Wrenhaven

Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.

---

"Undertow"

Elias woke at 3:47 a.m. with a decision already in his body.

Not in his mind, his mind was still assembling, performing the groggy boot-up sequence of a man dragged out of shallow sleep by an alarm he hadn't set. The decision was lower than thought. It was in his spine, in his jaw, in the set of his shoulders as he swung his legs over the edge of the mattress and planted his feet on the cold floor of the flat. 

He was done.

He didn't phrase it that way. He didn't phrase it at all. The decision had no language because language would have required naming the thing the decision was about, giving it shape, and shape was what made things real, and reality was the one thing Elias Voss could not afford to grant to whatever had happened in his kitchen nine hours ago.

The kitchen. The counter. The forty-watt bulb. A jaw in his palm. A pulse against his thumb. Warm skin and a body that was scarred and a pair of eyes, one open, one swelling shut, that had looked at him from a distance of six inches with an expression that had cracked something in the bedrock of who he was.

Done. He was done.

He stood. The flat was dark, the harbor lights tracing thin lines across the floor through the windows, the new window and the old ones, indifferent to the distinction. The rock sat on the nightstand where he'd placed it. He looked at it. For one second, one precise, measured second that he counted the way a diver counts seconds underwater, he looked at the gray, smooth stone that a boy had thrown through his window, that he'd kept, that he'd carried from the desk to the drawer to the nightstand, that he'd been holding when he fell asleep and had woken still reaching for.

He turned away. He didn't pick it up. He didn't move it. He left it on the nightstand.

He showered. The water was hot, and he stood under it until the heat turned his skin red, the steam filled the bathroom, and every trace of the night was scoured away. He dressed in the dark. Jeans. A henley — not the henley, a different henley, a black one, pulled from a stack in the dresser that contained four identical shirts in four identical folds, because Elias Voss bought his clothes the way he bought his equipment: in bulk, no variation.

He made coffee. He drank it standing at the counter, the counter where Rowan had sat, and he drank the coffee fast and hot and without tasting it, because tasting required attention and attention was a resource he was reallocating, effective immediately, to the only thing that had never betrayed him.

Work.

He was on the dock by 4:50.

Already deep into the machinery of the morning, tide charts reviewed, routes adjusted, the Lady Maren's fuel intake logged, Kowalski's schedule amended for the third time this week because Kowalski had developed a head cold and was, characteristically, treating it as though it were a terminal diagnosis.

He moved through the work the way water moves through a turbine: fast, directed, converting everything it touched into power. The whiteboard was full by six. The schedule was tight by six-thirty. By seven, he'd inspected the "Driftwood's" engine, recalibrated the winch on the Sea Ghost, and rewritten the protocol for net storage in a memo that no one had asked for, that no one would read, and that existed for the sole purpose of keeping his hands on paper and his mind on ink.

The crew arrived to a dock that had been preemptively perfected. Eddie Morrow, first to appear, stopped at the foot of the pier and surveyed the scene with a bewildered expression.

"Morning, boss."

"The fuel log has a discrepancy on Tuesday's entry. Twelve gallons unaccounted for. Find it."

"It's...it's five a.m."

"The discrepancy doesn't care. Neither do I."

Eddie went to find the discrepancy. He found it in nine minutes. It was a transposed digit. Elias said 'fine' and moved on. Eddie stood in the fuel shed, staring at a clipboard and questioning his career choices.

By mid-morning, the dock was running at a tempo that could only be described as manic competence. Everything was stacked, logged, checked, and double-checked. The boats left on schedule. The boats returned on schedule. The ice house was organized. The fire extinguisher was level. Briggs's bowline was, by this point, so tight that the rope had begun to make sounds of structural distress.

Marcus arrived at eight. He stood in the office doorway and watched Elias attack the whiteboard with quiet focus of a man observing a laboratory experiment.

"You've been here since before five," Marcus said.

"Four-fifty."

"The schedule was done yesterday."

"The schedule was preliminary. This is the revised schedule. Which accounts for the water temperature data from the buoy at Cutter Point, which updated at three a.m., which shifts the cod pattern north by approximately four nautical miles, which means the Tuesday route needs adjustment."

"You checked buoy data at three a.m."

"I was awake."

Marcus leaned against the doorframe. His arms crossed. His head tilted. The tilt was approximately fifteen degrees, the angle at which Marcus Hale's concern became visible, and his willingness to be deflected became negotiable.

"How's the kid?" he asked.

"Which kid?"

"The one you pulled out of a bar fight last night."

"Fine. Cuts and bruises. Camille picked him up."

"And?"

"And what?"

"And how are you?"

"I'm revising the schedule."

Marcus took it. He took it because Marcus had known Elias for twenty years and knew that there were times when pushing was productive and times when pushing was the equivalent of leaning on a locked door, you could exhaust yourself against it or you could wait for the lock to fail, and Marcus had learned, through long and occasionally painful experience, that Elias's locks always failed eventually. They just needed time. And pressure. And the particular, relentless patience of a man who loved his friend enough to let him be wrong until he was ready to be something else.

"I'll check on Lady Maren," Marcus said.

"Do that."

Marcus left. The door closed. Elias went back to the whiteboard. The marker moved. The schedule filled.

The schedule was, by any professional standard, excellent. It was, by any emotional standard, a barricade.

*

Camille's first call came at noon.

His phone lit up on the desk, 'Camille Leclair', the name over a photo he'd taken two years ago, laughing at something he'd said, her eyes catching the sun. He looked at the photo. He looked at the name. He watched the phone buzz against the wood, the vibration turning the device in a slow, incremental rotation, like a compass needle searching for north.

He let it ring.

The silence after the ringing stopped was specific, the quiet that exists after a choice has been made and before its consequences arrive. He picked up the phone. One missed call. He set it back on the desk.

He went outside. Checked lines. Yelled at Hargrove about something that didn't need yelling about. Came back. Checked the phone. No follow-up text. Camille was giving him space. Camille was always giving him space, an infinite, renewable resource of space, the kind that a woman gives a man she loves when she knows that love is the one thing he can't give back and that pushing him would cost her the thing she has. Proximity. Presence.

The second call came at 2:15.

This time, he answered.

"Hey." His voice was calibrated. Flat, warm, functional, the verbal equivalent of a room-temperature glass of water. Offering nothing. Denying nothing.

"Hey." Camille's voice was different. Tentative, searching, checking the temperature of a room before entering it. "I've been calling."

"Yeah. Sorry. Boats."

"It's fine. I just...I wanted to check in. After last night."

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine. I mean about Rowan."

The name. He heard it in her mouth, and he heard it in his memory. It arrived not in his brain but in his forearms, which tensed, involuntarily, as though the muscles were replaying the hold, the pressure, the heat, the vibration of a heart beating against the inside of his arms.

"What about him?" Elias said.

"Did he say anything? Before I got there?"

"Not much."

"He hasn't talked about it." Camille paused. The pause had texture. "But he's different. He's...I don't know. He came downstairs this morning. Sat at the table. He didn't eat. He didn't talk. But he sat there. While I was in the kitchen. For twenty minutes."

She said this the way a person describes a miracle, with awe, with disbelief, with the fragile hope of someone who knows that miracles are not to be trusted because they can be revoked.

"He sat at the table," Elias repeated. Neutral. Giving nothing.

"Twenty minutes. That's the longest he's been in the same room with me." Another pause. Longer. "Did you...say something? Something that might have..."

The question was a hand extended over the edge of a cliff. She was reaching for something she could feel but couldn't see, the shape of a change in her son that she couldn't explain, an alteration in his frequency that had occurred between the bar fight and the morning after, between the blood and the bandages and whatever had happened in a kitchen she'd walked into nine minutes too late.

"I cleaned him up," Elias said again. "That's all."

'That's all.' The words were structurally sound. They were factually defensible. He had, in the literal sense, cleaned the boy up. Antiseptic. Gauze. Butterfly bandages. These were medical interventions, not intimate ones. There was nothing in the sentence that was untrue, and the untruth lived not in what the sentence said but in what it contained, the vast, dark, oceanic thing beneath the surface that the sentence had been constructed specifically to cover.

"Has he thanked you?" Camille asked.

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me. You..."

"Camille. It doesn't matter."

She was quiet. He heard her breathing, soft, steady.

"Are you okay?" she asked. The question was gentle. The question was the most dangerous thing she'd said all day, because the gentleness was genuine and the gentleness was the thing that had always undone him. Gentleness. Camille's particular brand of it, soft and relentless, the steady drip that carves through stone.

"I'm fine. Busy. Boats." The trinity of deflection. "Talk later?"

"Sure." She said it easily. She said it the way she always said it. "Elias?"

"Yeah."

"Thank you. For last night. For everything."

"Don't mention it."

He heard the smile in her voice. The warmth of it reached through the phone and touched him in a place he couldn't protect, and the touch was familiar, the Camille-touch, the warmth that had once been enough, that had been easy, that had fit the shape of his life the way a key fits a lock, turning something that opened to something he understood.

It had been enough, once. He wasn't sure what had changed, or when, or why the key no longer fit, or whether the lock had changed or the key had, or whether the whole metaphor was collapsing under the weight of something he refused to carry.

"Later," he said.

He hung up.

*

The days compounded.

Wednesday into Thursday into Friday into the weekend, each day a carbon copy of the one before, the routine tightening around Elias like a tourniquet. He woke in the dark. He worked in the light. He came home in the dark. The cycle was closed, airtight, a loop with no entry point for anything other than fuel costs, tide data, or the specific tensile strength of the dock line.

