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.

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"Salt & Bone"

There are towns that exist on maps and towns that exist despite them. 

Wrenhaven was the latter. 

A congregation of salt-bleached buildings clinging to the edge of the world like they'd lost a bet. It sat on the southern elbow of a coastline that cartographers had always seemed embarrassed by: too jagged, too moody, too far from anywhere anyone was trying to get to. The kind of place GPS directions described, with what felt like reluctance. 

From the high road, the only road, really, the one that wound down from the ridge, Wrenhaven revealed itself in stages. 

First, the church steeple, white and austere, its paint perpetually peeling, as if God had given up on maintenance. Then the rooftops, a patchwork of slate and corrugated metal, shingles the color of things that had once been other colors. The trees came next, a sparse militia of wind-bent pines that leaned uniformly inland, as though they'd all collectively decided they'd rather be somewhere else. 

And then the sea. 
Always the sea. 

Vast and gray and indifferent, it stretched out behind the town like a judgment.

Main Street, which was not, in fact, called Main Street but rather Harborside Road, a name the residents had voted on in 1987 and had been too tired to change since, ran the length of the town's modest commercial district. There was the Drowning Barrel, the good bar, where the stools were worn smooth and the bartender, a woman named Sheila Oakes, had been pouring drinks since before most of her patrons were born. Sheila was sixty-three, built like a mailbox, and had a face that suggested she'd heard every story a human being was capable of telling and had found exactly none of them surprising. She opened at noon. She closed when she felt like it. No one argued.

Across the street and two doors down was the Rusty Anchor, the bad bar. The Rusty Anchor served warm beer, played country music from a jukebox that skipped on every fourth song, and attracted the kind of clientele that made Sheila Oakes thank God nightly for the existence of competition. It was owned by a man named Lyle Fenton, who had the interpersonal warmth of a parking ticket and a mustache that looked like it had been applied with a glue stick. Lyle and Sheila had not spoken to each other in eleven years. The reason depended on who you asked.

Beyond the bars, there was a grocery store that stocked exactly enough to survive on, but not enough to enjoy. A hardware store run by the Dimitriou brothers, George and Nikos, who had emigrated from Thessaloniki in 1998 and had been arguing about shelf organization ever since. A post office. A small ceramics shop with a hand-painted sign that read "Fireside Studio, Camille Leclair, Proprietor", its windows displaying glazed bowls and vases in shades of coastal blue and warm terra-cotta. The shop was dark today. A small card in the window said, in neat handwriting, "CLOSED - BACK SOON."

There was a laundromat that also sold bait. There was a church that also hosted AA meetings. There was a library the size of a generous living room, staffed by a retired English teacher named Dorothy Huang who treated overdue books with the moral seriousness of war crimes.

Wrenhaven did not have a movie theater, a gym, a Starbucks, or reliable cell reception south of the ridge. It had a post office, twelve hundred and forty-one residents, and an understanding, unspoken but there, that everyone knew everyone else's business and would discuss it freely, but never, under any circumstances, to your face.

But Wrenhaven's dock was the town's spine: a long, weathered stretch of concrete and timber that jutted into the harbor. At six-thirty in the morning, it was already alive. Boats knocked against their moorings with a sound like slow, irregular applause. Gulls screamed overhead, performing their daily audit of anything edible, anything shiny, and anything unattended. Thick with brine, engine grease, and the particular musk of men who had been awake since four.

Fishermen moved along the dock. Crates were loaded. Nets were checked, mended, and folded. Ice was shoveled into holds. Conversations happened in fragments, half-sentences tossed between tasks, laughter that started and stopped like a motor catching.

Old Pete Gallagher sat on his usual crate near the fuel pump, a thermos of coffee balanced on his knee, telling a story about a halibut he'd caught in 1979. He told this story every morning. The halibut grew by roughly two pounds per year. By now, it was the size of a German shepherd. No one corrected him. No one listened, either, but Pete didn't require an audience so much as a general proximity of ears.

Eddie Morrow, twenty-five and built like a refrigerator, was hauling rope with the stern focus of a man who had been told twice already this morning to haul rope and had not done it fast enough either time. His shirt was soaked through. His expression suggested he was reconsidering every decision that had led him to this dock.

And then there was the man Eddie Morrow was trying very hard not to disappoint.

Elias Voss came down the dock the way weather comes, you felt him before you saw him, and by the time you saw him, he was already the only thing in the frame.

He was carrying a clipboard in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, though carrying implied a delicacy that didn't apply. He held the mug the way most people hold a wrench, functional, careless, like it existed only because his hand needed something to do. He was wearing what he always wore: work boots, dark jeans, a henley with the sleeves shoved up past his forearms, and a canvas jacket he'd owned long enough that it had stopped being a color and had become a texture. His dark hair was pushed back, still damp, curling slightly at the nape of his neck where the wind caught it.

He looked like he'd been carved from the same material as the dock, weathered, solid, built to bear weight. The stubble along his jaw was two days past a razor and moving toward three. His hands were large and scarred and did not belong to a man who worked behind a desk, or who had ever worked behind a desk, or who had ever met a desk without immediately wanting to leave the room it was in. There was a healed white nick along his left knuckle. A faded line across the base of his right thumb. His skin was tanned from years of wind and sun in a way that couldn't be faked, making other men's tans look cosmetic by comparison. 

He walked with his shoulders slightly forward and his chin down, a posture that read as either intensity or aggression, depending on how well you knew him. If you knew him well, it was just how he moved, leaning into the next thing, always.

"Eddie." His voice carried. Pitched to cut through engine noise, sea wind, and the general chaos of a working dock. "Tell me those nets are done."

Eddie Morrow looked up with the expression of a dog who has been asked where the shoe is. "Almost, boss. Twenty minutes."

"You said twenty minutes forty minutes ago."

"Time's...relative?"

Elias stared at him. The stare lasted precisely long enough to be uncomfortable and not a second longer.

"Fifteen," Elias said. "And if I come back and they're not done, you're cleaning the hold."

"The hold's disgusting."

"So make sure the nets are done."

He moved on without waiting for a response, because Elias Voss did not wait for responses. He gave instructions the way the tide came in, with the implicit understanding that arguing was possible but pointless.

Two of the older fishermen, Carl Braddock and Jim Weiss, were standing near the ice house, smoking in the way men smoke when they've earned it: slowly, with the air of people who have been told it'll kill them and have decided they're fine with the timeline. Carl raised a hand as Elias approached.

"Voss. How'd the haul look yesterday?"

"Shit," Elias said, without breaking stride.

"That bad?"

"Worse. Water's too warm. Cod's moved north. I've got boats burning fuel to chase fish that aren't there." He took a sip of coffee and grimaced at it like it had personally wronged him. "Tell Hargrove his starboard engine sounds like it's dying. Because it is."

Jim Weiss exhaled smoke. "You tell Hargrove. Man doesn't listen to anyone under fifty."

"Man doesn't listen to anyone, period. That's why his engine sounds like a blender full of rocks."

Carl laughed, a short, hard bark. "Fair enough. Hey, is Camille around? Margaret wanted to ask her about a commission. Some bowl thing. Anniversary."

Elias shook his head. "She's gone up for a couple of days. She'll be back later today."

"Everything all right?"

"Yeah. Family stuff."

Carl nodded the way people in small towns nod when they hear family stuff, a single dip of the chin that means 'I understand that's all I'm getting and I'll find out the rest from someone else by Thursday'.

Elias kept walking. 

Two women had materialized near the harbormaster's office, coffee cups in hand, winter coats buttoned. Linda Pruitt and Diane Esposito. They came down to the dock with a frequency that had nothing to do with any business at the harbormaster's office and everything to do with the view, specifically, the one that was six-two, dark-haired, and currently scowling at a clipboard.

"Morning, Elias," Linda said, with a brightness calibrated to seem casual and failing.

He glanced up. "Linda. Diane."

"Cold one today."

"It's February."

"Right. Yes. Obviously." Linda laughed a little too quickly. Diane studied her coffee with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. "We were just...we were in the area."

"At six-forty in the morning."

"Early risers."

Elias looked at them for a beat. Something shifted at the corner of his mouth, not a smile, exactly, but the ghost of one, the kind that suggested he knew exactly what was happening and had decided to be merciful about it. "Stay warm," he said and walked on.

Behind him, Linda Pruitt exhaled like she'd been holding her breath since Tuesday.

"God," Diane muttered.

"I know."

"It's not fair."

"It's genuinely not."

They watched him go. They were not the only ones. Elena Marsh, who ran the laundromat-slash-bait shop, had found a reason to sweep her front step at this hour. Margaret Braddock, Carl's wife, had taken the scenic route to the grocery store. Even Dorothy Huang, the librarian, who was seventy-one and claimed to be above such things, had once admitted, after two glasses of sherry at the Drowning Barrel, that Elias Voss had a quality about him that was "frankly unreasonable."

It wasn't just that he was handsome, though he was, aggressively, almost inconveniently handsome, the kind of handsome that felt like a natural resource the town had no right to possess. It was the way he occupied space. The weight of him, the sureness. He moved through Wrenhaven like he was the only solid thing in it, and everyone else was just weather.

