"Sixteen years."
"Sixteen." She went very still with the putty knife in her hand. He watched her do it — watched the numbers cross her face like a tide chart. Fifteen in April. Sixteen years gone. The math was simple enough that sailors had done it in their heads for centuries, usually standing right about where she was standing. She looked up at him slowly, and whatever she saw in his face must have matched something in her own thinking, because her expression changed — not to knowledge, not even to suspicion, but to the careful blankness of someone who has decided, for now, not to know a thing.
"Long time," she said at last, lightly. "Must be weird."
"You have no idea," he said, honestly.
"Show me the building," he said, because his hands needed something that wasn't questions. "You've been working here. What's dying that I can't see from the floor?"
She took the assignment like a promotion. She showed him the northwest corner where the sill had gone soft enough to take a pencil, the rack of dories with their stems sprung, the sail loft up the ladder where the fleet's canvas slept in labeled bins — and where, along one wall, a drift of old archive boxes and a dead harbormaster's desk and three decades of regatta programs waited for somebody to decide they mattered. "Madam Librarian says the town stores everything and catalogs nothing," Wren said. "She's threatened to come up here with a label maker since I was nine."
"And the roof?"
"Leaks over the office. Harbormaster keeps a bucket with a name. It's called Management." She said it deadpan, and he laughed before he could stop himself, and she grinned — quick, pleased, the grin of a kid who tests every adult for a sense of humor the way you test ice. "You laugh like—" She stopped.
"Like what?"
"Nothing. Like a person." She moved on too fast, down the ladder ahead of him, and changed the subject to the youth sailing program — twelve kids, three instructors, a waiting list — and how the boathouse was the only place in Harbor's End that was hers in a way she didn't have to share with the word Prescott. "Mom taught me to sail when I was six. In the Marigold. She says a boat tells you the truth even when people won't." She ran a hand along the skiff's exposed frames. "Mom says a lot of things like that. Like they're proverbs. They're not proverbs, they're just—" She shrugged. "Hers."
"Your grandfather—" he began, and watched it land wrong, watched the shutters come down behind her eyes.
"We don't really go up there," she said. "The big house. He sends checks for the sailing program and a card on my birthday with money in it, like I'm a charity he adopted. Mom says he's old and sick and that's just his way." She picked up the heat gun again, done talking, then — because she was fifteen and the thing was bigger than her discretion — she added, "He never once came to a regatta. Not one. Mom races with me. Mom's the one who—" She shook her head hard. "Forget it. Adults are weird. You're probably weird too, it just hasn't shown yet."
"It'll show," Elias promised, and she snorted, and the moment passed the way weather passes — but he was a surveyor of structures, and he had just mapped a crack that ran through three generations of one family and came out, at the bottom, in a boathouse, in a girl with a heat gun who'd been handed checks instead of a grandfather.
The door at the end of the bay rolled up on its track, letting in a blade of morning light, and Adeline stood in it with a tray: two mugs, a thermos, a paper sack. She saw him and stopped so completely that one of the mugs sloshed.
For a moment nobody moved. Sixteen years, and the boathouse held them like a held breath: the woman in the doorway, the man by the skiff, the girl between them holding a putty knife, watching both their faces with the attention of a lookout.
"Mom," Wren said. "This is—"
"I know who it is." Adeline came forward and set the tray down on a workbench with great precision, the way you set down something that might break. She did not look at Elias. She looked at the skiff, at Wren's hands, at the notebook. "Wren. Your shift at the library. The cafe opens at nine and Maren can't run it alone on a Saturday."
"It's eight-fifteen."
"Then you'll be early." Her voice was pleasant and absolute. Now she did look at Elias, and it was like being looked at through harbor ice. "Mr. Thorne. I see the council's found its contractor. The boathouse committee meets Thursdays; Maren Dahl has the minutes if you need them. Everything else you need, the harbormaster can tell you." She picked up the empty thermos. "Wren."
Wren looked between them once more. "See you around, boat guy," she said, and there was something in it — a hook set gently in the water — and then she followed her mother out into the light.
Elias stood alone in the smell of turpentine with two untouched mugs cooling on the bench, and understood two things with the clarity of a man reading a survey: Adeline Prescott had just removed her daughter from a room he was standing in, quick as she'd pull her back from a cliff edge.
And she had called him Mr. Thorne, in the voice of a woman reading out a name she had buried.
Chapter 3: What Adeline Was Told
The summer Adeline Prescott was eighteen, she was the judge's daughter and the town's good example, and she was in love with Elias Thorne in the complete, airless, unnegotiable way that only happens at eighteen, when love is not a feeling but a climate. He was the Thorne boy from the cottage by the boathouse — no money, all talent, hands already scarred from other people's boats — and her father had forbidden it with the weary contempt of a man swatting at weather. They had met anyway, all that summer, in the boathouse loft and on the water and in the hour after her shifts at the library, and they had made their plans with the solemnity of treaty-makers. He would take the scholarship exam for the maritime trades program. She would defer her college place a year. They would marry in the spring, in the little church, and Harbor's End could think what it liked.
In the second week of August, Elias went to Portland for the exam and came back to find the Prescott house shut to him like a gate.
She never saw him again. What she saw, three days later, summoned to her father's study with her mother standing by the window saying nothing at all, was a letter.
Harlan Prescott laid it on the desk blotter and turned it toward her with two fingers, like something unclean. It was on plain paper. It was in Elias's hand — she would have known it anywhere, had copied homework out of it for two years, that tall slanted script with the crossed t's like little sails. She picked it up with hands that had gone strange and read it standing up, and the room tilted gently around the words.
Addie — it said. I am writing this so there is no scene. Your father has been fair with me. He has given me a check that will set me up in Seattle, where the program has a place for me starting now, not next year. I know about the baby. I am sorry, but I am eighteen and I am not going to be a husband or a father in a town that looks at me the way this one does. I don't want a wife. I don't want a child. Please don't write. It won't change anything. — E.