He didn't go to Camille's house. He'd told himself he was giving them space, the same rationale he'd deployed the first time, the same reasonable, responsible framework that a reasonable, responsible man would construct around the act of staying away from a woman and her son. Space. Boundaries. The delicate architecture of a family reuniting. He was being considerate.

He was lying to himself with a fluency that should have been impressive and was, instead, exhausting.

His texts to Camille became telegraphic. She'd write a paragraph, a dispatch from the front lines of motherhood, and he'd respond with a word. Two, if she was lucky.

Camille: Rowan came to the studio today. Didn't come in. Just stood outside for a few minutes and looked through the window. Then left. I don't know what it means, but I cried in the back room for ten minutes.

Elias: That's good.

Camille: Is it?

Elias: He came.

Camille: I miss talking to you.

Elias: Soon.

He hated 'soon'. He hated it more than 'later', because 'later' was vague and 'soon' was a promise. The word surfaced, unbidden, and he killed it. Replaced it with 'schedule'. 

He put the phone down. He went back to work.

Marcus watched. Marcus always watched. The difference now was that Marcus had stopped commenting, which was worse. A Marcus who teased was a Marcus who thought the situation was manageable. A Marcus who was silent was a Marcus who had reclassified the situation from amusing to concerning.

On Thursday, Marcus broke the silence with a single sentence. They were on the dock, side by side, inspecting a net that didn't need inspecting.

"You know you can't outwork a feeling, right?"

Elias didn't look up.

Marcus looked at him for a long moment. Then he went back to the net.

*

Rowan's mornings were the hardest part, because that was when the house pretended.

It pretended with light, the east-facing window in his room filling the space with a pale, insistent brightness that had no business being as warm as it was, given that the world outside was February, gray, and smelled like wet salt. It pretended with sound, the harbor, the gulls, the particular acoustic signature of a town waking up that had become, against Rowan's explicit wishes, familiar. It pretended with smell, coffee from below, the dark, rich bloom of it rising through the floorboards and the gaps in the old wood and the cracks in the ceiling, forty-seven of them, reaching his room before his conscious mind had finished assembling itself.

And it pretended with Camille. With the quiet sounds of her morning, the faucet, the kettle, the careful navigation of the third step, that had become, not the sounds of an enemy moving through contested territory, but something else. Something more bearable. Something that was not forgiveness and was not peace but was, possibly, the cessation of active hostilities, the conversational equivalent of two countries lowering their flags to half-mast and agreeing to discuss.

On Wednesday, three days after the fight, three days after the flat, three days after a man had held his face in a kitchen, Rowan came downstairs.

Not for food delivered to the hallway table. Not at two a.m., under cover of darkness, with the furtive choreography of a boy avoiding his own mother. He came downstairs at seven-forty in the morning, while the coffee was still brewing and the light through the kitchen window was still new, and he sat at the table.

Camille was at the counter. She had her back to the stairs, and she was doing something with bread, slicing it, or buttering it, and she didn't hear him at first. He'd skipped the third step. He always skipped the third step now, and the consistency of this, the care of it, the small, repeated act of consideration that he would have denied under interrogation, was a fact about himself that he refused to examine.

He pulled out the chair. The legs scraped against the floor.

Camille turned.

The sequence of expressions that crossed her face was, by now, a language Rowan was learning to read. Surprise first, the quick widening of the eyes, the parted lips, the full-body startle. Then restraint, the compression of the surprise into something smaller, something that wouldn't fill the room, something that wouldn't scare him back upstairs the way a loud noise scares a bird off a wire. Then warmth, controlled, rationed, administered in doses she calibrated by the second, watching his face for the threshold, watching for the moment when the warmth became too much, and the retreat began.

She didn't speak. This was new. This was, Rowan registered with disoriented awareness, the first time she hadn't said something. No 'good morning'. No 'there's coffee'. She just looked at him, and her mouth did something complicated, not a smile, but the landscape in which a smile might one day be built, and she turned back to the counter and continued what she'd been doing.

She poured a second cup of coffee. Set it on the table. Not in front of him, near him. Within reach but not aimed. The cup was ceramic, handmade, one of hers, a deep, mottled blue.

She sat down across from him. She ate her toast. She drank her coffee. She didn't try to talk.

Rowan sat. He didn't eat. He didn't drink the coffee, though his hand, at one point, moved toward the cup, a reflex, before stopping, mid-reach, and returning to his lap. He sat at the kitchen table for eleven minutes, in the same room as his mother, before standing and going back upstairs without a word.

Eleven minutes. 

It was nothing. 
It was everything. 

It was the longest they'd been in the same room, conscious, without a door between them, since he was eleven years old.

Camille sat at the table after he left. She picked up the blue cup. The coffee inside it was untouched. She held it in both hands and looked at the chair where her son had been and breathed, once, deeply, cataloging a small miracle and filing it in the place where she kept the evidence that things might, one day, be less broken.

Upstairs, Rowan closed his door. Click. Not slam. Click.

He sat on the bed. He pressed his palms against his eyes. He didn't know what had just happened. He didn't know why he'd gone down there, why he'd pulled out the chair, why his hand had moved toward the cup. He didn't know what was shifting inside him, what wall was cracking, what ground was giving, what tectonic event was responsible for the fact that the sight of his mother eating toast at a kitchen table had produced in him a sensation that was neither anger nor grief but something in the unmapped territory between them.

He knew when it had started. He knew exactly when.

A kitchen. A different kitchen. A counter he'd sat on while hands that weren't hers cleaned his blood and closed his cuts and shook with a gentleness they hadn't been designed for. A man who had seen his scars and said nothing. A man who had held him without hurting him.

That man had opened something. 

Some hatch, some valve, some sealed compartment in the architecture of Rowan's interior that had been locked so long he'd forgotten it existed. And now it was open, and things were leaking through, a slow seep of something warm and unfamiliar that was reaching rooms he'd boarded up years ago and softening the wood and loosening the nails and making the walls less solid than they'd been.

The anger at Camille was still there. 

He could feel it, dense, structural, the bearing wall of his identity. But the anger had changed shape. It was no longer a blade. It was a weight. And weights, unlike blades, can be set down. The possibility existed in a way it hadn't before, and the possibility had been opened by hands that smelled like coffee and the sea.

He reached under the mattress.

The henley was where he'd left it, folded, flat, pressed between the mattress and the box spring in the precise center of the bed, a placement that was neither accidental nor rational but that obeyed the logic of a thing being hidden.

He pulled it out.

The fabric unfolded in his hands. Dark gray. Soft. 

Rowan didn't bring it to his face. Not this time. He held it in his lap and looked at it the way you'd look at a letter you've already memorized, not reading it, just confirming that the words are still there, that the message hasn't changed, that the thing you remember feeling when you first read it is still available to you if you need it.

He needed it less now. This was the problem.

The first night, the night of the flat, the night he'd pressed it to his face and breathed and curled around it in the dark while Ian Curtis sang and the harbor breathed between them, the scent had been vivid. Total. The full olfactory biography of a man who worked on the water with his hands, compressed into a square of worn cotton. It had filled his lungs. It had filled the room. It had filled the space inside him where the loneliness usually lived, displacing it temporarily, the way water displaces air in a vessel, pushing it to the edges, making room for something else.

By the second night, the coffee was fainter. 

By the third, the salt had thinned. 

Now, Wednesday, day three, what remained was an echo. A suggestion. The olfactory equivalent of a word spoken in the next room: present but indistinct, requiring effort to hear, requiring closeness to confirm.

The scent was fading. 

Elias was leaving the shirt the way Elias was leaving everything, gradually, by degrees, the slow withdrawal of a presence that had been too large to sustain and too important to lose.

The panic this produced was disproportionate. Rowan knew it was disproportionate. A stolen shirt losing the smell of its owner was a chemical process, not a personal one, the volatile compounds evaporating, the oils breaking down, the invisible molecules doing what molecules do when they are no longer replenished by the body that produced them. It was science. It was physics. It was not Elias Voss abandoning him through the medium of organic chemistry.

But it felt like it. 
It felt exactly like it. 

It felt like another leaving, another person's warmth dissipating from a space they'd occupied, another absence where a presence had been, another proof of the fundamental law that governed Rowan's life: everything that comes close eventually goes.

He folded the henley. He put it back under the mattress. He smoothed the sheet over it with a care that bordered on the ritualistic, pressing the fabric flat, erasing the wrinkle, ensuring that no visible evidence remained on the bed's surface to suggest that anything was hidden beneath it.

He'd moved it twice already. Under the pillow the first night. Into the bag the next morning, when the pillow felt too obvious, too accessible. Then, under the mattress, where the weight of his sleeping body pressed the fabric flat and kept it contained and where the discovery would require Camille to lift the mattress itself, an action that seemed unlikely but that Rowan couldn't rule out, because Camille was the kind of woman who changed sheets and flipped mattresses and performed domestic acts of maintenance.

He moved it again. Into the record crate. Folded small, tucked between 'Closer' and 'Pink Moon', two albums whose spines were wide enough to conceal the bulk. The crate was his. The crate was inviolable territory. Even Camille, in her most ambitious episodes of maternal intrusion, would not rifle through his records.