Men, for their part, dealt with Elias Voss the way men deal with any force they can't outmuscle or outearn: with respect that had a thin rind of wariness around it. He was fair. He paid his crew well. He worked harder than anyone he employed, which made it impossible to resent him without also resenting yourself. But there was a hardness to him, a line you sensed rather than saw, and the consensus among the men of Wrenhaven was that crossing that line would be a memorable mistake.

He reached the end of the dock and turned left, toward the low, square building that sat at the water's edge like a cinder block. "Voss Maritime" was painted on the door in no-nonsense block letters. Above the office, accessible by a narrow exterior staircase, was his flat. The lights were off. They usually were.

He pushed through the office door, dropped the clipboard on the desk, and refilled his coffee from the pot that had been burning since five. The office was small, cluttered, functional, with tide charts pinned to the walls, a whiteboard with crew schedules, and a filing cabinet that hadn't been organized since the previous administration, which was also Elias. There was a calendar from a marine supply company. It featured a tugboat. The tugboat was not attractive, but it was the only art in the room, and it stayed. 

He leaned against the edge of his desk, took a long drink, and stared out the window at the harbor. The boats shifted in their berths. The water was the color of pewter. Somewhere out there, a gull was losing an argument with another gull.

The door opened behind him.

Marcus Hale entered a room the way golden retrievers enter rooms, fully, with his whole body, as if the concept of a quiet entrance had never occurred to him and wouldn't have interested him if it had. He was roughly Elias' age, roughly Elias' height, and roughly none of Elias' temperament. 

Where Elias was granite, Marcus was sandstone, warm-toned, easy to read, liable to erode under pressure, but pleasant to be around in the meantime.

He had sandy hair that he kept short on the sides and longer on top, in a style his wife, Jenny, called trying too hard and Marcus called character. A broad, open face. Quick smile. He was good-looking in the approachable, nonthreatening way that made him the man women's mothers wanted them to date while their daughters were busy craning their necks toward the dock.

Marcus co-owned Voss Maritime, a 10% stake he'd bought five years ago when Elias needed capital, and Marcus needed a reason to stay in Wrenhaven. They'd grown up together, fished together as teenagers, gotten drunk together for the first time on stolen beer behind the church when they were fifteen. Marcus was one of perhaps three people on earth who could call Elias on his bullshit and survive the experience intact.

He was carrying a paper bag from the bakery and wearing an expression that sat somewhere between 'I bring news and I bring pastries'. Both, as it turned out.

"Almond croissant," Marcus said, tossing the bag onto the desk. "You're welcome."

"I didn't say thank you."

"Preemptive. Eat it. You look like you slept in a drawer."

Elias opened the bag, looked inside, and took a bite without ceremony. "What do you want?"

"Why do I have to want something? Can't a man bring his business partner a croissant out of the goodness of his generous heart?"

"No."

Marcus dropped into the chair across from the desk, the only other chair in the office, a swivel model whose swivel had died sometime during the Obama administration. He leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head, and regarded Elias with the particular expression of someone about to bring up a subject he knows will not be welcomed.

"So," Marcus said. "Today's the day, right?"

Elias chewed. Swallowed. Took another sip of coffee that would strip paint. "Yeah."

"Camille's driving back with the kid."

"He's nineteen. Wouldn't call him a kid."

"You know what I mean." Marcus paused. "Have you met him?"

"No."

"Never? In the whole time you and Camille were..."

"No. He lived with his father. Camille didn't...it wasn't something she talked about. I mean, I knew the situation."

Marcus was quiet for a moment. This was notable because Marcus being quiet was like the sea being still, technically possible but worth paying attention to.

"Hell of a thing," he said. "Daniel."

"Yeah."

"Car wreck?"

"Went off the road up near Ridgemont. Rain. Middle of the night." Elias's jaw tightened by a fraction, a movement so small it would've been invisible to anyone who didn't know his face as well as Marcus did. "He was drunk."

"Jesus."

"From what Camille told me, he was always drunk. Just finally ran out of luck."

Marcus rubbed his jaw. "So the kid...Rowan?"

"Rowan."

"Nineteen, no other family, and his dad wraps his car around a tree. And now he's got to come live with the mother who left him." Marcus let out a low whistle, the kind reserved for situations that are too heavy for words but require some kind of sound. "That's a rough hand."

"It's a shit hand," Elias corrected.

"How's Camille doing with it?"

Elias set his coffee down. He was quiet for a moment, and the quiet had texture. "She's scared," he said finally. "She won't say that. She's been cleaning the house for three days straight. Bought new sheets. New towels. Arranged his room like she's staging a fucking open house." He looked at the window again. "She hasn't seen the kid in...I don't know. Years. Holidays, maybe. Birthdays. Quick visits. Daniel didn't make it easy, and Camille didn't push."

"Why not?"

"Because she's Camille. Because she thinks she deserves whatever she gets."
Marcus absorbed this. "And the kid? What do you know about him?"

"Not much. Young. Angry, probably. Wouldn't you be?" Elias bit into the croissant again, chewed, and pointed the remainder at Marcus. "His father was a drunk. His mother left. Now his father's dead and he's being shipped to some town he's never been to, to live with a woman he probably hates. So yeah. I'd guess angry covers it."

"You worried about Camille?"

"I'm always worried about Camille."

It came out simply, without weight, and that was what made it land. Marcus watched his friend for a moment, the hard line of his jaw, the way his thumb traced the rim of his mug without thought, the tension he carried in his shoulders, the way other men carried wallets. Elias cared about Camille in a way that was constant, unperformative, and completely devoid of the one thing she wanted it to contain. Marcus had watched this dynamic for years. It was like watching someone die of thirst next to a well that was six inches too deep.

"Well," Marcus said, clapping his hands on his knees and standing. "Maybe it'll be fine. Maybe the kid'll come in, see the ocean, breathe the air, have a moment. People do that. They arrive somewhere and they just...reset."

"You've been watching those renovation shows with Jenny again."

"I have. They're very soothing. And the before-and-afters are..."

"Marcus."

"What?"

"It's not going to be fine. Camille's going to pour everything she has into this kid, and he's probably going to throw it back in her face, and she's going to call me at midnight crying, and I'm going to have to figure out what to say." He finished the croissant, balled up the bag, and tossed it into the trash can across the room. It went in clean. "That's what's going to happen."

"You're probably right," Marcus said.

"I'm always right."

"You're frequently right. There's a difference."

"Get out of my office."

"Our office. I own ten percent."

"Then get out of ninety percent of my office."

The door hit the wall before anyone hit the door.

Eddie Morrow came through it like a man outrunning something, which, in a sense, he was, because Eddie had discovered early in life that delivering news was the only form of productivity that required no actual skill.

"Camille's car," he said, breathing like he'd sprinted the length of the dock, which he had. "Just came over the ridge. Faye at the gas station saw it pass."

He stood there, chest heaving, one hand braced on the doorframe, radiating the energy of a man who expects applause.

Elias didn't look up from the whiteboard. He was in the middle of reassigning Thursday's route, the "Lady Maren" needed her hull checked, which meant pulling Briggs off the northern run and putting Kowalski on it instead, which meant Kowalski would complain, which meant Elias would have to not care about Kowalski complaining, which was fine because not caring about complaints was perhaps his single greatest professional skill.

"Okay," Elias said.

Eddie blinked. "Okay?"

"What do you want me to do with that information, Eddie?"

"I...nothing. I just thought you'd want to know."

"I knew she was coming today. I told Carl she was coming today. I told you she was coming today. So you've run the length of my dock to tell me something I told you." He uncapped a marker with his teeth. "Incredible work. Go finish the fucking nets."

Eddie lingered for a half-second, the way a puppy lingers after being told 'no' and then retreated, the door swinging shut behind him with a defeated click.

Marcus, who had not left because Marcus never left when things were about to get interesting, was leaning against the filing cabinet with his arms crossed and a grin that could only be described as premeditated.

"Don't," Elias said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're about to."

"I'm just standing here. In my ten percent of the office. Observing."

Elias capped the marker and turned around. Marcus's grin had widened. It now occupied a percentage of his face that should have required a permit.

"You're vibrating," Marcus said.

"I'm not vibrating."

"You're like a tuning fork someone flicked."

"I'm going to flick you in a second."

"She's your best friend." Marcus tilted his head. "Kowalski can wait."

"Kowalski can't wait. That's the entire point of the schedule."

"Elias."

"Marcus."

They looked at each other. It was the kind of look that only exists between people who have known each other long enough to have their own private language, a language composed entirely of silences, eyebrow positions, and the specific way one man says another man's name.

"I have work to do," Elias said, with the careful, measured tone of someone constructing a fence. "And so do you. So I suggest you go do it and mind your own goddamn business."

"My business is literally this business. I have a stake."

"Ten percent."

"A meaningful ten percent."

"Go check on the 'Lady Maren'. Go count fish. I don't care. Just go do it somewhere that isn't here."

Marcus raised both hands in theatrical surrender. "Fine. I'm going. I'm gone. Consider me a memory." He pushed off the filing cabinet and moved toward the door, then paused, because Marcus always paused, and looked back over his shoulder. "You know, you could just say you're worried about her."

"Out."

"It wouldn't cost you anything."

"It would cost me the four seconds it takes to say it. Four seconds I could spend on the schedule. Get out."

Marcus left. The door closed. The office was quiet again.

Elias stood at the whiteboard for another thirty seconds, marker in hand, staring at Thursday's route without reading it. The letters blurred into shapeless blocks.

He put the marker down.

