so good she'd called him back to make sure he hadn't misread the invoice.
The parts room was gutted to the studs and being rebuilt with proper fire-resistant sheathing, because Breech had looked at the original construction, called it a hazard, and drawn up plans that Dana had approved with the caveat that she was choosing the shelving layout herself.
She'd been clear about that. She was clear about everything — what was hers to decide, what was theirs to share, where the lines ran.
The shop was hers. The waterfront business they ran through it was theirs.
The compound was his, but the room they shared in it was becoming something that belonged to neither of them and both of them at the same time.
Her tools on his dresser. His flannel on her side of the bed.
A parts catalog on the nightstand next to his phone.
He liked the parts catalog. He liked the evidence of her in his space, the proof that she'd moved through his life and left marks the way she left grease marks — permanent, functional, part of the machine.
Around noon, he finished the bilge pump job she'd assigned him and found her in the office doing paperwork.
Ray Prescott sat across from her in the chair he'd claimed as his — the old wooden swivel that had been his father's and his grandfather's — going through the week's work orders with a pen and the reading glasses he refused to admit he needed.
"You're overbooked Thursday," Ray said.
"I'm always overbooked Thursday. Thursday's when everyone remembers their boat exists."
"You could push the Nordland job to Friday."
"I could, but Nordland's been waiting a week and if I push him again he'll take it to that hack in Falmouth who'll charge him double and do it wrong." Dana signed an invoice and set it on the stack. "I'll run late Thursday. It's fine."
"You run late every day."
"That's because I'm good and people know it."
Ray looked at Squall over his glasses. "She always like this?"
"I've known her two weeks and she's been like this every second of it."
"Try thirty years," Ray said, but he was smiling, and the smile was the smile of a man who'd watched a girl grow into the woman who saved his life and was still trying to figure out how to say thank you without it sounding small.
Squall left them to the paperwork and walked out to the lot.
The harbor spread out in front of him — boats on their moorings, gulls on the pier, the breakwater standing against the Atlantic the way it had for a hundred years.
The fuel docks were running clean. The freight traffic had stopped.
The dock boys went about their business without looking over their shoulders, and the fishermen tied up and unloaded and went to the Gaff for a beer without worrying about unmarked trucks in the lot.
Normal. The waterfront was normal again, and normal was the thing he'd been fighting for since the night he'd seen the orange glow in Dana's windows.
His phone buzzed. Diesel.
"Torch wants you at the compound by four. Club business. Not urgent."
"What kind of not urgent?"
"The kind where he wants to talk about the coast routes and the waterfront split now that Meer's operation is cleaned up. Regular business. You remember regular business, right? Before everything caught fire?"
"Vaguely."
"Four o'clock. Bring Dana if she wants to come. Nora's making dinner."
He hung up and went back inside. Dana was at the bench now, the Gutierrez skiff's lower unit open in front of her, her hands inside the housing. She looked up when he approached.
"Compound at four. Torch wants to talk business. Nora's cooking."
"I've got the Gutierrez job."
"You've got three hours."
She looked at the lower unit, then at him, and did the calculation she always did — the one that weighed the work against everything else and usually came down on the side of the work. But something had shifted in that calculation over the past week. The everything else had gotten heavier.
"I'll be done by three-thirty," she said. "Don't rush me."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
She finished at three-fifteen. He knew she would — she'd been beating her own estimates since he'd met her, padding the time to give herself room and then filling the room with more work.
She washed up at the utility sink, changed out of her coveralls in the office, and came out in jeans and a flannel — his flannel, the one she'd been wearing the night he came back from the harbor — with her hair down around her shoulders.
He stared.
"What?" she said.
"Your hair's down."
"It does that sometimes."
"I've seen it up, in a ponytail, and under a hat. I've never seen it down when you weren't in bed."
"We're going to dinner, not the bench. I can have hair."
He crossed the shop floor and took a handful of that hair and tilted her head back and kissed her, deep and slow, in the middle of the bay with the afternoon light coming through the doors and the harbor sounds filtering in and the faint smell of gear lube still on her skin underneath the soap.
"You can have whatever you want," he said.
"Right now I want dinner. Move."
They rode to the compound on the Dyna, her arms around his waist, her body pressed against his back, the coast road unwinding in front of them in the late-afternoon light.
The harbor fell away behind them and the mill rose ahead, and the ride between the two — the shop and the compound, her world and his — was becoming the axis their life turned on.
Two points connected by a road and a motorcycle and the woman holding on behind him.
At the compound, Nora had taken over the great room kitchen with the authority of a woman who fed people for a living and considered it a moral obligation.
The bar was set for dinner — actual plates, actual glasses, a tablecloth that Squall had never seen before and suspected Nora had brought from the diner.
The brothers filtered in. Diesel, Anvil, Breech.
Wraith appeared in a corner booth and accepted a plate without comment.
Talley sat at the bar with his ribs finally untaped, eating like a man released from captivity.
Torch sat at the head of the table with Nora beside him, and the way they occupied space together — comfortable, settled, the ease of two people who'd stopped performing years ago — was a preview of something Squall was only beginning to understand.
Dana sat beside him and ate Nora's pot roast and argued with Diesel about the proper way to winterize an outboard, which was an argument she won in four sentences, and listened to Breech explain the new security system he was installing at the shop, which she approved with two modifications that made Breech blink and then nod.
She held her own at the table the way she held her own everywhere — by being exactly who she was, without adjustment, without apology, without the slightest interest in being anyone else.
After dinner, Torch pulled Squall aside.
"The waterfront's clean," the president said. "Meer's stock is moved. The shops he was using have been contacted and they know the score. Coast routes are back to normal."
"Good."
"Your woman did right by us."
"She did right by herself. We were standing nearby."
Torch almost smiled. On Torch, almost was the whole thing. "The shop partnership — that's solid. Good for the club. Good for the waterfront. She runs it, we back it, everybody works."
"That's the deal."
"And the two of you?"
Squall looked across the room to where Dana was at the bar with Nora, the two of them leaning close, talking about something that made Dana laugh — a real laugh, the unguarded kind that she gave so rarely it stopped the room when it happened.
Her hair was still down, and the bar light caught in it, and she was holding a glass of bourbon and smiling at a woman who'd become her friend in the span of two weeks because crisis compressed time the way pressure compressed coal.
"The two of us are the two of us," Squall said.
Torch nodded. Didn't push. The president understood that some things didn't need words, only witness.
They rode back to the shop after dinner because Dana wanted to check on the Nordland trawler one more time before morning.
He sat on the bench while she inspected the bilge pump he'd installed, and she found a fitting he'd torqued too tight and loosened it a quarter turn without saying anything, and he watched her hands in the shop light and thought about the first time she'd told him he was wrong about the outboard.
He'd been wrong about a lot of things. Not about her.
"Leave it," he said. "It's nine o'clock. The boat will be here tomorrow."
"I know. I just like being here when it's quiet."
He looked around the shop. The bay doors were closed, the bench light the only thing on, the harbor audible through the walls — halyards, water, the low boom of the breakwater. The shop smelled like engine oil and new lumber and the faintest trace of the fire that had started everything.
"I like being where you are," he said. "Quiet or loud."
She set down the wrench and walked over to him and sat on the bench beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched.
She put her head against his arm and he put his arm around her, and they sat in the quiet shop with the harbor breathing outside and the new wood smelling like the future and her hair against his shoulder smelling like everything else.
"Same time tomorrow?" she asked.
"Every day."
"That's a big promise."
"I'm good for it."
She tilted her head up and looked at him, and her eyes in the bench light were the darkest, warmest thing in the room.
"Yeah," she said. "You are."