Contraband. He was treating it like contraband. A grown man's shirt, hidden in another man's vinyl collection, relocated every twelve hours with the operational security of a dead drop. If someone told him, or described this behavior back to him, narrated it in the third person, laid out the facts of a nineteen-year-old stealing an article of clothing from a thirty-three-year-old man's apartment and sleeping with it pressed against his face, he would have recognized it immediately. He would have known the word for it. He would have been horrified.

He was not horrified. He was something else. Something that lived below horror and above need, in the strata where the self does things it can't explain and the explanation, when it comes, arrives not as a thought but as a reckoning.

He left the crate. 
He left the room. 

He went downstairs and out the front door and into the town that was, against every effort he'd made to resist it, becoming a place he knew.

Wrenhaven had a geography, and Rowan had mapped it.

The map existed in his body, in his legs, in his feet, in his nervous system, which had cataloged every sight line, every shortcut, every route that led to a place where he could be alone and every route that led to a place where he couldn't.

The church shortcut: two minutes off the main road, through the parking lot, past the dumpster that smelled like candle wax and mildew, emerging onto Harbor Lane with a clear view of the dock and no one's clear view of him.

The bluff path: seven minutes from the cottage, ascending, private, the only place in Wrenhaven where the sky was larger than the town and the sea was louder than his thoughts.

The grocery store: safe between nine and eleven, when the aisles were empty, and the cashier was a teenager who didn't make eye contact. Hostile after noon, when the town's social infrastructure activated and the store became a nexus of conversation and recognition, and 'You're Camille's boy'.

The Drowning Barrel: to be avoided. Too full of people who knew Elias and would therefore look at Rowan with the curiosity reserved for planets that orbit the same sun.

The Rusty Anchor: also to be avoided, but for different reasons. The bloodstain was probably still on the floor.

Then, the dock.

The center of the map. Not by design, by gravity. Every route Rowan walked, every shortcut he discovered, every path through the town's modest grid eventually curved toward the harbor the way rivers curve toward the sea: inevitably, as though the geography itself had been designed to deliver him to the one place he was trying to not go.

He went anyway. Every day. Sometimes twice.

He didn't walk onto the dock. He stayed at a distance that was too far to constitute presence and too close to constitute indifference, the exact range at which a person can see without being seen and can watch without being watched and can study the movements of a particular tall figure in a canvas jacket without admitting, even to the most private tribunal of the self, that studying was what they were doing.

He saw Elias every day.

Elias walked the dock, inspected the boats, shouted at Eddie Morrow, and stood at the fuel shed with his clipboard, his mug, and his permanent, low-grade scowl. He was exactly the same as he'd been before the flat, before the kitchen, before the hands and the bandages and the pulse, and the exactness was the problem, because 'exactly the same' meant the wall was up, and the wall was for Rowan, and Rowan could feel it from two hundred feet away the way you can feel a temperature change.

Elias didn't look at him.

This was not conjecture. This was observed data, collected over three days of careful, systematic surveillance that Rowan would have described, if pressed, as 'walking around town'. He had positioned himself within Elias's probable sight lines on seven separate occasions. He had stood on Harbor Lane at the hour he knew Elias walked to the fuel shed. He had taken the church shortcut, even though he knew Elias had returned to the office. He had been visible, hood up, unmistakable, the only person in Wrenhaven with black curls and a face that had recently been rearranged by a bar fight and then reassembled by the man he was trying to be seen by.

And yet, Elias didn't look.

Or, and this was the possibility that sat in Rowan's chest like a coal, hot and undiminishing, Elias saw him, registered the black hoodie at the edge of his sight line and made a decision, conscious and deliberate, to redirect his attention to the clipboard, the fuel shed, the dock, the hundred small tasks that constituted a day on the harbor and that served, collectively, as a barricade between himself and the boy standing two hundred feet away trying to be noticed.

The not-looking was louder than any look had ever been.

Louder than the look through the car window. Louder than the look in the kitchen, six inches apart, under the forty-watt bulb. Louder than the look that had passed between them when Camille walked in, and the room changed, and Rowan's eyes had asked, 'Did you feel it too?' and Elias's eyes had answered, 'Yes.'

Rowan felt it in his body. 
He was being shut out.

The man who had held his face. The man who had cleaned his blood. The man who had put his body between Rowan and three men in a bar and taken a cut across his cheekbone and hadn't flinched. 

That man was now a figure on a dock who turned the other way.

*

Thursday dawn. The bluff.

Rowan sat at the cliff's edge with his knees drawn up and the wind pulling at his hoodie and the sea below him doing its ancient, indifferent thing.

The harbor was visible from here. The whole of it, including the low building at the water's edge with "Voss Maritime" on the door. The exterior staircase. The flat. The windows, four panes of glass, all intact, the new one indistinguishable from the others at this distance.

He watched.

At five-fifteen, a light turned on in the flat. Elias was awake. The light was a small, warm rectangle in the pre-dawn gray, burning for approximately twelve minutes, the time it took, Rowan had estimated, for the man to make coffee, dress, and descend the staircase, before switching off.

At five-twenty-seven, a figure emerged from the office door. Canvas jacket. Dark hair. The stride. Even from the bluff, three hundred yards away and a hundred feet up, the stride was unmistakable, the lean, the forward pitch, the way the body moved toward the next thing without negotiating with the current one.

The figure walked to the end of the dock. To a boat.

Rowan had learned the boats the way he'd learned everything else in this town, passively, osmotically. He knew the Lady Maren, the biggest, Briggs's vessel, the one that went out with a full crew. He knew the Compass Rose, Hargrove's, the one with the engine that had sounded like dying and now sounded like recovery. He knew the smaller boats, the day vessels, the skiffs that went out at dawn and came back by noon.

And he knew the "Driftwood".

The Driftwood was Elias's. 

Not the company's. Elias's. A thirty-six-foot trawler, older than the others, with a dark blue hull and a white cabin and the worn, weathered look of a vessel that had been used hard and maintained harder. It sat at the far end of the dock, in the berth nearest the open harbor, the position of a boat that was meant to leave first and return last. 

It was the boat Elias took out alone. 
The solo boat. 

The one that went out on days when the fleet stayed in, when the weather was marginal, when the work was an excuse, and the real purpose was the sea itself, the open water, the solitude, the vast, uncomplicated emptiness of a world that asked nothing of the man inside it except competence.

The figure boarded the Driftwood. Rowan watched the pre-departure routine from the bluff: the engine check, the lines being untied, the supplies being carried from the dock and stowed below deck. He watched the way Elias moved on the boat, differently from the way he moved on land, looser somehow, the authority still there, but the tension reduced, the body settling into a space that fit it. The boat was, Rowan understood with a clarity that bypassed thought and arrived as knowledge, the only place Elias was fully himself.

The engine started. The lines were cast. The Driftwood eased away from the dock, turned its bow toward the harbor mouth, and moved out.

Rowan watched it go.

The boat crossed the harbor. Passed the breakwater. Hit the open water beyond the mouth, where the sea's color changed from the domesticated gray of the harbor to the deeper, bluer gray of the open ocean. The Driftwood shrank. A shape. A point. A suggestion.

He watched until the boat disappeared.

Then, he stayed. He didn't know why. The bluff was cold, colder than the town, the wind sharper at this height, cutting through the hoodie and finding the skin beneath. He should have left. He should have gone back to the cottage, back to the room, back to the forty-seven cracks and the record crate and the henley that was losing its smell and the mother who was learning not to speak.

But he didn't. He stayed.

At three-forty-seven in the afternoon, Rowan checked his phone. The Driftwood reappeared. A point on the horizon, growing, solidifying, the dark blue hull materializing from the gray like a word emerging from static. It crossed the harbor mouth. It passed the breakwater. It returned to its berth. The figure stepped off the bow, tied the lines, and walked back up the dock toward the office with the same stride, the same jacket, the same forward lean.

Rowan watched.

He came back the next day. 
And the next. 

He sat on the bluff at dawn and watched the Driftwood leave, and he sat on the bluff in the afternoon and watched it come back, and he learned the schedule the way he learned everything, quietly, precisely.

5:27 a.m.: engine check.
5:34: lines cast.
5:38: departure, harbor mouth.
3:40–3:50 p.m.: return, variable with weather.

He filed it. He held it. He carried the schedule in the same place he carried the scent memory of a shirt, the pressure memory of a thumb on his skin, and the sound memory of a voice saying his name in a bar, as if it were the first word of a language spoken by only two people.

The wind blew. 
The sea moved. 

The harbor breathed its tidal breath, in and out, the rhythm that connected the bluff to the dock, the dock to the boat, the boat to the man, and the man to the boy who sat on the cliff's edge three hundred yards away, watching, watching, learning the shape of a withdrawal so he could learn the shape of a return.

*

Four-forty a.m. The world was not yet a world.

It was a sketch of one, the dark so total that the town existed only as an idea of itself.

Rowan moved through it like a fish through deep water, silent, economical. The system was Daniel's. Not a gift, a byproduct. The ability to move through a dark house without triggering a creak, a groan, a footfall loud enough to reach the ears of a man sleeping, or not sleeping, on the other side of a wall. He'd been learning it since he was nine, refining it since eleven, mastering it by thirteen, the year Daniel's drinking shifted from nightly to permanent, and the apartment became a space that rewarded stealth the way the ocean rewards buoyancy: as a basic condition of survival.

He moved through Wrenhaven the same way. Down the cottage stairs, third step skipped, front door opened and closed. Down the lane, past the dark gardens and the darker houses. Through the church shortcut, the parking lot, the dumpster, the gap in the fence. Onto Harbor Lane. Down to the dock.