He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, a gesture he only made when no one was watching, a private tell, the physical equivalent of admitting something he'd never say out loud.

He looked at the phone on his desk. It was an old landline, beige, the kind that still had a curly cord. He'd been meaning to replace it for three years. He hadn't. The phone sat there, ugly, doing nothing.

He exhaled through his nose, not a sigh, because Elias did not sigh, but something adjacent. Something in the same postal code as a sigh. He crossed the office in two strides, picked up the receiver, and began to dial.

He got three digits in.

Outside, a car horn, short, sharp, two quick blasts. It wasn't the polite 'excuse me' honk of someone navigating a parking lot. It was the 'I'm here, I'm exhausted, come outside' honk of someone who has been driving for hours and has run out of patience and radio stations simultaneously.

The sound hadn't finished dying before footsteps hammered down the dock. 

The knock came softly. Two taps, knuckles barely committed, already apologizing for the interruption, which was, in essence, Camille Leclair's entire operating principle as a human being.

Elias opened the door.

Camille stood on the other side of it, looking like she hadn't slept in three days, which she probably hadn't. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a loose knot that had started the trip tidy and had since given up. She was wearing a long wool coat over something soft and rumpled, and her eyes, sharp, slightly too bright, had the glassy quality of a woman running on caffeine and dread and whatever reservoir of composure she kept hidden somewhere behind her sternum.

She was still beautiful. She was always still beautiful. This was one of the central, unspoken inconveniences of their friendship.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

This was the thing about Elias and Camille. 

In a room full of people, they were easy, warm, natural, the kind of friendship that looked effortless from the outside and mostly was. He'd hand her a beer without being asked. She'd steal food off his plate. They had rhythms. Shorthand. The comfortable choreography of two people who had seen each other naked and decided to build something less exciting but more durable on top of it.

But alone, truly alone, without the buffer of a bar or a dinner table or Marcus performing his role as human shock absorber, something shifted. The air thickened. The ease curdled into something that had too many edges. It wasn't hostility. It was the opposite: a closeness that had nowhere safe to land. Every silence between them contained the ghost of a conversation they'd never had, and every look lasted a half-second too long, and both of them knew it. Neither of them mentioned it, because mentioning it would require acknowledging that their friendship was built on a foundation of something Camille had never stopped feeling and Elias had never started.

They'd been good together. Physically, they'd been better than good, the kind of good that ruins your ability to enjoy anything moderate, the kind that leaves scorch marks on the furniture and makes you late for things you used to be on time for. 

But that was over. 
Had been over. 
It was supposed to be over.

"You look tired," Elias said, because he was pathologically incapable of starting a conversation with anything resembling tenderness.

"Thank you. That's exactly what every woman wants to hear after driving nine hours."

"You drove nine hours?"

"Seven. But the last two felt like nine."

She stepped inside without being invited, because she'd stopped waiting for invitations to this office approximately eighteen months ago. She looked around, at the whiteboard, the cold coffee pot, the tugboat calendar, with the distracted gaze of someone whose mind is in another building entirely.

"How was the drive?" Elias asked.

"Fine."

"Fine?"

"The road part was fine. The car part was..." She trailed off. Her mouth did something complicated, a smile that started, stalled, and collapsed into a flat line. "Do you want the version where I'm handling it?"

"Camille..."

"The real one. Okay." She folded her arms across her chest, not defensively but as if she were holding herself together, physically preventing something from spilling out. "He didn't speak. The entire drive. Seven hours. I picked him up from Daniel's apartment, which, by the way, was exactly as bad as you'd imagine. It smelled like...anyway. He had one bag. One. He put it in the back seat, and then he got in the back seat, and he put his headphones in, and that was it. Seven hours. Not a word."

"Nothing?"

"I tried. I asked about music. I asked about food. I asked if he needed to stop. I asked if he was comfortable. I made a comment about the weather, Elias. The fucking weather. Like I was his Uber driver." She laughed, short, airless, the kind of laugh that is just crying in a different outfit. "He looked out the window the entire time. I could see him in the rearview mirror. He has Daniel's jaw. Did I ever tell you that? He has Daniel's jaw and my mother's eyes, and he looked out the window like the glass was the only thing keeping him from jumping."

Elias set his mug down. "Where is he now?"

Camille tilted her head toward the door. Toward the dock. Toward the car parked by the fuel shed, visible through the office's salt-streaked window if you leaned slightly to the left, which Elias did not do because he was Elias, and leaning implied curiosity, which implied involvement, which implied a commitment of emotional energy he had not agreed to.

"He won't get out," Camille said.

"What do you mean he won't get out?"

"I mean, he won't get out of the car. I parked in front of the house. I turned off the engine. I said, 'We're here.' He didn't move. I said, 'Rowan, we're here.' He put his headphones back in." She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, the universal gesture of a parent approaching the event horizon of sanity. "So I...drove here."

Elias stared at her. "Okay," he said.

"That's all you've got? Okay?"

"What the fuck do you want me to say? He's nineteen, and his dad just died, and you drove him to the edge of the world. He doesn't want to get out of the car. I wouldn't want to get out of the car."

"You're not helping."

"You didn't ask me to help."

Camille looked at him. It was a specific look, one he'd seen before, many times, usually right before she asked him to do something he didn't want to do. It started in her eyes, which went soft and slightly wide, and then moved to her mouth, which pressed into a line that was somehow both firm and beseeching.

"No," Elias said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're doing the face."

"What face?"

"The face. You're doing it right now."

"I'm just looking at you."

"You're 'aiming' at me."

Camille took a breath. When she spoke, her voice was quieter. Stripped of performance. Just a woman standing in a cold office, asking.

"I thought maybe you could go over there. Just...say something. Introduce yourself. He doesn't know you, so there's no history, no baggage. Maybe he'd respond to that."

Elias's face went through a sequence of expressions so rapid and layered that a less charitable observer might have mistaken it for a seizure. There was disbelief, clean, almost admiring in its scope. There was incredulity, which was disbelief's louder, less polite cousin. There was a flash of something that might have been fury if it had been directed at anyone other than Camille, at whom he had never once been genuinely furious and never would be, a fact that annoyed him enormously. And underneath all of it, buried deep enough that only someone who knew him as well as she did would have caught it, there was resignation, the slow, inevitable understanding that he was going to do this, since the moment she knocked, and that everything between then and now had been theater.

"You want me," he said slowly, "to walk over to your car. And talk to your son. Who I have never met. Who is, by your account, not speaking to anyone." He paused. "And say what, exactly?"

Camille shrugged.
She shrugged.

"Motherfucker," Elias muttered. Not loudly. Not with venom. Just the quiet, bone-tired profanity of a man who has been outmaneuvered by someone who wasn't even trying.

"Elias..."

"What do you want me to do, Camille? What is the play here? I walk over, knock on the window, say, 'Hey, I'm Elias, I used to fuck your mom, welcome to Wrenhaven, population: miserable?' Is that the pitch?"

"It doesn't have to be a thing. Just go over there. You know...be yourself."

"Being myself is the problem. Being myself involves swearing at strangers and making them uncomfortable."

"You don't make people uncomfortable."

"I make everyone uncomfortable."

"Elias." She said his name the way she always said it when she needed him, like it was the only word in her vocabulary that still meant something. Just the raw, unguarded sound of a woman who had spent seven hours in silence with the child she'd failed and was now standing in a cold office asking the man she loved to do the one thing she couldn't.

He exhaled. It came from somewhere deep, somewhere structural, the kind of breath that carries the entire weight of a decision and deposits it at your feet.

"Goddammit," he said. Softer this time. Almost to himself.

He grabbed his jacket. Shrugged it on. Moved toward the door. Camille stepped aside. Elias pulled the door open and stepped out onto the dock.

The car was parked by the fuel shed, sixty feet away. A dark blue sedan, road-dirty, engine off. From here, he could see the shape, a silhouette, motionless behind glass.

He walked toward it.

Sixty feet. That was all it was. Sixty feet of concrete dock between the office door and the car.

Elias was aware, with a grim peripheral vision, that people were watching. Not obviously, Wrenhaven didn't do obviously. Carl Braddock had angled his body forty-five degrees from the ice house, pretending to inspect a crate that required no inspection. Jim Weiss had lit a cigarette like a man who had decided that this particular smoke required him to face the fuel shed. Even Old Pete had paused his halibut monologue, which was the Wrenhaven equivalent of a national emergency.

Elias ignored them. He was good at ignoring things. It was, alongside net repair and emotional suppression, one of his three core competencies.

The car sat by the fuel shed in a diagonal that suggested Camille had parked it with the urgency of someone who had stopped caring about angles approximately four hours ago. 

He was fifteen feet away when he realized the shape he'd seen from the office had moved.

The back seat was empty.

The figure was now in the front, specifically the driver's seat, and this rearrangement struck Elias as both irrational and deeply, pointlessly defiant, like a prisoner changing cells by choice. The silhouette was hunched, hooded, folded in on itself.

Ten feet.

He could see details now. A dark hoodie, the hood pulled up. Headphones, large, over-ear, had been moved down to hang around the neck. One knee was drawn up against the steering wheel. A hand, pale, long-fingered, was resting on the gear shift, not gripping it, just resting, the way you'd rest your hand on something you were thinking about using as a weapon.

Five feet.

Elias stopped. He turned around.

