48. I Know, All The Fish You Want -Finn
Forty Eight
I Know, All The Fish You Want -Finn
When we stepped inside, warmth enveloped me.
It wasn’t just the temperature—though the wood stove heat, redolent with the smell of food and smoke, certainly permeated the walls. It was the very fact of the place itself: still here, still standing, intact in a world that had made a project of destroying everything I’d ever cared about.
Twenty miles of nothing—of hands, teeth, and cold—and then this: a kitchen, warmth, the smell of food. A world I’d already eulogized, somehow still present, waiting to be re-entered.
It nearly knocked me sideways.
Lock sat at the kitchen table, head bent over something spread across its surface. He looked up at the sound of the door opening, already half-turning in his chair, his expression carrying the automatic alertness of a man who’d spent months treating every unexpected noise as a potential threat.
He saw Callan first. Then his eyes moved past him and landed on me.
And froze.
His eyes found mine and simply stayed there.
His right hand still held a pen, and I watched it slowly tip sideways between his fingers and drop onto the table.
He didn’t look down at it. He didn’t blink.
The wood stove popped once in the silence, and neither of us moved.
Then something shifted in the set of his jaw—the muscles went slack in a way that made him look, just briefly, like someone I hadn’t met yet.
Then—
“Holy fuck!“
The chair scraped hard against the floor, legs shrieking across wood, as he shot to his feet so fast it nearly tipped over behind him.
He crossed the room in three long, uneven strides—Lock never ran anywhere, never rushed, the most measured and deliberate man I’d ever known, and he ran across that kitchen—and before I could open my mouth, before I could get a single word out, he had me in a hug that damn near crushed what remained of my ribs.
His arms locked around my back, and he held on.
“You’re alive,” he said into my shoulder, his voice rough, carrying a tremor I’d never heard from Lock before and suspected I’d never hear again. Like he still didn’t entirely believe it. Like saying it out loud might make it less true, instead of more.
“Yeah,” I said, and my arms came up around him and held on just as hard, gripping the back of his shirt, pressing my forehead against his shoulder because my legs had started shaking again and I needed something solid to lean into. “Still here, brother. Still kicking.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me, hands still gripping my shoulders, eyes moving over my face the way a man reads a damage report.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Worse than hell,” I muttered. “Hell would’ve been an upgrade.”
He huffed a laugh.
“I knew you’d show up,” he said. “Told Callan. Told the girls. I knew you wouldn’t go down that easily. Not you.”
I swallowed against the tightness in my throat, fighting the burning pressure behind my eyes—a pressure I absolutely, categorically refused to give in to.
“Yeah,” I managed. “Well, I came closer than I’d like to admit.”
He pulled back, meeting my gaze. Something shifted in his expression—a slight tightening around the jaw, a question forming and then dissolving before it reached his mouth. He nodded once. I nodded back. That settled it.
“Fiona’s out,” he said, glancing over his shoulder toward the living room, his voice returning to its steady, practical tone.
“She pushed herself too hard today—kept moving, kept holding it together for the girls, kept going until her body made the decision for her. She sat down in that chair about forty minutes ago and just… gone. Hasn’t moved since. ”
I looked past him.
She sat slumped in the armchair near the window, her head tilted at an angle that would leave her neck aching in the morning. Her face was slack and pale in the lamplight, her hands still loosely gripping the armrests as if she’d fallen asleep mid-sentence. Completely worn out.
My sister. Alive. Safe. Here.
“Lily?” I asked.
“Asleep already,” Lock said. “Didn’t make it past the bed. She curled up and dropped off in about thirty seconds. The kid’s resilient, but today took it out of her.”
Good.
They had made it. They were here. The boat, the crossing, all of it—they had done their part, and now they rested behind locked doors on solid ground, surrounded by people with guns.
That mattered.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, my eyes already drifting toward the hallway. “About everything. The mainland, the route, what I saw out there. All of it. But right now I just—”
“Libby’s in your room,” he said immediately, cutting me off before I had to finish the sentence. The way he said it—no hesitation, no questions—told me he already understood more than I’d told anyone.
My chest constricted.