The Driftwood was at the far end. Berth twelve. The position closest to the harbor mouth, the first to leave, the last to return.

Rowan stood at the berth's edge and looked at the boat.

It smelled like Elias.

This fact arrived unbidden, without permission, bypassing every checkpoint Rowan had erected between his senses and the thing they were calibrated to detect. The boat smelled like him. Not overwhelmingly, not the way the henley smelled, not the concentrated, body-warm scent. But the ambient version. The environmental signature. Coffee, salt, diesel, and the deeper thing underneath, the warm, animal note that Rowan had filed in his body's permanent archive and that his body now retrieved, involuntarily, at the faintest trigger.

He shouldn't be here.

He should be in his room, in his bed, under the ceiling with its forty-seven cracks, counting them or not counting them, holding a shirt or not holding it, existing in the contained, controlled misery of a life that was at least his, at least navigable, at least not this idiotic, indefensible, genuinely deranged act of trespass that he was about to commit on a boat belonging to a man who was avoiding him with the quiet efficiency of a person who has decided that a thing is over and means it.

He should not be here, Rowan thought.

And, exactly two and a half seconds after the thought crossed his mind, Rowan boarded.

The motion was fluid, one foot on the gunwale, a hand on the rail, his body swinging over the side and landing on the deck. His boots on the wood. His weight shifting. The boat rocking, slightly, the hull adjusting to the new mass with the gentle, mechanical compliance of a vessel that accepts its burdens without comment.

The hold was forward. A hatch in the deck, low-profile, fitted with a brass latch that was old but functional. Rowan crouched. His fingers found the latch in the dark, cold metal, slightly corroded, the texture of hardware that had been touched by the same hands thousands of times and had worn smooth in the places where the fingers gripped.

He opened the hatch. The hold breathed upward, a gust of cold air carrying the concentrated essence of a fishing vessel's interior: diesel, rope, fish scales dried to the fiberglass, bilge water, and beneath all of it, the pervasive, inescapable salt that permeated every surface of every boat that had ever touched the sea. It was dark. Completely dark. The space below was a cavity, four feet deep, six feet long, three feet wide.

Rowan climbed in.

The descent was awkward — feet first, hands bracing on the hatch frame, his body lowering into the space like a body lowering into a grave, and the comparison was not lost on him and was not funny, and he didn't care. His boots hit the floor, fiberglass, smooth, slightly concave from the hull's shape. He crouched, then sat, then drew his knees up.

A tarp was bundled against the far wall. Heavy canvas, stiff, smelling of rubber and rain. He pulled it over himself. Not for warmth, the tarp was cold, the hold was cold, everything was cold, but for concealment. The tarp covered him. The dark covered the tarp. He was invisible, insensible, a boy-shaped presence in the belly of a boat.

And then, he waited.

The wait was long. The wait was forever. The wait was forty-seven minutes, which Rowan knew because he checked his phone once, at five-twelve, the screen's light filling the hold, temporarily blinding him and illuminating the absurdity of his situation: him, curled under a tarp in the cargo hold of a fishing boat at five in the morning, hiding from and seeking the same person, in the same act, with the same desperate, ridiculous, completely indefensible logic.

He turned off the phone. The dark returned.

He was an idiot. He was aware of this. The awareness was total, comprehensive, and utterly irrelevant, because the part of himself that evaluated decisions had been overruled by the part that made them. The making-part had carried him out of a cottage and through a dark town and onto a boat and into a hold and under a tarp, and the making-part was not interested in the evaluating-part's objections.

Above, the dock woke. A presence.

Then footsteps. Specific. Close.

The dock's concrete transmitted them through the water, through the hull, through the fiberglass floor of the hold, and into Rowan's body. Heavy. Even. Unhurried. The stride of a man who did not rush because rushing implied that the world set the pace, and this man set his own.

Elias arrived at the Driftwood at five-twenty-six. One minute earlier than the schedule the boy on the bluff had recorded, because the boy on the bluff had been tracking from three hundred yards, and the walk from office to berth was variable by plus or minus ninety seconds, depending on whether Pete was stationed at the fuel shed and wanted to talk about the halibut.

Pete was not at the fuel shed. Elias walked past it without stopping, carrying a thermos in one hand and a canvas bag in the other, lunch, supplies, the small kit of provisions that a solo day on the water required. The morning was cold. Dark. Empty. 

The Driftwood was his. 
Today was his.

He needed the water.

He needed it the way a man with a fever needs cold air, not as a luxury but as a treatment, a specific, targeted intervention for a specific, targeted condition. The condition had no name. It had been building for ten days, through the lockdown, through the routine, through the fuel allocation matrix and the color-coded whiteboard, and the aggressive, punitive schedule he'd imposed on himself, his crew, and every inanimate object within his jurisdiction.

The sea would fix it. The sea always fixed it. The sea was the only medicine that worked on the specific illness of being Elias, because the sea didn't care about him, and the not-caring was a relief so profound it was almost love.

He boarded the Driftwood. A surface he'd been stepping onto since he was sixteen and his father had first let him take the boat out alone. Every plank was known. Every cleat, every fitting, every scratch in the wood, they were his, the way the lines on his palms were his, the readable record of a life spent in a specific place doing specific things.

Engine check. Clean. Steady. Good.

Lines. He moved to the bow and cast the forward line, then the stern, the heavy rope sliding off the cleat. The Driftwood shifted, freed from the dock, held now only by the spring line, the last tether between the boat and the land.

He cast the spring line. The boat was free.

He took the wheel. The throttle advanced, slow, controlled, the engine's idle rising to a working hum as the Driftwood eased from the berth and turned its bow toward the harbor mouth. The water parted. 

The harbor mouth opened ahead, the gap between the breakwater walls, the channel markers blinking red and green in the pre-dawn, the passage from the contained to the uncontained, from the harbor's domesticated water to the open sea beyond.

The Driftwood passed through.

And the sea took him.

The open water was a different language.

Elias spoke it natively. 
He'd been born into it.

Not literally, though his mother had joked that the labor had started on the dock and would have finished there if his father had had his way. He'd been raised on it. The sea was not, for Elias, the postcard version, the sunsets, the sailboats, the decorative watercolor. The sea was a coworker. A boss. A partner with rules and moods and a capacity for violence that made every human he'd ever met look gentle.

He respected it. Not feared it, respected it, the way you respect a person who is smarter than you and stronger than you and older than you by approximately four billion years. 

The sea had been here before Wrenhaven. The sea would be here after Wrenhaven. 

The sea didn't care about fishing schedules or fuel matrices or the particular, private agonies of a man standing at a wheel trying not to think about a boy's face.

This was the relief. This was the medicine. The vast, absolute indifference of a body of water so large that everything human, every feeling, every fear, every unnamed thing that lived in the chest and throbbed in the dark, was reduced, by sheer scale, to a speck. To a mote.

The Driftwood settled into her run. Eight knots. The hull cutting the gray water in a clean, white line, the wake spreading behind like a signature. The coastline receded, Wrenhaven shrinking, the dock disappearing, the buildings and the streets and the bluff and the cottage and the flat all compressing into a thin, gray margin at the edge of the world.

Elias breathed.

The air was different out here. Stripped of the land's contaminations. The air was salt and cold and nothing else, and nothing else was everything he needed.

He ran the pots. He had twenty traps set along a line south of the harbor, weighted and buoyed, and the work of hauling them was the work he loved best, the physical, rhythmic labor of pulling rope and emptying cages and sorting the catch. His arms worked. His back worked. His mind, blessedly, narrowed to the task, pot up, check, sort, rebait, pot down. The circuit was closed. The loop was complete. There was no space in the loop for anything that wasn't rope and wire, and the cold, flexing weight of the sea doing its daily business of being the sea.

An hour passed. 
Two. 

The sun rose, and the water reflected it. Elias stood at the wheel. Thermos in hand. The coffee was strong, the way he made it, black, no sugar, the brew itself an act of aggression against subtlety. He drank. He watched the water. He felt, for the first time in ten days, something approaching the equilibrium he'd been chasing, the flat line, the zero point, the emotional sea level below which the splinter couldn't reach.

The sea held him. 
The boat held him. 
The silence held him.

Until something moved in the hold.

It was a small sound. A shift. The weight redistribution of something, or someone, adjusting position in an enclosed space, the sound a tarp makes when the body beneath it has been still for too long, and the stillness has become its own kind of pain.

Elias's hand stopped on the thermos. His head turned. He set the thermos down. He left the wheel, the Driftwood was idling, engine at low, the autopilot holding a gentle course northeast into nothing. He moved forward along the deck, his boots on the planks, his weight shifting with the swell, the easy, unconscious balance of a body that had been compensating for the sea's motion since before it could walk on land.

The hatch. 
Brass latch. 
Closed, as he'd left it. 

But the boat was speaking to him. The way all boats speak to the men who know them, in the language of weight and balance and trim, and the boat was telling him that her forward weight had changed. That something was in the hold that hadn't been there when he'd loaded the supplies. That the bow was sitting fractionally lower in the water than it should have been, a displacement measurable in ounces and readable, to a man who knew this hull the way he knew his own hands, as clearly as a word written on a page.

He crouched. 
He put his hand on the hatch.
He paused.

The pause lasted two seconds. In those two seconds, several things happened inside Elias that he would later deny and never forget. His heart rate increased. His hand, on the brass latch, tightened. The splinter pulsed. Once. Hard. The pulse of something that has been dormant and is now, in the presence of a stimulus it recognizes, waking up.