Back at the office, sixty feet away, Camille stood in the doorway, her arms wrapped around herself, an expression of concentrated hope so intense it was nearly aerobic. When she saw him turn, she straightened. She gave him a thumbs-up.

A thumbs up.

Like he was about to parallel park. Like he was attempting a recipe. Like this was a situation that a single upward digit could summarize, and not, in fact, the most uncomfortable thing he'd been asked to do since Tommy Burke had asked him to be best man at a wedding, Elias had privately given six months' notice.

He turned back to the car.

"Right," he muttered. "Okay. Fine."

He stepped up to the driver's side window and knocked. Two knocks. Firm, unhesitating, the same knock he used on his own crew when they were late, which was to say, a knock with structural authority.

Nothing.

The figure in the driver's seat did not move. Did not flinch. Did not acknowledge by any visible mechanism that a knock had occurred. The stillness was so complete, so practiced, that Elias understood immediately he was dealing with someone who had elevated the act of ignoring people into an art form. This was not amateur-hour avoidance. This was professional.

He knocked again.

The hood shifted. Barely. A rotation of ten degrees, just enough to indicate that the person inside was aware of his existence and had assigned it a priority level somewhere between irrelevant and annoying.

And then the hood came down.

Elias had spent thirty-three years on this earth. He had seen beautiful things, sunsets that made the ocean look like it was bleeding gold, storms that turned the sky into something biblical, the curve of a woman's back in the kind of light that makes you forget your own name. He was not a man who was easily stopped by the way a thing looked. He was not built for it. His brain was organized around function, not aesthetics. Things were useful, or they weren't. People were decent, or they weren't. The world was a series of problems that required either solving or enduring, and beauty was a concept he acknowledged the way he acknowledged the existence of France, real, presumably pleasant, not relevant to his daily operations.

But this.

The hood fell back, and the face beneath it surfaced like something coming up from deep water, and for a span of time that lasted either half a second or the rest of his natural life, Elias forgot what he'd come here to do.

The boy, the young man, had a face that didn't belong in a car, or on a dock, or in a town like Wrenhaven, or possibly on this planet. It was the kind of face that old painters used to put on angels and then feel vaguely ashamed about afterward, all sharp, clean geometry softened by something almost obscenely delicate. Skin so fair it was nearly translucent, traced with a faint scatter of freckles across the bridge of the nose. A jaw that was fine but defined, carrying just enough of what must have been his father's bone structure to pull it back from ethereal into something harder, realer. Black hair, true black, not dark brown pretending, fell in loose, careless curls past his ears and across his forehead, and he hadn't pushed it back, and it framed his face the way a frame makes you look at a painting.

And the eyes.
Christ, the eyes.

Blue didn't cover it. Blue was a word for the sky, for the water, for the little strip of ceramic Camille used on her bowls. This was something else, a deep, dense, almost violet saturation, like someone had taken the concept of blue and distilled it until it became aggressive. They were fringed with dark lashes and set beneath brows that were slightly drawn together, not in confusion but in a kind of permanent, low-grade hostility, as though the world had been put on notice a long time ago and hadn't listened.

Those eyes turned toward Elias.

The look that came with them was flat. Assessing. Utterly devoid of warmth or interest or any of the things a face is supposed to contain when it encounters another face for the first time. It was the look of someone who has learned to evaluate every new person as a potential threat and has not yet gathered sufficient evidence to downgrade.

Something landed in Elias's chest. Not a thought. Not a word. Just a sensation, quick, unnamed, gone before he could examine it. Like a hook catching on something and pulling taut for a single instant before the line went slack.

He blinked. He was a man standing at a car window. That was all.

He knocked again.

Pointed downward. 'Roll it down'.

A pause. 

Long enough to be a statement. Then the window descended, slowly, grudgingly, the mechanical whir somehow carrying an attitude.

It stopped halfway. Of course it did.

"Hey," Elias said.

Nothing. The blue eyes watched him through the half-open gap with the detached curiosity of a cat deciding whether something is worth killing.

"I'm Elias. I'm a friend of your mother's."

Nothing.

"She asked me to come over here. Which I want you to know I didn't volunteer for. I was in my office, drinking coffee, having a perfectly decent morning, and now I'm standing in the cold talking to a window. So we're both having a bad time. That's our common ground. Congratulations."

A beat. Then, barely, almost imperceptibly, the corner of the boy's mouth moved. It wasn't a smile. It was the ghost of a ghost of a smile, the faintest muscular acknowledgment that something had been said that did not warrant complete contempt. It was there and gone so fast that Elias might have imagined it.

"You're Rowan," Elias said. Not a question.

The boy looked at him. The eyes were steady and unblinking, and up close, even through half a window, they had a quality that was difficult to describe and impossible to ignore. There was intelligence in them. There was pain. And there was a hardness that had been earned, not chosen, the kind that forms around a wound when the wound has been open long enough.

"Yeah." The voice was quiet. Flat. Lower than Elias expected, not deep, but not boyish either. Somewhere in the middle, with an edge on it.

"You want to get out of the car?"

"No."

"Okay."

Silence.

"Is that it?" Rowan said.

"Is what it?"

"Your whole pitch. 'Hey, I'm Elias. You want to get out of the car.' That's what she sent you over here with?"

"I didn't prepare remarks."

"Clearly."

Another silence. Elias leaned one hand on the roof of the car, casual, unhurried, projecting a ease he did not entirely feel. Inside his chest, the unnamed thing from a moment ago was still sitting there, quiet and strange, like a sound at a frequency he couldn't quite identify.

"Look," Elias said. "Your mother asked me to come talk to you. I've talked to you. Obligation fulfilled."

Rowan turned his head. He looked at Elias fully now, a direct, sustained look, the kind that most nineteen-year-olds can't hold and that this one wielded like a tool. His eyes moved across Elias's face with an attention that felt almost physical, cataloging, reading, taking inventory of something Elias couldn't see.

"You're the ex," Rowan said.

"What?"

"The ex. Her boyfriend. The one she was with."

"We dated. Years ago. We're friends."

"Right." Something shifted in Rowan's expression, a flicker, fast and unreadable, there and gone. "She talked about you on the phone once. When she used to call." The word 'used to' carried a weight that could have sunk a fishing vessel. "She'd mention your name, and her voice would do this thing. This...pathetic sigh." He said like it disgusted him. "So you're that guy."

"I'm not any guy. I'm just..."

"You can go now."

"Excuse me?"

"I said you can go. You did your little errand. You walked over. You said your thing. Go back and tell her you tried." The voice had changed. The flatness was gone, replaced by something with teeth in it, a sharp, specific anger that came up fast and aimed to land. "That's what she does, right? She sends people. She couldn't get me out of the car herself, so she sent her friend to do it. Classic Camille. Always finding someone else to do the part she can't."

The eyes, those impossible, devastating eyes, held Elias's without wavering. There was no moisture in them. No trembling. Just a fury so pure and so old that it had become structural, load-bearing, the thing that held everything else up.

"Go the fuck away," Rowan said.

He reached for the radio. 
Found the knob. 
Turned it.

Music filled the car, loud, immediate, a wall of sound designed for exactly one purpose: to make the man standing outside the window irrelevant. Some song Elias didn't know and didn't care about, bass-heavy, percussive, the audio equivalent of a door being slammed.

Rowan settled back in the driver's seat. Pulled the hood up. Crossed his arms and stared straight ahead through the windshield at the harbor, at the boats, at the gray and indifferent sea, as though Elias had already stopped existing.

Elias stood there.

The unnamed thing had not gone away. It had, if anything, gotten louder, a resonance, a vibration, as though someone had struck a tuning fork against a part of him he'd forgotten existed. The boy's face. The fury. The blue of those eyes aimed at him like headlights. The way his mouth had moved when he'd said 'go the fuck away', the precision of it, the control, the way his lips had shaped the words with a care that contradicted the carelessness he was performing.

Elias turned around. 
He walked back toward the dock. 

It had become, in the seven or so minutes since he'd left his office, a theater. Every fisherman, dock worker, and incidental bystander within visual range had found a reason to be facing the fuel shed. Carl Braddock was leaning on his crate. Eddie Morrow had climbed halfway up the Lady Maren's mast, which had nothing to do with rigging and everything to do with sight lines. Even Marcus had materialized, leaning in the office doorway, arms crossed, grinning.

Elias ignored all of them. He walked directly to Camille, who was standing where he'd left her, hands clasped in front of her.

"How did it..."

"Keys," Elias said.

"What?"

"Your car keys. Give them to me."

"Why do you need my..."

"Camille. Keys."

Something in his tone, not anger, not urgency, but something flatter, made her hand move to her coat pocket before her brain had finished processing the request. She held them out. A small ring, two keys, a ceramic keychain she'd made herself in the shape of a starfish.

Elias took them. He looked at her. "Let's go."

He turned. He walked back toward the car. Behind him, Camille followed, quickly, a half-step behind, her confusion visible in every line of her body.

On the dock, the audience adjusted its angles. Carl Braddock abandoned all pretense of the crate and stood, staring. Jim Weiss stopped mid-cigarette. Eddie Morrow, still on the mast, gripped the rigging with both hands.

Marcus uncrossed his arms. "Oh, this is going to be good," he said, to no one.

Elias reached the car. The music was still blaring, audible even from outside, bass rattling the windows. Through the windshield, Rowan was exactly where he'd been: hood up, arms crossed, staring at the harbor with the performative stillness of a gargoyle.

