Page 22 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
“I wanted to get more out of him,” Isobel said. “I thought, if I asked the right way, if I said the right word—” she shook her head, “But he wasn’t there to talk. He was there to deliver a message and watch it land. Even if he’d said something true, I couldn’t do anything with it alone but die faster.”
Rone’s throat worked. She wondered if he knew she saw the place where memory and decision met and ground against each other. He didn’t fill the space with useless promises. He didn’t say I won’t let that happen, because men who said that were either liars or fools or got dead trying. He only nodded once, a motion so small it would have been easy to miss if she hadn’t been this close.
“You’re not like her,” he said, so softly she almost didn’t hear it.
“Like who?”
He took a breath that went all the way down, like he was pulling air through gravel. He let the word trail. The end of it vibrated in the space between them like a struck string. “You’re brave but not stupid.”
“I’m trying.” Her mouth felt dry. “I’m desperate for answers. I want to know who my father is and where he is and what I can do to ask him why he left. And to get those answers, I think I’ll do anything, but fear wants me to run. Pride wants meto stand in the middle of the dock and announce I’m not afraid. Neither seems smart.”
“Smart’s boring to most people,” he said, and she heard the aching fondness in it, like a man teasing a friend he wanted to keep alive. “But boring’s how people get old.”
“I’d like to try it,” she said, lips easing. “Getting old.”
For a beat, his gaze met hers full-on. The light from the lamp post outside cut a low gold into his eyes, brought warmth up from somewhere he probably didn’t show the world. It caught her off guard. Not romance—she didn’t have room for that, not now, not with the smoke still in her hair and the taste of threat on her tongue. Something smaller. Something that felt like standing on a porch beside somebody while the storm blew past and not having to be the one who said it would be all right.
She patted the burn dry, slicked gel with a careful finger, and taped fresh gauze. “There. Paid in full for that sunrise coffee you promised.”
The corner of his mouth kicked, near to a smile. “Echo, I think this is a shakedown.”
“Same result.” She tore a strip of tape with her teeth and smoothed it down. “You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
They both knew only one of them would.
She slid back on her heels and let her knees breathe. Echo shifted and put his head in her lap as if he’d been waiting for permission. She bent and pressed her forehead to his damp skull, inhaling brine and dog and extinguisher dust. “You scared me,” she whispered into fur.
Echo snorted likeyes, well, you scare me sometimes, too.
“You’re the only family I have left in this world, you know. I have no siblings, and now my father’s dead. And my mom died from a broken heart the doctors called ‘the widowmaker’.”
Rone watched them with that quiet, attentive look she waslearning meant he was thinking more than he was saying. He flexed his wrapped hand once, testing. The line between his brows smoothed a little. “Sun’s coming up and there’ll be lots of people here working, so I don’t think anyone will try anything for at least a few hours,” he said, the logistics clicking back into place because that was how men like him fought—by stacking small certainties. “I’ll show you how to start up the genie for power.”
“Good.” The ordinariness of the plan steadied her the way a recipe steadied a messy kitchen. “I’ll make coffee at dawn regardless.”
“Isobel.” He stopped her with her name. She looked up. “You don’t owe anybody on this dock bravery. And you don’t owe a man who left you when you were young.”
“Maybe not.” She stroked Echo’s ear. “But I owe honesty to myself. And… I owe kindness where I can give it.” She glanced at his hand. “Including to men who pretend burns don’t hurt.”
He huffed. “It’s a good pretend.”
“It’s a lonely one,” she said, and surprised herself because that sounded truer than she’d meant to get tonight.
Silence met the admission. He leaned back into the settee, this time like the furniture might hold him. “You don’t have to be alone either,” he said, and then added, so quietly she barely caught it, “not in this.”
A quick, ridiculous swell of tears rose behind her eyes. She chased it with a breath and the memory of every moment today that had asked her to choose fear or hope.
From outside, a gull cried, the kind of sound that always sounded like bad news even when it was only hunger. A boat line moaned where it rubbed. He pointed to what she needed to do between the electrical panel and the generator to get everything going then collapsed onto the settee while Echo grunted and stationed himself by the cockpit door as if giving abriefing to the air. “Looks like Echo’s staying with you this morning.” He stood and headed out the door. “Lock behind me.”
“I will.”
He paused at the door. “If he comes back,” he added, chin tipping toward the dark where the messenger had disappeared, “and I’m not in eyeshot—call. Don’t try and bargain him into truth.”
“I won’t,” she said, an answer she planned to keep even if her bones wanted something else. “Rone?”
He waited.