He knew. He didn't know how he knew. The same way he knew the sea, the same way he knew that a particular set of blue eyes had been watching him from two hundred feet away for three days and that his not-looking had been the most sustained and exhausting act of perception he'd ever performed, he knew.

He opened the hatch.

The tarp was there, his tarp, the heavy canvas, bundled against the forward bulkhead in a shape that was not the shape he'd left it in. The shape it was in now was approximately six feet long, with shoulders and knees, and at one end a patch of dark curls visible above the canvas edge, like a flag someone had forgotten to lower.

Elias looked at the curls. The curls did not move.

"Get out," he said.

His voice was calm. 
Unreasonably, impossibly calm.

The tarp shifted. Slowly. With the reluctance of a person who knows they've been caught and is calculating, in the final seconds of concealment, whether any possible configuration of words or silence might alter the outcome.

The tarp pulled back.

Rowan looked up at him from the floor of the hold.

His face was six feet below the deck, framed by the hatch opening, lit by the gray February sky. It was looking up at Elias with an expression that contained, in no particular order: defiance, seasickness, something that might have been fear if fear had an older sibling that was worse, and, underneath all of it, in the deep structure, in the blue that was looking up at him from the bottom of his boat the way the sea looks up from below when the water is clear enough to see through, something that was not sorry.

The seasickness was evident, the greenish cast beneath the paleness, the sheen of sweat at the temples, the particular set of the jaw that indicates a person's stomach is conducting negotiations with their esophagus, and the negotiations are not going well.

His lips, the lower one still showing the faded pink line where the split had healed, were pale, almost blue, trembling with a micro-vibration that was cold and adrenaline and the aftershock of two hours spent in a dark box smelling diesel and waiting for this exact moment.

He looked up at Elias.
Elias looked down at him.

"Hi," Rowan said.

Elias stared at him.

The calm was holding. Barely. "Get," Elias said. "Out. Of. My. Hold."

Rowan got out. The climb was graceless, hands on the hatch frame, arms shaking, his body pulling itself up through the opening. 

He looked at Elias.
Elias looked at him.

Somewhere below the waterline, in the belly of the boat, the space where Rowan had been hiding was empty now, and the tarp was flat. The hold smelled like diesel and fish and the faint, unmistakable scent of a boy who had no business being here and was here anyway, because 'here' was where the man was, and the man was where Rowan needed to be, and need had overridden every other instruction his brain had ever given him.

The Driftwood rocked. Rowan swayed. Caught himself on the rail. His knuckles, the right hand, still healing, went white around the metal.

Elias's jaw was set so tight the muscle in his cheek was visible, a hard line beneath the skin, pulsing with the effort of containing something that wanted, very badly, to be released.

"You," he said, "are on my boat."

"Yeah," Rowan said.

"In the middle of the ocean."

"Yeah."

"Without permission."

"Yeah."

The calm broke.

"What the FUCK is wrong with you?"

The words left Elias's mouth at a volume the Driftwood had never heard. The boat had heard weather. The boat had heard shouting. The boat had heard Elias Voss at his loudest.

This was louder.

This was not the dock voice. Not the command voice, the low, total authority that made grown men recoil and dock dogs flatten their ears. This was the voice underneath that voice, the one that lived below the control, below the composure, below the twenty years of carefully maintained stoicism that constituted the load-bearing wall of Elias's personality. 

"You stowed away. On my boat. You...you STOWED AWAY. Like a...what are you, a fucking refugee? A stray CAT?"

Rowan stood on the deck and absorbed this. His body was performing two competing functions: staying upright on a surface that wouldn't stop moving, and not vomiting, and the dual demand left no spare capacity for the kind of facial arrangement that a normal person might deploy when being screamed at by a man twice their weight on a boat in the middle of the ocean. His face was green. His face was defiant. His face was doing both of these things simultaneously, which should have been impossible and was, instead, infuriatingly, one of the most compelling things Elias had ever looked at.

"I didn't stow away," Rowan said.

"You were IN MY HOLD. Under a TARP."

"That's not stowing away. That's...waiting."

"Waiting for WHAT?"

"For you to stop being a coward."

The word landed on the deck between them like something thrown. Not a rock, something sharper, something that didn't break on impact but embedded itself, point down, vibrating.

Elias's jaw locked. The muscle in his cheek fired. His hands, at his sides, opened and closed, the fingers extending and contracting, the unconscious rhythm of a man's body cycling through the options and rejecting, systematically, every response that involved making contact with the boy in front of him.

"Say that again," Elias said. Quiet now. The quiet was worse than the shouting, and both of them knew it.

"Coward," Rowan said. He didn't blink. The one word, delivered from a face the color of pond water. "You've been hiding for ten days. You won't even look at me..."

"I don't owe you a look."

Rowan said nothing.

"You're a fucking stranger on my dock. You're a nineteen-year-old kid. You're Camille's son. That's what you are."

"That's not all I am."

A swell passed beneath the hull, lifting the bow and setting it down with the gentle, rocking motion that the sea uses when it's listening.

Elias turned away. Walked to the wheel. Put his hands on it, both hands.

"You need to understand something," he said. To the windshield. To the sea beyond it. To anything that wasn't the boy. "What happened at the flat...was a situation. I handled a situation. That's what I do. Someone's bleeding, I fix it. Someone's in trouble, I step in. It's not..." He stopped. Recalibrated. The sentence he'd been building had a destination he couldn't afford to reach. "It wasn't personal."

"Your hands were shaking."

The words arrived from behind him like a scalpel entering the exact point where the nerve is closest to the surface. Rowan hadn't moved from the spot on the deck where he'd emerged from the hold, but his voice carried across the boat's small cockpit with a clarity that the wind couldn't diminish and that Elias couldn't deflect.

"Your hands. They were shaking." Rowan said. 

"It was cold."

"No...it wasn't."

"I don't..."

"I could feel them. On my face. Your fingers. They were shaking. They shook when you touched my face."

Silence.

The Driftwood drifted on the current, her autopilot holding a course that had ceased to matter because the man at her wheel had stopped steering and the man on her deck had stopped breathing and the distance between them, fifteen feet, the length of the cockpit, the width of a truth being spoken for the first time, was the only distance in the world.

"That's why you're hiding," Rowan said. His voice had changed. Lower now. Stripped of the defiance, stripped of the hostility, stripped of every weapon he usually carried, until what remained was the raw, exposed wire of a person saying something that costs them everything to say. "And you don't know what that means, and it scares you."

Elias's grip on the wheel tightened. The wood creaked under his palms.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"I know exactly what I'm talking about."

"You're nineteen."

"And you're thirty-three. And your hands shook. Age doesn't fix that."

Elias turned around.
The turn was slow. 

"I can't..." His hand came off the wheel. Went to his chest. Pressed flat against the place where the splinter lived, where the second heartbeat had been pounding since a car window rolled down in a parking lot and a boy inside it had said 'go the fuck away' with a face like a bomb and eyes like the sea at its deepest. "You understand? I can't. You're Camille's son. You're nineteen years old. Your father just died, and you're...." He was listing the reasons the way a man reads charges at a trial, each one delivered with the weight of evidence, each one irrefutable, each one true. "...you're damaged, and you're angry, and you're grieving, and the last thing you need is a thirty-three-year-old fisherman who can't keep his hands from shaking when he touches your fucking face."

The list landed. Each item a stone. Each stone a truth. The truths piled on the deck between them like ballast.

Rowan absorbed them. All of them. He stood in the wake of Elias's confession, because that's what it was, a confession, extracted by the sea and the solitude and the blue eyes of a boy who had sailed into his sanctuary and refused to leave until the walls came down.

His face did something. It was the thing his face did on the dock, looking at the cardboard window. Elias saw it. Elias, who had been looking at this face for fifteen days and denying that the looking was looking and denying that the denial was denial, saw the tremor and understood what it meant: the boy was shaking. Not visibly. Not in any way the sea or the cold could explain. The boy was shaking on the inside, in the place where the walls were, in the place where the doors had been locked, and the keys swallowed, and the whole fortified structure of Rowan's interior had been built to withstand exactly this, the arrival of someone who meant it.

"You saw my scars," Rowan said.

The shift was so abrupt it landed like a punch. Elias blinked. The non sequitur, except it wasn't, it was the opposite of a non sequitur, it was the most direct line between two points that had ever been drawn, the statement arrived from a direction he hadn't been defending and hit a place he hadn't been guarding.

"Yes," he said.

"And you didn't say anything."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because you would have run."

The answer was immediate. 

Not considered, not weighed, not filtered through any of the mechanisms that Elias normally applied to the things that came out of his mouth. It was reflex. It was the truth operating faster than the lie.

Rowan stared at him. 

The blue eyes, wet now, though the wetness could have been wind, could have been salt, could have been the accumulated evidence of a conversation that had gone deeper than either of them had intended, the blue eyes held him.

"No one's ever..." Rowan started. Stopped. The sentence was trapped behind something. "You looked at me like..."

He stopped again. The Driftwood rocked. The swell was building, a slow, rhythmic increase in amplitude that made the deck tilt and settle, tilt and settle, the pulse of the ocean asserting itself in the space between two people who had run out of walls.

"You looked at me like I was worth being angry about," Rowan said.

The sentence was almost lost in the wind. A sentence spoken at the volume of a thing that has never been said before and is not sure it has the right to exist.

