"They do if it mattered." She blew dust off the plank. "Everything my mother won't talk about mattered. You can map her whole life by the things she changes the subject from. That song's on the map."
Elias said nothing. He had gone very quiet inside, the way a house goes quiet when a door somewhere closes.
Sixteen years he had believed a story. It had a shape and he had built his life inside the shape of it: she had chosen Stephen Kellerman, she had not wanted him, his letters had been answered by silence, and silence, repeated for two years, had become the answer he lived by. He had stopped writing. He had built a company out of that silence, the way you build a breakwater out of wreckage.
But a woman who had chosen another man — a woman who had cast him off and meant to forget him — did not teach her daughter his grandmother's song. She did not hum it over the dishes for fifteen years, in a kitchen where no Thorne had stood, badly, with the words half-missing, like a person turning a key in a lock she no longer had the door to.
And the girl herself. The girl with his mother's hair and his mother's squint and his own stubbornness worn like a tool belt, who had been, on the dock that first day, doing arithmetic in her eyes.
He was certain. He understood, standing there with his hand still on the plank and the dust settling in the light, that he was as certain as he had ever been of anything — and that certainty was not proof, and proof was what a thing like this required, because the next person he had to convince was not himself. It was Adeline. Adeline, who had shut the library door in a way that included thirty years of practice. Adeline, who hummed his grandmother's song over the dishes and would not tell her daughter where she learned it.
He would have to come to her with more than a feeling. He would have to come with dates, with records, with something that could not be waved away. A song could be explained. Arithmetic could not.
"You're doing it again," Wren said.
"Doing what."
"Supervising my face." She stood up, brushing dust off her knees, and gathered her tools with the neatness of a surgeon. "Same time tomorrow? The stem's ready to come out. You'll need to be here early. Bring coffee that isn't from the urn. It tastes like the harbor."
"It is the harbor, essentially."
"Then bring harbor that isn't from the urn."
She went out into the evening with her toolbox, and he watched her go down the dock toward town, and she was humming again by the time she reached the road — he could see it in her shoulders, even when he could no longer hear it — and Elias stood in the boathouse door among the ribs and the shavings and sixteen years, and thought: I know. God help me, I know. Now I have to prove it.
Chapter 7: The Dates
A man cannot take a song to a woman and call it proof. Elias knew that the way he knew a hull was sound or wasn't — by what would hold weight. So he did what he had done with every hard problem since he was twenty: he went looking for numbers, and he started with the regatta.
The Harbor's End Regatta kept its records the way the town kept everything else, in a bound ledger in the yacht club's front room and, since some optimistic grant in the nineties, in a card file nobody had ever thrown away. The entry cards were the point. Every junior sailor entered in the summer program had a card: name, boat, division — and date of birth, because the divisions were by age, and Harbor's End took its junior divisions the way other towns took church.
Elias was restoring two of the junior fleet's skiffs under the town contract, which gave him a legitimate reason to be in that front room on a rainy Sunday with a clipboard, checking hull numbers against the ledger. It gave him a legitimate reason to be flipping through the card file. It did not give him a legitimate reason to keep flipping after he'd found the hull numbers, and he was honest enough, alone in the room with the rain on the windows, to admit that to himself and keep flipping anyway.
PRESCOTT, WREN A. The handwriting was Adeline's — he'd have known it anywhere, that upright, unhurried hand, dotting nothing, crossing everything. Boat: Marigold. Division history marching down the card year by year, nine, ten, eleven, all the way up. And at the top, in the box set aside for it, the date of birth.
He stood with the card in his hand for a long time.
He had been braced for it. That was the thing he would remember later: he had done the arithmetic in his head a hundred times on the strength of a face and a song, and had told himself the card would only confirm what he already knew, and confirmation turned out to be nothing like knowing. Knowing was a feeling. The card was a fact, printed in his lost girl's handwriting, and it went through him like cold water.
Wren had been born in the spring. Nine months, almost to the week, after the last week of the last summer — the summer he and Adeline were eighteen, the summer of the Marigold and the boathouse roof and Gull Rock, the summer that had ended with Harlan Prescott's clerk and a door closing and a bus out of town. Elias had left Harbor's End believing she was promised to Stephen Kellerman. He had left not knowing. And everything that had ever been said to him since — the silence, the two years of letters going into a void — rearranged itself around that small printed date like iron filings around a magnet.
She was conceived before he left. Before the goodbye. Before any of it. Whatever story had been told in this town — and he was beginning to understand there had been a story, told carefully, told by someone — Wren Prescott was his daughter, and she had been his daughter from before he'd ever set foot on that bus.
He put the card back in its exact place in the file. He finished his hull numbers. He was careful about all of it, out of a superstition he couldn't have named: as if carelessness now might somehow damage the fact.
Maude knew, of course. Maude had always known; the only question was what she was waiting for.
He went to the Thorne cottage that evening with a bag of groceries he didn't need to bring and found his aunt at the kitchen table shelling peas into a colander with the ferocity of a woman who had been shelling peas at people for seventy years.
"You've seen it, then," Maude said, without preamble, because Elias had apparently walked in with the regatta card file written on his face.
"Seen what."
"Don't insult us both." She pointed at the chair across from her with a pea pod. "Sit. You've got the look your father used to get when he'd worked out which plank was rotten and didn't want to say it out loud because saying it made it his job to fix. Spring baby, wasn't she."