“She hasn’t really slept,” he added, his voice dropping lower. “She tried. Callan’s girl sat with her for a while. I brought her food she didn’t touch, but she… couldn’t settle. Kept getting up. Kept going to the window. Kept staring at the water like she thought if she watched long enough—”
He stopped himself, pressing his lips together.
“She finally crashed, maybe an hour ago,” he said. “Exhaustion took her.”
Of course, she hadn’t slept. Of course she’d fought it. Of course she’d sat in my room and stared at the dark water and waited for something that she’d already been told would never come back.
I nodded once, not trusting my voice.
“Alright.”
Lock grabbed my shoulder before I could take a step, his grip firm, his eyes holding mine one more time.
“Glad you’re here, Finn,” he said. The simple words carried more weight than any long speech could have.
“Me too,” I replied, meaning it more profoundly than anything I’d ever said before.
Then I moved.
Down the hallway, past closed doors and quiet rooms, my muddy boots left prints on the wooden floor. I’d clean them tomorrow, or never; it didn’t matter. Every step drew me closer to her.
The door stood ajar.
I pushed it open slowly, letting the hinges creak.
Quiet.
The room was dim and still, lit only by the small bedside lamp someone—Lock, probably—had left burning on its lowest setting.
The bed occupied its usual spot: the same worn wooden frame I’d built with my own hands the first year I bought this place, the same blankets I’d slept under hundreds of nights before the world ended and everything I’d taken for granted became precious.
And her.
Curled in the center of the mattress, knees drawn up, one hand tucked beneath her chin, the other resting on the pillow beside her face—my pillow. She had pulled the blankets tight around herself, wrapped in them as if she needed something to hold on to and the blankets were all she had.
Small.
So still.
Even in sleep, the tension hadn’t left her. I saw it in the faint crease between her brows, the slight curl of her fingers against the pillow, as if she’d fallen asleep mid-grip. Her hair spread across the white cotton in dark waves, still faintly stiff with salt from the crossing, and her face—
Her face bore the swollen, creased look of someone who had cried herself into unconsciousness—puffy eyelids, faintly blotched cheeks, mouth slightly open the way it gets when sleep arrives as collapse rather than rest.
My chest tightened so hard and suddenly that the pain in my shoulder faded to nothing by comparison—insignificant, irrelevant, a footnote next to the thing that locked my ribs in place and made every breath something I had to negotiate for.
She had grieved me.
Mourned me.
Lying in my bed, in my room, surrounded by my things, and cried until sleep took her because she believed with absolute certainty that I’d died on that shore and she would never see me again.
I stood there longer than I should have, in the doorway, one hand on the frame, just looking at her.
Taking in every detail—the rise and fall of her breathing, the way the lamplight caught the curve of her shoulder, the gentle shadow her lashes cast across her cheekbones, the shape of her mouth, the impossible realness of her lying in my bed as if she belonged there, as if she’d always belonged there, as if every night I’d ever spent in this room before her had just been practice for this.
I set the carrier down gently near the door, unlatched the grate, and eased it open.
Doc Fluffbutt emerged with the cautious, dignified deliberation of a creature who would hold his recent ordeal against me for the rest of his natural life.
He stretched—front legs first, then back, spine arching high—and shook himself once from ears to tail.
He looked up at me, blinking slowly, a silent judgment that made me feel I owed him an apology.
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered under my breath. “I remember. All the fish you can eat. I’m good for it.”
He blinked once more, slowly, conveying both deep skepticism regarding my reliability and a willingness to grant a temporary reprieve.
Then he immediately turned away, trotted to the bedroom door, and began scratching with rhythmic, insistent intensity—tiny claws against wood, over and over.
It was the universal feline signal for: This door is closed, that is unacceptable, and I require immediate attention from someone more competent than you.
I cracked the door open and leaned into the hallway.
“Lock,” I called, keeping my voice low. “Feed him. Water him. He’s been through it.”
A pause from the kitchen.
“Of course he has,” Lock muttered, and I heard the sound of a chair pushing back. “He’s your cat now. You go out and nearly die, and you come back with a cat. That’s very Finn.”
“He’s not my—” I started, then stopped. Arguing about cat ownership at one in the morning, after kayaking twenty miles across the open ocean, seemed like a battle I lacked the energy to fight. “Just—take care of him. Please let him in with Lily; she seems to be his person.”