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.

---

"The Splinter"

The morning was three hours old, and Elias had accomplished nothing.

This was unprecedented. Elias did not have unproductive mornings. His mornings were machines, calibrated, sequential, ruthless in their forward motion. He woke at four-thirty. He made coffee that could dissolve enamel. He reviewed tide charts, updated schedules, checked weather reports. By six, he was on the dock. By seven, he had solved three problems, created one, and delegated the rest. His mornings did not stall. His mornings did not wander. His mornings did not find him sitting at his desk at seven-fifteen with a cold mug of coffee and an expression that, had anyone been there to witness it, would have prompted serious questions about his neurological health.

No one was there to witness it. 
The office was empty. 

The dock was awake beyond the walls, but in here, in this small room with its tide charts and its tugboat calendar and its filing cabinet of unorganized sins, it was just Elias and his desk and the thing in his hand.

He was holding it the way you hold something you've picked up by accident and haven't decided to put down, thumb moving across its surface in a slow, absent rhythm. He wasn't looking at it. He was looking at the wall. Or through the wall. Or at some point in the middle distance that existed between the wall and whatever was happening inside his skull, which was a place he did not want to be and could not seem to leave.

His thumb traced the surface. Smooth. Cold. Sea-worn.

He'd picked it up that morning. That was the thing. He'd woken up badly from a sleep that had been shallow and populated by shapes he refused to examine, and on his way to the coffee pot, he'd passed the windowsill where he'd left it last night. The cardboard patch over the broken pane was holding. The tape was secure. And the rock sat where he'd placed it, gray and dense and ordinary.

He'd picked it up. Carried it downstairs. Set it on his desk.

He hadn't done this consciously. It had been automatic, pre-verbal, the kind of action that happens in the gap between sleeping and thinking, the body making a decision before the mind has clocked in. And now it was seven-fifteen, and he was sitting at his desk holding a rock that a nineteen-year-old had thrown through his window, and he was rubbing it with his thumb like a goddamn talisman, and if someone had asked him why, he would not have had an answer. He would not have had an answer. He would have had the kind of silence that answers make when they don't exist yet.

Something was wrong with him.

Not wrong in the medical sense. Not wrong in the way that produces symptoms, diagnoses, and prescriptions. Wrong in the way a compass is wrong when something magnetic has been placed too close to it, the needle still moves, still points, still appears to function, but the direction it's indicating is not north. Has not been north since yesterday morning. May not be north again for some time.

He felt, and this was the part that bothered him most, the part that turned the wrongness from a nuisance into something approaching alarm, he felt unsettled. 

Not angry. 
Not confused. 

Unsettled, as though a layer of himself that had been stable for years had shifted, and the layers above it were now rearranging without his permission.

He couldn't point to the source. Or he could, but the source didn't make sense, because the source was a face he'd seen for twelve minutes and a voice that had told him to 'eat shit and die' and a figure in a black hoodie disappearing into the dark like something out of a dream he hadn't asked for, and none of these things, individually or collectively, should have been sufficient to displace a grown man's equilibrium.

Elias had equilibrium. 
He was known for it.

It was, alongside his jawline and his ability to intimidate, one of his defining characteristics. And now it was gone, or tilted, or recalibrated toward a coordinate he couldn't read, and he was sitting in his office holding a rock.

The door opened.

Elias's hand moved faster than his thoughts. The rock went into the top desk drawer, a quick, fluid motion, wrist and fingers, the drawer opened and shut in under a second. The sound it made was louder than it should have been, or maybe that was just the acoustics of guilt, which has a way of amplifying everything.

Marcus came through the door carrying two paper cups of coffee.

"Morning," Marcus said. He set one cup on Elias's desk, a gesture so routine it had become infrastructural, and dropped into the swivel chair with full-body commitment. "Question."

"No."

"You haven't heard it yet."

"The answer is still no."

"The window upstairs." Marcus pointed at the ceiling with his coffee cup. "I noticed it on the way in. The one with the cardboard taped over it. Very stylish, by the way. Really pulls the whole façade together. Was that there yesterday?"

"Yes."

"It was not. I have eyes, Elias. Functional ones. I use them to look at things, including the building I co-own ten percent of, and yesterday that window had glass in it, and today it has cardboard in it, and I'm wondering if there's a story."

"There's no story. Some kids. Throwing rocks. It happens."

"This is Wrenhaven. The kids here don't throw rocks. The kids here smoke weed behind the church and complain about the Wi-Fi. Rock-throwing is metropolitan delinquency. We're not zoned for it."

"Well, someone threw a rock. I covered the window. I'll replace the glass this week. It's handled."

Marcus watched him. Marcus had a way of watching that was deceptively loose, while the eyes did something entirely different. The eyes were attentive. Reading.