Elias pressed the key fob. The locks clicked.

He opened the driver's door.

The music hit him full force, a blast of volume and bass that would have made a lesser man flinch. Elias did not flinch. He had spent twenty years on boats in storms. He had been yelled at by men twice his age in gale-force winds. He had once physically separated two drunk fishermen who were trying to kill each other with a gaff hook. A teenager's stereo did not register on his threat matrix.

Rowan turned. The hood fell back. Those blue eyes, wide now, shocked, the composure cracking for the first time, met Elias'.

"What the f..."

Elias reached in, hooked one arm around the boy's torso, and pulled him out of the car.

It wasn't gentle. It wasn't violent either. It was efficient, the same economy of motion Elias applied to hauling nets, moving crates, and every other physical task that required something to be somewhere it currently wasn't. He gripped, he lifted, he relocated. That was all.

Rowan was lighter than he expected. That was the first thing he noticed, the boy was lean, wiry, all sharp angles and coiled tension, and he weighed about as much as a moderate catch of haddock. The second thing he noticed was the sound Rowan made, a strangled, furious noise somewhere between a shout and a hiss, the vocal equivalent of a cat being pulled from a shelf.

"Get your fucking hands...let go of me...what the fuck!"

Rowan twisted, kicked, swung an elbow that connected with nothing because Elias had already adjusted his grip. Fish don't want to be in the boat. Crates don't want to be on the truck. Nineteen-year-old boys don't want to be extracted from sedans. The principle was the same. You set your feet, you controlled the center of gravity, and you didn't let go.

"Put me the fuck down!"

"I will. Relax."

"Relax? Relax? You just...who the fuck does this...you can't just..."

Elias opened the rear door with his free hand, a maneuver that required a brief, graceless rearrangement of limbs that probably looked, from the dock's perspective, like someone trying to load an angry duffel bag into a hatchback. He deposited Rowan into the back seat with a firm, lateral motion that was closer to placing than shoving but that Rowan would undoubtedly describe as shoving for the rest of his natural life.

Rowan landed on the back seat with a thud and an expletive so creative it contained three syllables that may not have existed in English prior to this moment. His curls were wild, his hood was twisted, his face was flushed with a furious pink that made his blue eyes blaze like pilot lights. He kicked the back of the driver's seat once, hard, with focused rage.

"You're a fucking psycho!"

"Buckle up," Elias said, and shut the door.

He turned to Camille.

She was standing four feet away, mouth open, eyes so wide they had achieved a near-perfect circle. Her hands were frozen in midair in a gesture that could have been 'stop' or 'what' or simply the physical manifestation of a brain attempting to process an event it had not been designed for. She looked like a woman who had asked someone to water her plants and had returned to find them pressure-washing the house.

"Get in," Elias said.

"Elias."

"Now."

"You just...you picked him up..."

"He's in the car. You're not in the car. Get in."

From the back seat, Rowan's voice, muffled, incandescent with rage: "I'm going to kill you. I'm going to literally, actually kill you. I'm going to find out where you live and I'm going to..."

"He's spirited," Elias said to Camille.

Camille got in. She opened the passenger door and sat down. A mechanical obedience of a fight-or-flight response that had glitched into a third option: comply and process later. She pulled the door shut. She put on her seatbelt. She stared straight ahead.

Elias walked around to the driver's side. He got in. Adjusted the seat, Camille was shorter than him by half a foot, and the mirror was wrong, and the steering wheel was too close, and he made all of these corrections.

In the rearview mirror, Rowan was pressed against the far door, knees drawn up, breathing hard, looking at Elias with an expression that contained approximately fourteen emotions, none of them positive. His hair was in his face. His cheeks were still flushed. His chest rose and fell rapidly under the hoodie, and his eyes, God, those eyes, burned with a hatred so vivid and so personal that it felt almost intimate.

Elias met them in the mirror. 
Held them. 
One second. 
Two.

Something passed between them. Elias didn't know what it was. He didn't want to know.

He started the engine. It turned over with a cough and a rattle that suggested Camille's car, like everything else in this situation, was being held together by stubbornness and neglect.

He put it in drive.

On the dock, the population of Wrenhaven's harbor watched as Camille Leclair's dark blue sedan reversed out of its diagonal parking job with a jerk. The car straightened, lurched forward, and accelerated up Harborside Road with a velocity that was, by any reasonable standard, excessive for a residential area and entirely appropriate for the mood of the man behind the wheel.

Eddie Morrow, still clinging to the mast of the Lady Maren, watched the car disappear over the ridge.

"What the fuck just happened?" he said.

Marcus, still standing in the office doorway, shook his head slowly. He was no longer grinning. He wore the expression of a man who has just watched the first scene of a movie and realized, with a mix of excitement and dread, that he has no idea where the plot is going.

"No clue," Marcus said. "But those nets still aren't done."

Meanwhile, Camille's car had been in motion for eleven seconds when Rowan started.

"You're insane, you know that? You're genuinely, clinically, certifiably fucking insane! That's assault. That's actual, literal assault. I could call the police. I could press charges. I could..."

Elias drove. The road climbed from the harbor toward the ridge, and he took the first curve. His hands were at ten and two. His jaw was set. His eyes did not leave the road.

"...and who even are you? Some dock worker? Some fucking fisherman who thinks he can just...what, manhandle people? Pick them up like they're a bag of..."

"Lean back," Elias said.

"...and you." Rowan's voice shifted. The rage, which had been pointed at the back of Elias's head like a blowtorch, swiveled to the passenger seat, where Camille sat with her hands in her lap and her gaze fixed on the dashboard. "You just stood there. Mother of the year. Really. Standing ovation."

"Rowan..." Camille started.

"Don't."

"Lean back," Elias said again.

"Fuck you."

"You're leaning between the seats. It's a safety issue. Lean back."

"A safety issue? You just ripped me out of a stationary vehicle with your bare hands, and you're worried about seatbelt etiquette?"

Rowan was, in fact, leaning forward, his body pressed against the gap between the two front seats, his face close enough that Elias could see him in the periphery: the wild dark curls, the flushed cheeks, the eyes that were doing something nuclear. His breath was fast and hot and slightly sweet, like cheap coffee and anger.

"I'm going to give you until this next turn," Elias said, his voice carrying the calm, pleasant cadence of a weather forecast. "And then I'm going to need you to be sitting back in your seat."

"Or what? You'll throw me in the fucking trunk?"

"Sit. Back."

"Make m..."

Elias hit the brakes.

Not gradually. Not with a warning. He depressed the pedal with the full, committed force and let the laws of physics do his talking for him.

The car stopped. The road did not.

Rowan, unbelted, leaning forward, approximately ninety-five percent of his body mass pitched between the front seats, launched forward with a velocity that would have been impressive in an athletic context and was, in this context, purely slapstick. His face connected with the back of Elias' headrest with a sound that was somewhere between a thud and a honk, the dull, meaty impact of bone meeting padded vinyl, followed by Rowan's nasal exhalation compressing against the fabric.

He ricocheted back. His hands flew to his face. He landed in the back seat with the graceless collapse of a marionette whose strings had been cut.

"Fuck!"

The car was still. The engine idled. Outside, a bird sang. The bird did not know what was happening inside the car. The bird was having a fine morning.

Elias checked the rearview mirror. Rowan was slumped against the back seat, both hands clamped over his nose and mouth, his eyes, watering now, involuntarily, the physiological response of a face that had recently met upholstery at speed, glaring at Elias above his fingers with a hatred so concentrated it could have been bottled and sold as fuel.

Elias put the car back in drive. Resumed speed. The road curved. The trees scrolled past.

Three seconds of silence. 
Four. 
Five.

It was, in retrospect, the last silence any of them would experience for the next six minutes.

"ELIAS!"

Camille's voice detonated. She had turned in her seat, fully, bodily, seatbelt straining, and was looking at him with an expression that had departed the realm of shock and arrived, at last, in the more familiar territory of fury.

"What?" he said.

"What? What?! You just...did you seriously just brake-check my son?"

"He wasn't wearing a seatbelt."

"So you taught him a lesson about seatbelts by giving him a concussion?!"

"It's not a concussion. It's a headrest. They're designed to absorb impact. He's fine. Are you fine?" Elias asked the rearview mirror.

From the back seat, muffled by hands. "I'm going to murder you in your sleep."

"See? He's fine," Elias confirmed.

"He is not fine! You walked up to my car...my car...grabbed my child..."

"He's nineteen."

"...Out of the front seat like a...like a sack of..."

"Potatoes," Rowan offered from the back seat, nasal and bitter. "He grabbed me like a sack of potatoes. That's the word you're looking for."

"I was going to say laundry," Camille said.

"Potatoes is better."

"Fine. He grabbed you like a sack of potatoes, threw you in the back..."

"He didn't throw me. He shoved."

"Is there a difference?"

"Trajectory. Throwing implies air. I didn't get air. I got shoved."

"Okay, he shoved my son like a sack of potatoes into the back seat of my car, got in, didn't explain, didn't ask..."

"You told me to handle it," Elias said.

"I told you to talk to him!"

"I talked to him. He told me to go fuck myself. So I moved to phase two."

"There is no phase two! There was never a phase two! The whole plan was phase one! Talk! Words! Human communication!"

