The Shipwright's Come About

Roan Mercer sails into Merritt Harbor alone on the day the town blesses its fleet, his boat half-sinking and his plan already set on leaving by fall.

Seven years of delivering other men's vessels up the coast have taught him to travel light and slip away before any harbor can keep him, because leaving is the only safety he has ever trusted.

Hollis Cyr is the opposite kind of man: a shipwright who has shouldered a failing boatyard and half the waterfront for twenty years, restoring every worn hull while never once letting himself want anything of his own.

Roan means only to work off the haul-out, but the yard is one bad season from the wrecking ball, an out-of-state developer is circling the fleet's last working docks, and every fight he picks for a place that cannot be his makes staying harder to refuse.

He came to repair a boat, not to spend his nights in a bed up the hill, learning what it costs to want to remain.