Elias looked at him.

The fury had lasted, what? Three minutes? Four? The duration of an argument that had covered more ground than any conversation he'd had in ten years. The fury was gone, and what was left was the thing underneath the fury, the thing that the fury had been protecting, the way bark protects a tree and armor protects a body, and a man's silence protects the thing he can't say.

What was left was tenderness. 

Vast, terrifying, oceanic tenderness, the kind that has nothing to do with softness and everything to do with scale. 

He didn't say this. He couldn't say this. The tenderness was too large for language, the way the sea is too large for a glass, and putting it into words would have been an act of reduction that the feeling did not deserve.

He looked at Rowan. 
Rowan looked at him. 

The sea held them, the only witness, the only audience, the only space vast enough and old enough and indifferent enough to contain the thing that was happening between a fisherman and a boy on a February morning in the middle of the water.

"You're worth being angry about," Elias said.

The words were quiet. Spoken the way certain things are spoken, not to convince, but to place a thing in the ground between two people and let it stand there, alive, visible, undeniable.

Rowan's face broke.

A crack in a load-bearing wall, a fissure in the foundation, the kind of break that doesn't show on the surface but that changes, permanently, the structure's ability to hold weight. His mouth opened. Closed. His eyes, bright, wet, the blue so saturated it looked lit from behind, held Elias's gaze for one more second. 

Two. 
Three.

The sentence sat in the space. 
Neither of them touched it.

The coast was closer now. 

Wrenhaven had resolved from a gray line back into geography, the bluff, the harbor, the scatter of rooftops south of town. Elias was steering toward a stretch of beach he knew: Tern Cove, a long, empty crescent of sand and stone a half-mile south of the harbor, sheltered by the bluff's southern arm, too rocky for swimming and too remote for walkers. The kind of beach that existed for no one, which was why Elias knew it, which was why he went there on the days when no one was precisely the amount of company he required.

Fifty yards from shore. The water here was shallow, ten feet, maybe twelve, the bottom visible in patches where the gray cleared to green and the rocks showed through like teeth. The Driftwood drew four feet. Plenty of clearance. He could motor in close, beach the bow, step off.

He should have done that. 

The rational sequence was: approach shore, beach boat, disembark, escort the stowaway back to town on foot, deliver him to his mother's cottage, and never speak of this again. This was the adult response. The responsible response.

He should have done that.

Instead, he looked at Rowan at the rail.

Still gripping the gunwale. His hoodie was soaked, not from the hold but from the spray, the fine mist that came over the bow, the salt water that had been accumulating on his clothes and his hair and his skin for the entire journey back. He looked beautiful. He looked like something the sea had pulled up and hadn't decided whether to keep.

And he was on Elias's boat. Still. After everything. After the hold and the discovery and the argument and the confession and the silence that had followed the confession like the calm that follows a storm, he was still here. 

On the Driftwood. 
In Elias's space. 

Occupying the air that Elias breathed, standing on the deck that Elias's boots had worn smooth, gripping the rail that Elias's hands had gripped ten thousand times.

Something in Elias shifted. 

Not the splinter, the splinter was beyond shifting. The splinter had become permanent infrastructure, a load-bearing element of his internal architecture that he'd stopped trying to remove. Something else. The same mechanism that had pulled Rowan from a car. The mechanism that had put itself between Rowan and three men in a bar. The mechanism that did not think. The mechanism that moved.

He cut the engine. 

He stepped out from behind the wheel. He crossed the cockpit. Four strides.

Rowan heard him coming. Turned from the rail. "What are you..."

Elias picked him up.

The motion was the same as the car. The same mechanical authority, the same effortless leverage, one arm hooked beneath Rowan's knees, the other across his back, the lift powered by the legs and the core and the twenty years of hauling weight that had made Elias's body a machine designed for exactly this: the displacement of objects lighter than himself from positions they had no business occupying.

Elias lifted him off the deck the way you lift a child out of a puddle, completely, decisively, with an authority so total it left no room for negotiation.

"What the FUCK...!"

Elias walked to the rail. Two steps. The gunwale was eighteen inches high. The water beyond it was gray and cold and exactly deep enough.

He threw him in.

He threw him the way you throw a thing back into the element it came from, a fish into the sea, a bird into the air. A clean, arcing, almost graceful trajectory that carried Rowan over the gunwale and deposited him, with a spectacular and deeply satisfying splash, into the February waters of Tern Cove.

The splash was magnificent. 

The splash was approximately one hundred and fifty-five pounds of human body hitting a surface it had not been consulted about, and the sound it produced, a deep, percussive 'THRACK' followed by the secondary detonation of water erupting upward and outward in a white, chaotic crown, was, by any objective measure, one of the most satisfying sounds Elias Voss had ever heard.

Rowan went under.

For one second, one brief, heart-stopping second that lasted approximately one century, the surface closed over him, and there was nothing. The ring of the splash spreading outward in concentric circles, each one wider and flatter.

Then he surfaced.

He came up gasping. The sound was involuntary, the full-body, diaphragm-deep inhalation of a mammal whose nervous system has been overridden by cold water. His head broke the surface. His arms went wide. His mouth opened, and the air rushed in, and with the air came the sound, not a word, just the raw, percussive exhalation of a body.

The water was cold.

Not the cold of a cold shower. Not the cold of a winter morning. The cold of the North Atlantic in February, a comprehensive, totalizing, nerve-by-nerve audit of every square inch of skin, conducted simultaneously, without mercy, at a temperature that exists in the narrow band between uncomfortable and medical event.

Rowan's body went rigid. Every muscle contracted. Every nerve fired. The seasickness vanished, evaporated, obliterated, overwritten by a signal so powerful it made nausea look like a minor inconvenience, which it was, retrospectively, compared to the experience of being fully clothed in fifty-degree water fifty yards from a beach.

He treaded water. 
His arms worked.
He looked up.

Elias was at the rail.

Looking down at him from the deck with an expression that was attempting, with diminishing success, to be anger. But the eyes that had, twenty minutes ago, looked at Rowan on this same boat and said 'you're worth being angry about', were doing something the jaw couldn't control.

They were bright. 
Alive. 

"YOU..." Rowan spat water. Salt. "...FUCKING..." more water. "...PSYCHOPATH..."

Elias said nothing. He walked to the wheel. He started the engine. The boat began to move toward shore. At a speed that was, by any nautical standard, barely a speed at all. Two knots. Maybe less. The pace of a man walking a dog. The pace of a procession. The pace that a thirty-six-foot trawler achieves when its operator sets the throttle to the absolute minimum of forward motion and leaves it there, and the leaving is deliberate, and the deliberation is the point.

Rowan realized what was happening approximately three seconds before it began to matter.

The boat was moving. Without him. The hull slid past him, the dark blue paint at eye level, the waterline inches from his face, the boat's wake creating a small, purposeful current that pushed him backward as the vessel moved forward.

He lunged for the hull. 

His hand, the right one, the one with the knuckles that had healed from the bar fight and were now being reintroduced to trauma, slapped against the painted surface and found nothing. No grip. No handhold. 

The boat pulled ahead. 
One foot. 
Two. 
Three.

"VOSS."

The name was a howl. Specifically, it was the howl of a person who is treading water in February and watching their only means of conveyance motor away from them at a pace that is insulting in its leisureliness, not fast enough to be an escape, not slow enough to be a rescue, but calibrated with a precision that could only have been achieved by a man who knew his throttle the way he knew his own pulse and had set it to the exact speed required to maintain a distance of approximately fifteen feet between his stern and a swimming young man.

The young man had to swim.
So, Rowan swam.

He was not a strong swimmer. He was a competent swimmer. He could keep his head above water and move in a direction without drowning. These were the parameters. These were, given the current circumstances, sufficient.

He swam beside the Driftwood. The boat moved at its glacial, infuriating, perfectly calibrated pace, and Rowan moved beside it, his arms churning the water, his legs kicking, his lungs taking in air and salt spray in alternating gulps, his entire body performing the fundamental act of aquatic locomotion. In contrast, his mouth performed the secondary act of sustained, creative, and increasingly inventive profanity.

"...absolute MANIAC...fucking UNHINGED mother fucker!...Who throws a person into the fucking OCEAN...?!"

The words came in bursts, synchronized with his breathing, each stroke producing a new fragment of invective that was expelled and carried away by the wind and that served, collectively, as the most comprehensive thesaurus of obscenity that Tern Cove had ever received.

"...gonna call the coast guard...this is a CRIME...maritime ASSAULT...I'll have your fucking LICENSE..."

At the wheel, Elias drove.

He was not looking at Rowan. He was looking at the shore. At the beach. At the sand and rocks ahead. His eyes were forward. His expression was stone.

The corner of his mouth was twitching.

A small thing. A muscular event so localized it was visible only in the specific line that ran from the corner of his lip to the edge of his jaw, a line that was straight and firm and as expressive as a dock cleat. The line was moving. The line was fighting something. The line was engaged in a war between the face's commitment to severity and the face's involuntary response to the sound of a boy swimming beside a boat in February and calling the boat's captain a, what was the current term?

"...DERANGED FUCKING WALRUS!!"

That was the current term.