"Your plan was shit, Camille."

"My plan was reasonable!"

"Your plan was to send a stranger to talk to a kid who doesn't want to talk to his own mother. What exactly was the endgame? I'd knock on the window, and he'd have a spiritual awakening? He'd see my face and think, 'Oh, a fisherman, my problems are solved?'"

"Don't do that. Don't make it sound stupid."

"It was a little stupid."

"It was not..."

"It was incredibly stupid," Rowan said from the back.

Camille spun around. "You don't get to agree with him!"

"I'm not agreeing with him. I'm observing a fact. The plan was stupid. He's an asshole. Both things can be true at the same time."

"Don't call him an asshole."

Elias glanced at the mirror. Rowan had lowered his hands. His nose was red but intact. The tears had dried, or been willed away, or both. He was sitting upright now, not by choice, Elias suspected, but because the indignity of being slumped while losing an argument was more than his pride could sustain.

"I'm okay with asshole," Elias said.

"You're not helping," Camille said.

"I wasn't trying to help. I was trying to get him out of the car and to your house, which is what's happening right now. You're welcome."

"I'm not thanking you."

"I said you're welcome."

"That's not how that...you can't just preemptively accept gratitude..."

"And yet."

Camille made a sound. It wasn't a word. It was the sound a kettle makes right before the whistle, a pressurized, tonal expression of frustration that comes from somewhere below the throat and above the soul. She pressed both hands flat against her face and held them there, breathing into her palms, the way people breathe when they are trying very hard not to say the next thing their brain has prepared.

"This is not how today was supposed to go," she said, into her hands.

"How was it supposed to go?" Rowan asked. The hostility had downshifted, still there, still idling, but quieter now, running on a different fuel. Something closer to curiosity. Or exhaustion. Or the particular numbness that follows a burst of rage so total it empties you.

Camille lowered her hands. She didn't turn around. She spoke to the windshield, to the road, to the narrow corridor of trees and salt air that led to the house where her son was about to live.

"I was going to drive home. I was going to show you the house. Your room. I bought...I made it nice. I was going to make lunch. Something good. I was going to sit across from you at the table, and I was going to say…" She stopped. The sentence hung there, unfinished, trembling slightly at its severed end. "I had things I was going to say."

The car got quiet. The road turned, and the trees thinned, and the first rooftops of the residential stretch came into view, small houses, weathered clapboard, gardens that were mostly mud at this time of year.

"Great," Rowan said. Flat. Toneless. A single syllable that contained absolutely nothing and absolutely everything. "Can't wait."

Elias turned left onto a narrow lane. The houses here were older, set closer together, with the slouching intimacy of buildings that had been leaning on each other for decades. Camille's cottage was at the end, two stories, white clapboard, green door, a front garden that had been tended with the kind of care that comes from having too much time and too many feelings and a need to put both of them somewhere.

He pulled into the short driveway. 

The engine hadn't finished dying before Rowan was out.

He moved with the explosive urgency of something uncaged, door handle, door open, body through the gap in a single fluid motion. He was free, and he communicated this freedom by immediately slamming the rear door with a force that rocked the sedan on its suspension and sent a flock of starlings detonating out of Camille's garden hedge like feathered shrapnel.

He wasn't done.

He rounded the back of the car with three fast strides, came up along the driver's side, and slapped the door panel with the flat of his palm, once, hard, a sharp percussive crack that rang off the clapboard houses and probably registered on seismographs in neighboring counties.

"Fuck you," he said, through the window, to the man still sitting behind the wheel. It was delivered with a breathless, almost ceremonial conviction, as though the words were not an insult but a thesis statement, the opening argument of a position he intended to defend for the foreseeable future.

He hit the door again. Stepped back. His chest was heaving. His curls were wild. His eyes were incandescent.

Inside the car, Elias didn't flinch. He sat with both hands still on the wheel, watching.

Then he turned to Camille.

"I'll walk back," Elias said. She looked at him. "Might be best if you two have some time. Alone." He said this the way a doctor says 'we should monitor the situation', technically neutral, practically loaded, the subtext being 'this is going to be terrible, and I'd like to not be here for it'.

Camille nodded. It was a small nod, automatic, the nod of someone who is receiving instructions because the alternative is making decisions, and decisions require a level of cognitive function she does not currently possess.

"It'll be fine," Elias said. It wasn't a question, and it wasn't quite a statement. It occupied the narrow territory between the two, an assertion made on her behalf, because she couldn't make it herself.

"Yeah," she said. She didn't believe it. He knew she didn't believe it. The word existed solely so that the conversation could end and they could both get out of the car.

She opened her door. Got out. Closed it with the careful, quiet click.

Elias followed. He unfolded himself from the seat, stood, and stretched, rolling his shoulders, cracking his neck, recalibrating his body after the compressed chaos of a car that had been, for the last six minutes, approximately the least peaceful environment on the planet.

Rowan was standing in the driveway, six feet from the car, arms crossed, hood back up. He had positioned himself with the instinctive spatial awareness of a feral animal, close enough to the house to suggest he might eventually go inside, far enough from both adults to make clear that proximity was not the same as participation. He was staring at the cottage with an expression impossible to read and easy to guess: the look of someone being shown a life built without them.

Elias closed the driver's door. Patted the roof of the car once, a gesture of farewell that was directed at the vehicle but intended for the situation, and turned toward the driveway.

He paused beside Rowan. Not close. Just adjacent, the way you'd pause beside a bonfire, respectful of the heat, aware of the danger, not entirely uninterested in the warmth.

"Pleasure meeting you," he said.

He said it straight. Dry. With the faintest undercurrent of something that a generous listener might have called amusement and that Rowan, who was not a generous listener, identified immediately as provocation.

Rowan's hand came up, fast, practiced, the middle finger extended with the crisp, architectural precision. It was, objectively, an excellent middle finger. Committed. Well-formed. The kind of thing you'd put in a textbook if textbooks covered the subject.

"Eat shit," Rowan said. "And die."

Elias walked. Down the short driveway, past the low garden fence, toward the lane that would take him back through town to the dock. His boots crunched on gravel, then on packed earth, then on pavement. Behind him, he could hear Camille's voice, soft, careful, the tentative opening notes of a conversation that would either save or destroy the next chapter of her life. 

The front door closed behind them, and then it was just the two of them, and the house, and all the years between.

Camille's cottage smelled like linen and dried lavender and something baking, or something that had been baking, hours ago. A loaf of bread, probably. She'd have made bread. She was the kind of woman who believed the smell of a warm kitchen could soften problems, and she was not entirely wrong about this, and she was not entirely right, and the difference between those two things was standing in her hallway with his hood up and his bag over one shoulder and his eyes on the floor.

The hallway was narrow. Hooks by the door held coats, a scarf, and a set of keys on a ceramic starfish that matched the one on the car ring. There were framed photographs on the wall, Camille at her studio, smiling over a wheel. A landscape of the harbor. A group shot at what looked like a town festival, faces Rowan didn't know, a life he hadn't been part of. He didn't look at them. He looked at the floorboards. They were old, dark, worn smooth in a path that led from the front door through to the kitchen, a groove made by years of a single woman's feet walking the same route, morning after morning, alone.

"Come in," Camille said, and then caught herself, because he was already in, and the invitation was redundant, and redundancy was what happened when your mouth was trying to fill the space your heart couldn't.

She moved ahead of him into the kitchen. It was small, warm, meticulously kept. Open shelves held her own ceramics, mugs, and plates, each one handmade, each one slightly different in the way that handmade things are, which is to say: each one honest. A wooden table sat beneath the window, set for two. She'd laid out placemats. Cloth napkins. A small vase of wildflowers, purple and white, picked that morning or the morning before, already beginning to lean.

Two place settings. She'd been so sure there would be lunch.

Rowan stood at the kitchen threshold and didn't enter. He occupied the doorway the way a person occupies a border checkpoint, present, technically, but uncommitted to either territory. His hands were in the pockets of his hoodie. His face, beneath the hood, was closed, not angry, not sad, just off, like a television switched to a channel that broadcasts nothing.

Camille stood at the counter. Her hands found things to do, she straightened a towel that didn't need straightening, touched the kettle, opened a cabinet, and closed it without removing anything. 

"Are you hungry?" she asked. "I made bread. Before I left. And there's soup...I made soup. Butternut squash. I wasn't sure what you..." She stopped. Recalibrated. "I can heat something up."

Rowan said nothing.

"Or if you want coffee. Tea. I have both. The coffee's decent. Elias brings it from some place next town. It's..." She stopped again. Mentioning Elias. Probably not the move. "I have water. Obviously. Everyone has water."

The silence that followed this remark was profound. Camille pressed her lips together. She gripped the edge of the counter behind her, both hands, knuckles whitening. She was trying. She was trying so hard that the trying was visible, muscular, a woman bench-pressing the air between herself and her son and losing.

"Rowan, I know this isn't..."

"Where's my room?"

Three words. Delivered without inflection, without eye contact, without any of the social connective tissue that usually accompanies human speech. Just the question, bare and functional, stripped to its mechanical purpose: 'I need to not be in this kitchen anymore'.

Camille's mouth stayed open for a half-second, the ghost of whatever sentence she'd been building still hanging there, unfinished, before she dismantled it and swallowed the parts. "Upstairs," she said. "I'll show you."

