Page 28 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
She wanted to cross the space between them and set her palm against the rough stubble of his jaw and say,You’re here. That matters.Instead, she tugged the edge of an old cloth napkin, repetitive pulls until the fabric unraveled. “How did Shade end up in this… whatever this is?”
Rone’s eyes flicked to windows that had smeared red letters partially scrubbed clean like a healing wound this morning. “He was always in other people’s messes. He liked to unspool knots. Sometimes he didn’t ask who tied them first.” He rotated his wrist, flexing his fingers under the gauze. “He was liked and respected for a time. Work. Church. A bait shop. I don’t know where the unraveling of him started, but I know where it ended.”
“In the bay.”
Rone nodded, once.
“Did he drown?” she asked the water in her mug. “Or did someone drown him? Or is he alive?” She tried not to cling to the hope of that last word.
The boat made a small sound like a sigh around them. The silence changed shape, heavier. Rone finally said, “Don’t know.”
She looked up. “Rone.”
“I wasn’t there,” he said, a disclaimer and a confession. “If I say more than that, I give you pieces that will cut you if you squeeze. I’m trying to keep you from bleeding in places you can’t bandage.”
“You think I’m fragile.” She wanted it to be accusation. It came out as a truth from childhood, the kind that wears its shape into you and refuses to be smoothed out.
“I think you’re human,” he said. Then, softer, “I think I can’t watch it happen again.”
“Torres.”
“Torres.” His mouth shaped the name like a prayer he didn’t say out loud. He stared at his coffee. “The night she died, I was supposed to pull. She moved. I hesitated a half second at a sound that wasn’t important, and the bullet picked the gap, and that’s all it takes. The difference betweenyou go homeandyou go underis as thin as a breath. I have lived inside that breath ever since.”
Truth set itself down on the table. Bracing. Heavy. She could almost see the shadow of it between their cups.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He nodded, a rough little dip. “Me too.”
They sat with it. The boat clicked and hummed. From a few slips over, someone swore.
Isobel angled her body sideways, knees against the cushion, and tucked a foot under her. The posture felt like something she only did with people who were allowed to see her messy. “I know what I’m asking you to do,” she said. “I’m asking you to walk back into a room that hurt you because I’m standing in the doorway and I don’t know how to cross it alone.”
His half smile was there and gone so fast she almost thought she’d imagined it. “You’re not helpless.”
“I know.” She lifted the mug to her mouth and realized her hands were steadier. “But I’m also not stupid. I can want help and still be strong. I can love the father I knew and not turn into a husk of myself chasing him. Both can be true.”
He studied her for a long time like he was measuring a distance only he could see. “There’s a tin,” he said, the words reluctant, flaking out of him like old paint. “Shade left it for you. I didn’t tell you because I thought keeping you away from it would keep you away from this.”
Her heart kicked so hard she felt a hiccup in her throat. “You have it?”
He didn’t move. His shoulders rolled back the smallest degree, as if the act of telling had asked his body for rent. “I have it.”
“What’s in it?”
“A drive,” he said. “I haven’t plugged it in.”
“Because…?”
“Because it could be a key or a fuse,” he said. “Either way, something lights.”
She set her mug down with care and laced her fingers together so she didn’t reach for him. “Thank you for telling me.”
He gave the smallest nod, and the gratitude she felt at that ridiculous fraction made something deep in her chest go tender and sore. She should have been angry with him for keeping it. She wasn’t. Or not exactly. There was anger in there, but it had softened into a sad kind of understanding: he had been trying to build a wall around her without noticing she’d been born on the other side of it.
He shifted, the couch creaking under his weight, and leaned forward, forearms on the table, the line of his back tense even at rest. “We’ll look,” he said, an adjustment so slight it might have been the sound of a lock agreeing to open. “But not here. Not on anything connected to anything. Off-site. Offline. We control the light switch and who sees it.”
She exhaled. It trembled coming out, then steadied. “Okay.”