The twitch intensified. The lip pulled. The jaw clenched against it. Elias Voss, captain of the Driftwood, owner of Voss Maritime, a man respected and feared by every fisherman on the harbor, was biting the inside of his cheek so hard he could taste copper, because the alternative, the alternative was laughing, and laughing would destroy the entire structural integrity of what he was doing, which was punishing a stowaway by making him swim to shore, which was a thing that was happening, which was real, which was the single most ridiculous thing he had ever done in a life that had, until two and a half weeks ago, contained no ridiculousness whatsoever.

"...IF I DROWN IT'S ON YOU...THEY'LL FIND MY BODY, AND IT'LL BE YOUR FAULT!"

"You're in four feet of water," Elias finally said. Without looking.

Rowan's stroke faltered. His legs extended downward. His feet touched sand.

He was in four feet of water.

He'd been swimming, thrashing, cursing, performing the full cardiovascular repertoire of a man fighting for his life, in water that came up to his chest. The beach was twenty feet away. The water was shallow. He could walk. He could stand. He had been swimming in four feet of water beside a boat that was moving at walking speed, and the swimming had been unnecessary for approximately the last thirty yards, and Elias had known this, and Elias had said nothing.

Rowan stood up.

The water was at his sternum. He stood in the shallows of Tern Cove, fully clothed, soaked to the molecular level, his hair plastered to his skull, his hoodie clinging to his body like a second skin, water streaming from every surface. He looked at the man at the wheel of the with an expression that transcended anger and entered a territory that didn't have a name, but that occupied the space between 'I am going to kill you' and 'I have never been more alive'.

Elias looked at him.

What was left on his face, as he looked at Rowan standing in four feet of February ocean with murder in his eyes and seawater in his lungs, was something he couldn't hide and wasn't trying to.

The mouth lost its battle.

The corner went up. Not a smile, not yet, not the full expression, not the thing that a face does when it surrenders to the impulse that the body has been generating. But the precursor. The moment when the rock cracks and the light gets in.

Rowan saw it. 

Rowan saw it, and the seeing did something to his face too, a crack, a fracture, a break in the wall of fury that let through a single, reluctant, absolutely involuntary flash of something that looked, in its raw and unguarded state, like the beginning of a laugh.

He killed it. Drowned it. Pushed it back behind the wall with both hands. But it had been there. On his face. In the water. Visible.

He waded toward shore, legs driving through the water, the body leaning forward, the soaked boots hitting the sandy bottom, and emerged from the shallows.

He reached the sand. 

The Driftwood nosed into the shallows. Elias cut the engine. Silence returned, the sudden, comprehensive quiet of a cove where the only sounds are waves and wind and the breathing of two men who have just concluded the most absurd sequence of events in the history of their acquaintance.

Elias stepped off the bow. 

His boots hit the wet sand. Solid ground. Dry, or dry relative to the man standing twenty feet away, who was dripping onto the beach like a piece of laundry someone had forgotten to wring.

They stood on the beach.

Twenty feet apart.

Rowan was breathing hard. The swim and the cold and the fury and the argument and the confession and the overboard and the four feet of water, all of it was running through his body like current through a wire, and the wire was hot.

Fifteen feet. 

One of them had moved. One of them had taken a step forward, and the other had followed with another step. The steps were not decisions. The steps were not choices. The steps were the physical expression of a force that had been building for two and a half weeks, and that had been compressed by distance and silence and walls and water, and that was now, on this beach, in this cove, with no one watching and nothing between them but wet sand and cold air, decompressing.

Ten feet. 

They were both moving now. Walking. The gravitational, unstoppable walk of two objects falling toward each other, the walk that happens when the orbit decays and the distance contracts and the force that's been holding two things apart becomes, in a single, irreversible moment, the force that pulls them together.

Ten feet. 
Eight. 
Five.

They could see each other's faces. 

Three feet.

The distance where a face becomes a landscape. Where you can see the pores, the stubble, the individual lashes. Where breath is visible, not as vapor but as warmth, the heat of a mouth, the heat of a body, the heat that crosses the gap between two people and arrives on the other person's skin before any other contact is made.

Two feet.
One.

The distance at which a person stops being a person and becomes a field, a thermal presence, a thing that carries heat and breath, and the electrical discharge of two nervous systems firing at a frequency that the space between them cannot insulate.

One foot. 
Twelve inches. 

The length of a ruler. The width of a pillow. The distance across which Elias had cleaned a boy's face in a kitchen, and that distance had been too close, and this distance was the same, and Elias was here again, at the edge, at the line, at the place where the air stopped being neutral and started being charged.

Rowan's eyes were on his. Blue, wet, blazing. The water from the Atlantic was still streaming down his face, and the water made the blue brighter, the way rain makes a color deeper, the way the sea makes everything it touches more itself.

Elias's eyes were on Rowan's. Brown, dark, the pupils dilated to a blackness that had consumed the iris almost entirely, the eyes of a man whose body has overridden his brain and whose brain has stopped contesting the override.

One foot.

Rowan shoved him.

The contact was explosive, palms against chest, the flat of both hands hitting the solid wall of Elias's body with a force that was not calculated and not restrained and not anything except a detonation.

The shove pushed Elias back. Half a step. He didn't fall.

Rowan shoved him again. Harder. Both hands. The heel of his palms driving into the meat of Elias's chest with the full, committed force of his body behind them, the legs driving, the arms extending.

Elias took it.

He took the second shove the way he'd taken the first, absorbed, grounded, his body accepting the force and converting it into nothing, the kinetic energy of Rowan's fury entering his chest and disappearing into the mass and the muscle and the particular, immovable density of a man who has decided he is not moving.

Rowan swung.

Not a punch, something messier, wilder, the hybrid motion of a fist that doesn't know if it wants to hit or grab and that ends up doing both, the knuckles catching the side of Elias's neck in a glancing blow, the hand dragging across the tendon and the jaw and ending up, somehow, through some alchemy of rage and want, fisted in the collar of Elias's jacket.

He gripped. The canvas bunched in his fist. His arm was extended, the distance between them reduced to the length of a forearm, the grip so tight the seams creaked.

Elias grabbed him back.

Not his collar. His jaw. The same jaw he'd tilted toward the light to clean a cut. His hand found it now, as it had then, automatically, gravitationally, the fingers wrapping around the bone with a grip that was neither gentle nor rough, and something that lived in the space between those words and made both of them obsolete.

They were locked. Fist in collar. Hand on jaw. The distance between their faces was inches, the inches closing, the inches multiplying, the space oscillating as their bodies fought the same war from opposite sides: the push and the pull happening simultaneously, the two forces not canceling each other but intensifying, each resistance creating more pressure, each pressure creating more heat.

Rowan's other hand came up. It hit Elias's shoulder, a blow, a grip, the distinction no longer meaningful. His fingers dug into the muscle through the canvas jacket, and the digging was hostile and desperate, like trying to climb someone and fight them at the same time, and discovering that the motions are identical.

Elias's other hand found the back of Rowan's neck. The wet curls. The cold skin beneath them. His palm covered the nape, broad, encompassing, the hand large enough that the fingers reached the edges of the jaw on one side and the base of the skull on the other. He held.

The hold wasn't restraint. 
The hold was a claim.

Their foreheads touched.

The kiss did not arrive.
The kiss detonated.

It was Rowan.
Or it was Elias. 
Or it was neither. 
Or it was both.

The simultaneous, mutual collapse of the last inch of distance, the two of them closing the gap at the same instant, from both directions, with a force that was not a choice and not a surrender but something more elemental: the resolution of a tension that had become physically unsustainable, the way a wave breaks not because it decides to but because the water can no longer hold its shape.

Their mouths met.

The contact was not soft. The contact was the opposite of soft, hard, forceful, the collision of two mouths arriving at the same point.

Teeth. Elias felt teeth, Rowan's, against his lower lip, not a bite, but the hard contact of a mouth that has opened too fast and too wide, the evidence of a person who is kissing for the first time in any way that matters and who is doing it the only way he knows how to do anything: violently, completely, with the full and reckless commitment of a body that has stopped asking for permission from the mind above it.

Salt. The kiss tasted like the sea. Rowan's face was still wet, the Atlantic still dripping from his hair, his jaw, his lips, and the salt entered the kiss like a third participant, the ocean's contribution.

Elias kissed him back.

The kissing back was not a decision. The kissing back was the same as the walking and the closing and the grabbing, a physical event that occurred below the altitude at which decisions are made, in the deep structure of the body where instinct lives, and language dies, and the only grammar that matters is the grammar of pressure and heat and 'more'. He kissed Rowan back with his hand on the boy's jaw and his other hand on the boy's neck and his mouth open and his eyes closed and his entire body leaning into the contact with a force that was not gentle because gentleness was a thing he hadn't learned yet, not for this, not for the specific act of putting his tongue on Rowan's mouth, and the not-learning was mutual, and the mutuality was the thing that made it work.

Rowan's fist tightened in his collar. Pulled. The pulling brought their bodies closer, chest to chest, the wet fabric of Rowan's hoodie pressing against the dry canvas of Elias's jacket, the cold of the water meeting the heat of the body beneath and producing, at the interface, a condensation, a fog, the physical evidence of two temperatures colliding.

Elias's hand moved. From Rowan's jaw to his hair. Into it. The wet curls wrapped around his fingers, cold, thick, the individual strands separating against his knuckles and reforming around them, the hair gripping his hand the way Rowan's hand was gripping his collar, everything between them a closed circuit of grip and hold and the refusal, absolute and shared, to let go.

Rowan bit him.

Lower lip. The bite was real, not playful, not the decorative nip that passes for passion in the lexicon of ordinary intimacy. This was Rowan. This was teeth closing on flesh.

