18. Nolan #2
No house I belonged to.
No place where someone expected me to come home.
No permanent address that ever felt permanent.
Hadley’s look shifts.
“What?” I ask.
She hesitates. “I pictured it.”
“The house?”
She nods.
Hope moves through me so sharply it’s almost painful.
“Yeah?”
She threads her fingers through mine.
“Yeah.”
That one word builds something inside me.
A foundation.
A future.
The kind of hope I’ve always been smart enough not to entertain.
We lie for a while after that. The silence isn’t awkward or heavy. It’s the kind that only exists when two people no longer feel the need to fill every space between them.
The apartment grows brighter as sunlight finally breaks through the clouds. Unfortunately, reality begins creeping back in.
The marina.
Reopening meetings.
A list of problems that will double the second I get out of this bed.
Hadley shifts away.
My arm tightens around her.
“No.”
She laughs. “People expect us to function today.”
“They’re unreasonable.”
“Very.”
I bury my face briefly against her shoulder.
“I could cancel everything and hibernate with you instead.”
A gentle warmth spread across her face, relaxing her features.
“You’re very bad at casual now.”
I lift my head.
“Hads, I don’t think there’s a single casual feeling left in me where you’re concerned.”
Her breath catches.
It feels like the simplest truth I have.
She presses a kiss against my jaw before finally untangling herself from me.
And as I watch her cross the room in her wrinkled sweater, gathering her clothes and complaining about the lack of decent coffee in my kitchen, another truth settles beneath my ribs.
I’m no longer afraid of loving her.
I’m afraid of how losing her would destroy me. And for the first time in my life, running before that could happen doesn’t even cross my mind.
By Sunday evening, I’ve spent approximately forty-eight straight hours being loved by Hadley Wright.
And honestly?
I’m still not entirely sure how to function around it.
Not because it feels wrong.
Because it feels so unbelievably right that part of me keeps waiting for the universe to realize it made a mistake.
I stand alone near the western slips just after sunset, watching marina lights flicker across Back Bay while warm evening wind moves over the docks.
The reopening weekend was chaos in the best possible way.
Full slips.
Packed charter schedules.
Tourists everywhere.
Every restaurant within walking distance overflowing by noon.
Across the dock, an older couple wanders past the bait shop, their fingers loosely intertwined.
They stop near the end of the restaurant deck, looking out over the water without saying anything for a long moment.
Finally the woman smiles.
“It’s smaller than I remember.”
The man chuckles.
“Everything is.”
She nudges him gently with her shoulder.
“This is where you proposed.”
“No,” he says, grinning. “This is where you turned me down.”
Her laughter carries across the dock.
“Only because you’d known me for six weeks.”
“Seven.”
She rolls her eyes.
“You counted?”
“I was trying to convince you to marry me.”
“You were trying to convince me not to run.”
They both laugh.
After a quiet moment, she reaches up and squeezes his hand.
“Good thing I stayed.”
He kisses the top of her hand.
“Best decision either of us ever made.”
They continue down the dock at an unhurried pace, disappearing toward the parking lot as naturally as they’d arrived.
Walter watches them go from where he’s coiling rope beside the fuel dock.
“Forty-two years,” he says.
I glance over.
“They’ve been coming here that long?”
He nods.
“Met right here at Sweetspire.”
His eyes follow them with quiet satisfaction.
“This place has been collecting love stories longer than either of us has been alive.”
The marina feels alive now in a way I could only have imagined when I first bought the place, half destroyed and drowning in storm damage.
I should feel nothing but satisfaction.
This is what I worked for.
What I gambled everything to build.
Yet the accomplishment feels secondary tonight because every good thing that happened this weekend came with Hadley standing beside me.
Celebrating.
Laughing.
Talking to visitors as though she’d been part of the marina from the beginning.
Existing in my space as if she belongs here.
“You hiding from people?”
I turn. Hadley walks toward me along the dock carrying two beers while the last of the sunset spills gold across the water behind her.
There she is again. The center of every thought I’ve had for weeks. The woman I love.
“I’m supervising the marina,” I tell her.
I gesture toward the docks.
“Somebody has to make sure Walter isn’t reorganizing my lumber again.”
She smiles.
“Did he?”
“By color.”
“That sounds helpful.”
“It absolutely wasn’t.”
She snorts and hands me a beer. “Very important work.”
“Critically important.”
She settles beside me against the railing while the bay stretches dark and endless around us.
For several minutes, neither of us speaks.
We stand shoulder to shoulder, watching boats shift against their slips as the marina lights reflect across the water.
The silence feels intimate. I never knew love could feel this calm.
Hadley nudges her shoulder against mine. “You disappeared earlier.”
There’s no accusation in her voice.
Only concern.
She is always concerned about me, even when she doesn’t make a production out of it.
“Just thinking.”
“That’s usually dangerous.”
“Probably.”
I glance toward her.
The wind catches strands of her hair and moves them across her face while she watches the marina with quiet contentment.