She moved past him. He stepped aside to let her, just spatially, the minimum physical adjustment required to avoid contact. The gap between them as she passed was perhaps eight inches, and those eight inches contained approximately eight years of everything neither of them had said.

The staircase was narrow and steep. Camille went first. Rowan followed. 

The second floor was small. A short hallway with three doors: bathroom to the left, Camille's bedroom at the far end, and the guest room, his room, to the right. His door was closed. She'd closed it deliberately, he'd realize later. She'd wanted the reveal. She'd wanted the moment of opening.

She stopped in front of it. Her hand went to the knob and rested there. She didn't turn it immediately. She stood with her back to him, her fingers wrapped around the brass, and in the half-second before she opened the door, her shoulders did something, a small motion, a gathering, a bracing, the physical equivalent of a prayer offered by someone who has forgotten how to pray.

She turned the knob. She pushed the door open. She stepped aside.

Rowan walked in.

The room wasn't large. A single bed against the wall. A nightstand with a reading lamp. A window that looked out over the back garden and, beyond it, the gray suggestion of the sea. The walls were painted a pale, warm gray that felt neither cold nor forced.

His eyes moved across it. Quick, clinical, the inventory of a person who has learned to assess every new space for what it contains and what it threatens.

Then they stopped.

His books were on the shelf. Not all of them, but enough. His father's copies of Vonnegut and Heller and McCarthy, spines cracked, pages soft, the books that had been his companions through the long, unpredictable nights in Daniel's apartment. They were arranged on a small wooden shelf by the window in an order that was almost right but not quite: "Slaughterhouse-Five" was next to "Blood Meridian" instead of next to "Cat's Cradle", and someone unfamiliar with the system had shelved "Suttree" spine-out instead of spine-in, and these small errors proved that a person who didn't know him had touched these things with care, and that was worse, somehow, than if they'd been thrown in a box.

His records were there, too. The crate he'd kept under his bed at Daniel's, vinyl, warped at the corners, stuffed with albums he'd bought at thrift stores for a dollar each. Joy Division. Nick Drake. Elliott Smith. The soundtracks to every dark hour he'd endured. Somebody had placed the crate on the floor beside the dresser, upright, accessible.

His jacket was draped over the back of a chair. The green army surplus jacket he'd worn every day for two years, the one with the torn pocket and the cigarette burn on the left cuff. He'd left it in his father's closet. Someone had found it. Someone had brought it here.

"I had your things shipped," Camille said. She was standing in the doorway behind him, not crossing the threshold, granting him the space of the room even though the room was hers, the house was hers, everything here was hers except the boy standing in the middle of it. "Your dad's landlord...he let me in. I tried to get everything I thought you'd…I didn't know what...Anyway, I tried to get all of it."

Rowan stood in the center of the room. His back was to her. His bag had slipped from his shoulder to the crook of his elbow and hung there, forgotten. He was looking at the shelf. At the books. At the record crate. At the jacket draped over the chair. Something was happening in his body. His shoulders had changed, not dropped, exactly. Still, they shifted, a tectonic adjustment, the plates of his composure moving against each other in a way that produced no visible quake but that Camille, watching from the doorway, could feel in her own chest like a frequency.

She waited. She had become, over the last eight years, an expert at waiting for Rowan. Waiting for calls that didn't come. Waiting for replies to texts that were read and ignored. Waiting for holidays that were promised and canceled. Waiting was the primary medium of their relationship, the thing she was best at and worst at, simultaneously, the skill she'd never wanted and couldn't afford to lose.

She waited.
He didn't move for a long time. Ten seconds. Fifteen.
Then he turned around.

His face was, she would think about this later, alone, in her own room, in the dark, his face was open. For one unguarded instant, the mask was gone. The hostility, the sarcasm, the barbed-wire perimeter he'd built around himself with such meticulous, furious craftsmanship, all of it was absent, and what remained was just a boy. Standing in a room full of his dead father's things, in a house that belonged to the woman who'd left him, and his eyes were blue and wet and enormous, and his mouth was doing something it couldn't control, and for one fraction of one second, Camille saw her son, her actual son, the one who existed underneath the anger, the one she'd been trying to reach for eight years, the one she'd dreamed about and cried over and failed, and she thought: 'there you are'.

And that's when it happened.
He grabbed the door.

He swung it shut with the full force of his arm, a motion that began at the shoulder and ended with a sound like a gunshot, the wood meeting the frame with an impact that rattled the photographs in the hallway and sent a vibration through the floorboards that Camille felt in the soles of her feet.

The door was closed. The door was a wall. The door was everything he couldn't say and everything he needed her to hear, and it said it all in the span of a single, violent second.

Camille stood in the hallway.

The house was quiet. Below, in the kitchen, the bread sat on the counter, cooled. The soup sat in the pot, untouched. The table was set for two, but no one was sitting at it, and no one would today.

She raised one hand. She placed it flat against the closed door. Her palm against the wood. Her fingers spread. She held it there, pressed to the barrier between herself and her child, close enough to touch and separated by everything.

She didn't knock.

She stood there for a long time. Then she lowered her hand, turned, and went downstairs, and sat at the table alone, and did not cry, because she had promised herself she wouldn't, and Camille was very good at keeping promises to herself.

It was the promises to other people she'd broken.

*

The walk from Camille's cottage to the harbor was twelve minutes if you took the lane to Harborside Road and followed it down to the dock. Fourteen if you cut through the church parking lot to avoid the stretch past the Rusty Anchor, which Elias usually did, not because he disliked Lyle Fenton, he was indifferent to Lyle Fenton, but because the shortcut let him walk the bluff path for about two hundred yards, and the bluff path was the only stretch in Wrenhaven where you couldn't hear anyone else's problems.

He walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and his chin tucked and his eyes on the hard-packed dirt trail, and he tried very hard to think about Thursday's route.

Kowalski. The northern run. The Lady Maren's hull inspection. These were real things. Concrete. Scheduleable. They existed in a world of cause and effect that he understood, a world where problems had shapes and solutions had timelines, and nothing crawled under your skin and sat there at a frequency you couldn't tune out.

He thought about Kowalski for approximately ninety seconds.
Then he thought about blue eyes.

He shut it down. Immediately, reflexively, the way you shut a door on a room you've walked into by mistake. He didn't examine what he'd seen. He didn't linger. He was a man with a well-maintained system for handling unwanted thoughts, and the system was simple: identify the thought, classify it as unproductive, discard it, move on. It had worked for thirty-three years. It had gotten him through his father's death, through two failed relationships, through the slow revelation that he was built for work and loyalty and not much else. The system was efficient. The system was reliable.

The system was not, at this particular moment, working.

Something had lodged itself somewhere behind his sternum. Like a splinter. Subcutaneous. Present. The kind of thing you could almost forget about until you pressed on it, and then it was the only thing in the world.

Elias pressed on it.

The face came back. The pale skin and the black curls and the jaw that carried just enough of someone else's bones to make it interesting. The mouth, that mouth, set in a line that was trying so hard to be cruel and that trembled, just barely, at the edges, a tremor so faint you'd have to be watching very closely to catch it. And the eyes. The fucking eyes. Aimed at him through a half-open car window like something that could cause damage at a distance.

'Go the fuck away'.

He'd been told to go fuck himself by better men, harder men, men who outweighed him and outranked him and had the capacity to back it up with something other than a middle finger and a vocabulary. It shouldn't have landed. It shouldn't have registered. A nineteen-year-old kid in a hoodie, grieving and vicious and too pretty for his own good, this was not a person who should be taking up real estate in Elias Voss's head. This was a problem that belonged to Camille, and Camille's problems were things he helped with, not things he absorbed.

And yet.
Yet.

He was annoyed. That was the classification he settled on. He was annoyed. The morning had been disrupted. He'd been pulled from his work, sent on an errand he didn't volunteer for, forced to extract a hostile stranger from a sedan, and subjected to a car ride that had taken years off his life. He was annoyed, and the unease he felt was the residue of annoyance, and the residue would fade, and by tomorrow the whole thing would be a story he told Marcus over a beer, 'you should've seen this kid', and Marcus would laugh, and that would be the end of it.

He almost believed this.

The bluff path descended. The town reappeared: rooftops and chimneys and the steeple of the church poking up through the tree line like a raised finger. Elias rejoined Harborside Road near the laundromat, where Elena Marsh was, for reasons known only to God and Elena Marsh, still sweeping her front step, despite the fact that it was cleaner than most surgical environments.

He was two blocks from the dock when he saw her.

Diane Esposito was coming out of the grocery store.

She was carrying a single paper bag, the kind of small, purposeful bag that contains exactly enough items to justify a trip and not enough to suggest actual need. A bottle of wine, maybe. Some cheese.

Diane was thirty-one. She'd moved to Wrenhaven four years ago after a divorce she described as "amicable" in a tone that made the word sound like a felony. She worked remotely for a marketing firm in Portland, which meant she spent most of her days in her kitchen with a laptop and a level of restlessness that the town's limited offerings could not satisfy. She was dark-haired, olive-skinned, with a sharp face and sharper collarbones and a body she maintained with the disciplined energy of someone who has nothing to do after six p.m. and a gym membership in the next town over.

She was also, and Elias was aware of this in the unsentimental way he was aware of most things, the woman in Wrenhaven who wanted him with the least pretense about it. Linda Pruitt brought him baked goods and manufactured reasons to visit the dock. Elena Marsh swept her step. Diane Esposito simply looked at him, as if she were reading a menu and had already decided what she was ordering.