Elias felt the bite. Felt the pressure, the edge of the teeth, the sharp, bright line between pleasure and pain that Rowan was walking.

He took it.

He took it the way he took the shove and the swing and the grip on his collar, absorbed, grounded, his body accepting what Rowan's body was giving because his body understood, at a level his mind was still catching up to, that this was how the boy spoke. This was his language. Not words, not silence, but the physical grammar of contact that means too much to be gentle, the dialect of a body that has only ever known touch as a weapon and is now, for the first time, trying to use the weapon as a bridge.

Elias took the bite. And then he did something that changed everything.

He made a sound.

Low. From the chest, from the belly, from the place where the splinter had been and where the splinter now was not, because the splinter was gone, dissolved, replaced by something larger and hotter and alive, something that had no name and no shape and that moved through his body like a current and exited through his mouth.

The sound was need.

Pure, uncut, thirty-three years of not needing converging into a single, involuntary vocalization that left his mouth and entered the air between them and hit Rowan's ears at a distance of zero inches and changed, instantly, permanently, irreversibly, the thing that was happening between them.

Rowan heard it. 
His body heard it. 

His body reacted to it the way a body reacts to electricity, a full-system jolt, every nerve firing, every muscle contracting, the hand in Elias's collar pulling tighter and the mouth on Elias's mouth pressing harder and the breath coming faster and the sound, an answering sound, high and broken and ripped from somewhere so deep that Rowan didn't know it existed until it was already out, leaving him in response.

Two sounds. 
Two needs. 

Colliding in the space between two mouths that were no longer two mouths but one, continuous, shared.

The kiss deepened. 
Descended.

Went down into layers, found levels that neither of them had known existed. Elias's tongue found Rowan's. The contact, new, shocking, intimate at a scale that dwarfed everything that had come before, produced a response in Rowan's body that was visible from the outside: a full-body shudder, a seismic event that started at the point of contact and radiated outward through every limb, every joint, every cell.

They combusted.
That was the word. 

Not kissed, not embraced, not any of the vocabulary that the world has developed for the act of two people putting their mouths together. 

Combusted. 

Elias held. 
Rowan fought. 

Elias held the way the sea holds, vast, immovable, the patience of something that has been here since before the land and that will accept whatever the land throws at it and will not break. His arms were around Rowan now, both of them, the hands on his back, the fingers spread.

Rowan fought the way fire fights, consuming, volatile, the energy of something that has been contained too long and is now free and is burning in every direction at once. He fought because fighting was his body's response to everything, to fear, to pain, to the devastating, unbearable, impossible-to-process experience of being kissed by a man whose hands didn't shake from weakness but from the effort of being gentle, and whose mouth was hard and sure and tasted like coffee and the sea and the thing that Rowan had been inhaling from a stolen shirt for ten nights and that was now, real and present and alive, pressing against his lips and his tongue and his teeth.

He fought. 
Elias held. 
He bit. 
Elias took it. 
He pulled. 
Elias pulled back. 

The exchange was constant, rhythmic, the systole and diastole of a heart that belonged to both of them, and the heart was beating, and the beach was empty, and the sea was watching, and the kiss was becoming something that was no longer a kiss.

Rowan snapped.

It happened inside. 
Silently. 

Every wall he had ever built, every locked door, every swallowed key, every year of Daniel's hands and Camille's absence, and the armored, fortified, razor-wired perimeter of a self that had been constructed specifically, exclusively, for the purpose of not letting anyone in, every wall made itself known. At once. Simultaneously. Not as a defense but as the internal alarm of a system that has been breached and is screaming, screaming, screaming that the breach is total and the intruder is inside and the intruder's mouth is on yours and the intruder's hands are on your back and the intruder's heart is beating against your chest and you can feel it and you want it and the wanting is the most dangerous thing you have ever felt.

He shoved.

His palms hit Elias's chest. The heels of his hands drove into the sternum with a force that was not about strength but about survival, the blind, thrashing push of an animal escaping a trap, and the trap was warmth and the trap was need and the trap was the feeling of Elias's mouth on his and the sound Elias had made and the way that sound had reached inside him and touched something that no one had ever touched and that he had not known was there to be touched.

Elias released him.
His arms opened. 

Rowan stumbled backward.

Three feet between them. Then five. The distance refilling with the absence of contact, with the sudden, brutal vacancy of a space that had been occupied by the most intense physical experience of either man's life and that was now empty.

Rowan's face.

His mouth was swollen. The lower lip, the one Elias had kissed, the one that had kissed back, the one that still bore the faded scar of a split, was red, flushed, darkened by the pressure and the blood that had rushed to the surface in response to a stimulus. His cheeks were red. His jaw was red. The skin that Elias's stubble had scraped, chin, mouth, the edges of the jaw was raw and abraded.

His eyes.

Both of them. Open. The full, devastating, unobstructed span of blue, both eyes, no swelling, the healing complete, the bruises faded to faint yellow shadows that were, in this light, invisible. The eyes were wide. 

The blue was terrified.

Not of Elias. The terror was aimed inward. Directed at the self. At the thing the self had done. At the sound the self had made, the broken, high, involuntary sound that had left his mouth when Elias's tongue touched his, the sound of need being admitted by a body that had never admitted need.

Rowan was terrified of the want. 
Of the depth of it. 

Of the size and the heat and the totality of it.

He turned.

"Rowan."

Elias's voice. Low. 

Rowan didn't stop. His body was already in motion, the turn becoming a step, the step becoming a stride, the stride accelerating toward the escape velocity required to leave this beach and this man and this thing that had happened on a stretch of sand between a boat and a bluff in a cove that no one visited.

Elias's hand closed around his wrist.

The fingers wrapped around the wrist, around the tendons and the bone, and the pulse that was hammering against the inside of the skin.

Rowan's momentum stopped. The wrist held him. He pulled, a single, testing pull. He turned. Not fully. Half. Over his shoulder, his body angled toward the beach, and his face angled toward the man behind him.

Elias pulled Rowan back. The distance closed, five feet to three to one. Face to face. Breath to breath. Again. The same distance, the same proximity, the same charged and fatal air.

Elias leaned in.

His mouth moved past Rowan's mouth. Past the swollen lip, past the stubble-burned skin, past the jaw that his hand had held and his thumb had traced. His mouth found the space beside Rowan's ear. He could feel Rowan's pulse. Against his lips. Through the skin. 

And that's when he whispered.
From one mouth to one ear, through one inch of cold salt air, carrying four words that were not a question and not a statement and not a prediction but a certainty.

"You'll be back."

The words entered Rowan's ear. Traveled inward. Reached the place where language becomes something else, not thought, not meaning, but impact.

Rowan pulled free.

The wrist came out of the grip, not because the grip released but because Rowan twisted, the bone rotating inside the circle of Elias's fingers.

He spun. Faced Elias. Full-on. Square.

His face was a catastrophe. A beautiful, shattered, incandescent catastrophe. The shape collapsing and reforming, the features cycling through an expression that was terror and fury and want and grief and the specific, acute, unbearable knowledge that a man had just whispered the truest thing anyone had ever said to him.

And the part that made his face break, his eyes burn, and his hands shake was that he knew it was true.

So he spat.

The full, conscious, premeditated deployment of the oldest human gesture of contempt, the gathering of saliva, the thrust of the tongue, the propulsion of spit from one body toward another with the specific intent to degrade, to dismiss, to communicate in the most primal language available: you do not own me.

The spit hit Elias's face. 
Left cheek. 

Below the eye, above the jaw. It landed as a small, wet impact, visible, physical, and undeniable.

Rowan ran.

He ran down the beach, away from the boat, away from the man, away from the cove and the kiss and the whisper and the four words that were already living inside him, already burrowing, already taking up permanent residence in the space between his ribs where, until two and a half weeks ago, nothing had lived except anger.

He ran. His silhouette shrank against the gray. He got smaller. A figure. A shape. A point. A suggestion.

Gone.

Elias stood on the beach.

The spit was on his cheek.
He didn't wipe it.

He stood in post-event silence of a beach that had just witnessed something. The waves broke against the sand. The Driftwood rocked in the shallows, her bow in the beach, her engine off, patient, waiting for the man who always came back.

His tongue moved.

The motion was not involuntary. It was chosen, conscious, the decision of a man standing in the aftermath of something seismic, who wants, needs, must taste the evidence before the wind takes it. His tongue found the corner of his mouth. The edge of his lower lip. The trace, faint, already fading, that the spit had left in its trajectory from cheek to chin.

Salt. Seawater. The mineral trace of cold ocean and the warmer, sharper trace of a human mouth, a specific human mouth, the mouth that had been on his thirty seconds ago, the mouth that had bitten his lip and made a sound and kissed him back with a fury that was indistinguishable from surrender.

Rowan.

He tasted Rowan. 
On his mouth. 
On his lip. 

In the saliva that the boy had launched at his face as a weapon and that had landed as something else, as evidence, as contact, as the last, desperate, furious act of intimacy available to a person who was running and who wanted, even in the running, to leave a part of himself behind.

Elias closed his eyes.

The wind blew. 
The sea breathed. 

The beach held him the way the sea held the boat, without judgment, with the ancient, mineral patience of a surface that has supported the weight of everything that has ever stood on it and has never asked why.

He slowly opened his eyes.

The beach was empty. 
Rowan was gone. 

But now, Elias knew.
He knew.

Rowan would be back.

(To be continued...)

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