She spotted him from thirty feet. Adjusted her trajectory. The adjustment was subtle, a degree or two, a slight angling of the shoulders, but Elias saw it because Elias saw everything, a professional hazard of being a man who read water and weather and the behavior of things that moved.

"Elias." She said, the vowels slightly stretched, like the word itself was something to be savored rather than spent. "You look like you've had a morning."

"I've had several mornings. They keep happening."

"Rough ones?"

"One in particular."

She stopped in front of him. Close enough that the space between them became a choice rather than an accident. She held the grocery bag against her hip with one arm, and her free hand pushed her hair back, a gesture that was either unconscious or engineered to expose the line of her neck, and with Diane, the distinction was academic.

"Want to talk about it?" she asked.

"Not even a little."

"Good. Talking's overrated." She smiled. It was a good smile. "I was going to open this wine tonight. Alone. Which feels like a waste."

"Of the wine?"

"Of the night."

Elias looked at her. The unease in his chest, the splinter, the unnamed thing, pulsed once, dull and insistent, like a heartbeat in the wrong place. He breathed in. Salt air, cold pavement, the trace of Diane's perfume, something warm, slightly spiced.

The thing about Elias was this: he was not a complicated man when it came to this particular arena. Some men sublimated. Some men brooded. Some men went for runs, poured themselves into work, or sat with their feelings like adults, examining them with patience, maturity, and the kind of emotional intelligence therapists recommended.

Elias fucked.

It wasn't compulsive. Or reckless. It was mechanical, almost, a pressure valve, a release, the body's solution to the mind's refusal to cooperate. When the tension built, and it always built, because he lived inside a life that generated tension the way the sea generated salt, he found a way to discharge it. The way was physical, and the physical was simple, and simplicity was the only currency he'd ever trusted.

He looked at Diane. She looked back.

"Come by later," Elias said. "After eight. I'll be at the flat."

He said it the way he said everything, undecorated, without the performative softness that other men might have draped over the words to make them sound like something they weren't. It wasn't a question. It wasn't a request. It was a coordinate. A location and a time, offered with the implicit understanding that what happened there did not require further discussion.

He didn't wait for her answer. He was already moving, past her, down the sidewalk, toward the dock.

Diane stood on the sidewalk with her grocery bag on her hip, her lips slightly parted, and a flush moving up her throat that had nothing to do with the cold. She exhaled. Then she adjusted her grocery bag. She walked home. 

That morning, she walked home faster than usual.

*

The wine was a Malbec. 
She'd chosen well. 

Not that it mattered, because by the time Diane Esposito walked through the door of Elias's flat at 8:14 p.m., fourteen minutes late, deliberately, neither of them had any intention of tasting it properly.

She'd barely set the bottle on the table before he was on her.

There was no preamble. No dimmed lights, no music, no careful choreography of glances and touches escalating by degrees. Elias kissed the way he did everything else, directly, with force. His hand went to the back of her neck. His mouth found hers. And whatever Diane had rehearsed on the walk over, some opening line, some coy arrangement of herself against his kitchen counter, evaporated on contact.

She made a sound against his mouth. Not words. Something more honest than words.

He lifted her onto the table. It was a small table, wooden, unsteady, the kind of furniture that exists in bachelor apartments because it came with the lease and no one cared enough to replace it. The bottle of Malbec rocked on its base. The two glasses she'd had time to set beside it, cheap, mismatched, one with a chip on the rim, clinked against each other with each shift of weight.

Clothes stayed on. Mostly. This wasn't lovemaking. This was not the slow, reverent undressing of two people discovering each other. This was something faster, rawer, a transaction of two bodies that knew what they were here for and had no interest in pretending otherwise. Her black, fitted skirt, chosen with exactly this accessibility in mind, was pushed up around her hips, bunched and creased, the fabric straining at the seams. Her blouse was unbuttoned to the sternum, but still on, still clinging to her shoulders, one bra strap pulled down. Her head was tipped back. Her fingers were in his hair.

Elias's jeans were shoved down just far enough, mid-thigh, belt unbuckled, the denim pooling around the hard muscles of his legs. His henley was rucked up at the back, exposing the lower span of his torso, the ridge of his spine, the taut slab of his lower back tapering into his waist, the upper curve of his ass tensing and releasing with each thrust, shadowed and sculpted from the single overhead bulb he hadn't bothered to change.

The table knocked against the wall. The glasses chattered. The wine bottle performed a slow, precarious migration toward the table's edge with each rhythmic jolt, inching closer to oblivion.

Diane was vocal. She was, as Elias had learned on two previous occasions, a woman who narrated. Words came out of her in fragments, half-constructed sentences that started as observations and dissolved into sounds. 

"God, you...right there...yes...I was thinking about this all...fuck!...all afternoon, I couldn't...you have no idea what you...oh!"

Elias didn't respond. Not with words. His mouth was against her neck, and his hands were gripping her hips with a pressure that would leave marks she'd trace in the mirror tomorrow, and he was doing the thing he was good at, the focused, relentless, mechanical thing, the rhythm that his body knew how to produce without consulting his brain, which was useful, because his brain was not in the room.

His brain was somewhere else.

It had been somewhere else since she'd knocked. Since he'd opened the door and registered, with the dispassionate clarity of a security camera, that she looked good, objectively, measurably good, the kind of good that should have occupied the full bandwidth of his attention and that was, instead, competing for signal with something he couldn't shut off.

He'd kissed her to stop thinking. It had worked for approximately forty-five seconds.

Now, with his body performing its function with the reliable competence of heavy machinery, his mind drifted. A face. A voice. 'Eat shit and die'. Blue eyes behind glass.

He adjusted his grip. Changed the angle. Diane gasped, a real gasp, the contraction of a diaphragm encountering something unexpected, and her fingers tightened in his hair, and her legs pulled him closer, and for a moment he was here, fully here, in the heat and the friction and the simple, mammalian clarity of two bodies doing what bodies do.

"Elias, I... you're so...I wanted to tell you about..."

He silenced her. Not with his hand, but with a shift, a recalibration of pace and pressure that communicated, that whatever she wanted to tell him could wait, and that his mouth had better uses than conversation, and he proved this by deploying it against her collarbone with a precision that turned her sentence into a moan and her moan into something that would, under different circumstances, have constituted a noise complaint.

The table protested. The wine bottle reached the edge. Diane's voice climbed, a rising, breathless scale that suggested the evening was approaching its thesis statement, when suddenly.

The window exploded.
Not metaphorically. 
Literally. 

The glass detonated inward with a sound like a gunshot, a sharp, percussive crack followed by the bright, cascading shatter of a pane disintegrating into a hundred pieces across the floor. Cold air rushed in. The curtain billowed inward like a sail catching wind.

Elias was off her before the last shard hit the floor.

The transition was instantaneous, one second he was a man engaged in the most fundamental of human activities, and the next he was an animal responding to a breach in its territory. He pulled back. He pulled up. His jeans were buttoned and belted in a single motion that suggested this was not the first time he'd had to dress at combat speed, and then he was moving, across the flat, past the kitchen, toward the row of windows that faced the dock.

The middle pane was gone. A jagged mouth of broken glass framed the dark harbor beyond. On the floor, among the glittering debris, sat the projectile: a rock. Gray. Dense. Roughly the size of a man's fist, smoothed by the sea in the way that harbor rocks are, rounded, heavy, the kind of thing you'd find on any beach within walking distance.

The kind of thing a person would pick up if they wanted to throw something and wanted it to hurt.

Elias reached the window in three strides. He leaned through the broken frame, carefully, glass crunching under his boots, and looked down at the dock.

Dark. The harbor at night was a different country from the harbor at dawn. But he caught it.

Movement.

There, at the far end of the dock, near the junction where the concrete met the road. A figure. Running. Already fifty yards out and moving fast, the stride long and fluid and young in a way that was immediately, unmistakably identifiable. The figure cut left, toward the bluff path, and for one brief second, one frame, one snapshot, it passed through the edge of the harbormaster's light, and Elias saw it.

A black hoodie. Dark curls spilling from beneath the hood. A lean, angular silhouette moving with the coiled, reckless energy of someone who had just done something dangerous and was enjoying it.

Then the figure was gone. Swallowed by the dark, by the bluff path, by the night.

Elias stood at the broken window. The cold air moved over his face, his neck, the exposed strip of his chest where his henley was still rucked up. Behind him, Diane was saying something, sitting up on the table, pulling her skirt down, her voice carrying the specific pitch of a woman whose evening has been interrupted by an act of vandalism.

But Elias wasn't listening.

He was looking at the place where the figure had disappeared. The dark mouth of the bluff path. The last trace of movement, already memory.

The smile started before he could stop it.

It was nothing like the polite, controlled expression he wore for the women at the dock or the flat acknowledgment he gave his crew. This was private. Involuntary. A smile that came from the same uncharted place as the thing in his chest. The splinter, the hum, the low vibration that had been running beneath his skin since that morning and that now, standing in the cold with broken glass at his feet and the ghost of a black hoodie burned into his retinas, suddenly felt less like unease and more like something else entirely.

"That little shit," he murmured.

(To be continued...)

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Wrenhaven's story doesn’t end here. If you’re reading along, I’d love to hear from you.
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