"You seem tense," Marcus said.

"I'm not tense."

"You're doing the thing with your jaw."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you look like you're trying to crack a walnut with your face. That thing. You do it when you're tense."

Elias unclenched his jaw. He hadn't been aware he was clenching it, which was itself a data point, because Elias was generally aware of everything his body did. His body was a tool he maintained with professional diligence. He knew its sounds, its signals, its tells. The fact that it was now producing tells he wasn't authorizing was, there it was again, unsettling.

"How's Camille?" Marcus asked, shifting gears. "Have you talked to her since yesterday?"

"She texted last night. Said they got in. Said it was fine."

"Fine?"

"Her word."

"How's the kid settling in?"

Elias picked up his coffee. The new one, the one Marcus had brought. He drank from it slowly, using the act of drinking as a delay mechanism, which was a strategy he employed so frequently it had essentially become a beverage philosophy.

"I don't know," he said. "I didn't ask."

"You didn't ask."

"She said fine. I said good. That was the conversation."

"That's not a conversation. That's a transaction. A vending machine has more emotional exchange."

"Noted. Moving on."

Marcus did not move on. He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees, and looked at Elias. "Maybe you should go over there. Check in. Bring something..."

"No."

"Elias."

"I'm not going anywhere near that house for the next couple of days. Maybe longer."

The sentence came out with more force than he'd intended. Not loud, Elias didn't do loud, not in conversation, but weighted, definitive, a door being closed with both hands. Marcus registered it. His eyebrows moved, a fraction of an inch upward.

"Okay," Marcus said. Carefully. "Any particular reason?"

"The last thing they need is me standing in the kitchen making small talk while they figure out how to be in the same room."

"Since when do you make small talk?"

"Exactly. So I'd be standing in the kitchen making no talk, which is worse."

"You're usually fine there. You practically live in that kitchen."

"This is different."

"How is it different?"

Elias set his coffee down. He looked at Marcus. His face was arranged in its default configuration, the granite composure that had been his primary interface with the world since adolescence. But something underneath it was working, moving, turning over like an engine that won't catch. Marcus could see it. Marcus could always see it. That was the problem with people who'd known you since you were a kid. They had the source code.

"It's different because the kid is there," Elias said. "And the kid is...angry. He doesn't know me. He doesn't want to know me. I showed up yesterday and made it worse."

"You said he needed to get out of the car."

"He did."

"So you got him out."

"In the worst possible way."

"Is there a good way to extract an unwilling teenager from a sedan?"

"There's a better way than grabbing him."

Marcus tilted his head. The gesture was small, almost canine, a slight rotation.

"You're bothered," Marcus said.

"I'm not bothered."

"You're bothered about how it went with the kid."

"I'm not...Jesus, Marcus. I'm saying I need to stay out of it. For a few days. Give Camille room. Give the kid room. Let them sort their shit out without me in the middle."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. You're right. It makes sense. Stay away. Give them space. Very rational. Very measured." Marcus took a long sip of coffee, watching Elias over the rim with infuriating calm. "When has Elias Voss ever needed to talk himself into staying away from anything?"

The question landed like a coin dropped in a quiet church.

Elias said nothing.

Marcus stood. He picked up his coffee and moved toward the door. "I'll check on the Lady Maren," he said. "Briggs thinks the hull's fine, but Briggs also thought his marriage was fine, so."

He opened the door. Paused. Looked back.

"If you change your mind about going over there, and you will, because you always do, because you can't actually leave Camille alone with hard things, no matter how many times you tell yourself you can, bring bread. Not wine."

He left. 
The door closed. 
The office was quiet.

After the smallest beat, Elias's hand moved to the desk drawer. Rested on the handle. He didn't open it. He just held it there, his palm against the metal, fingers curled, feeling the faint, residual cold of what was inside.

He let go.

He picked up his marker. He went to the whiteboard. He worked on things. Real things. Things that didn't look at you with eyes you couldn't stop seeing.

He wrote. 
He scheduled. 
He worked.

The drawer stayed closed.
It stayed closed all morning.

He checked. 
Twice.

*

The ceiling had forty-seven cracks.

Rowan had counted them twice. The first time was the night he arrived, lying on his back in the dark, in the bed that was too clean, under sheets that smelled like a store, in a room that was trying so hard to be his that it made his teeth ache. The second time was now, Wednesday morning, two days later, confirming the count, because confirming gave him something to do that wasn't thinking, and not thinking was the only skill he'd brought to Wrenhaven that was proving useful.

Forty-seven. The longest one started near the light fixture and traveled diagonally toward the window, branching twice, like a river seen from space. Old house. Old bones. The kind of cracks that come from decades of settling, from a structure slowly accepting the shape the earth wanted it to be. 

Rowan understood this. 

He'd grown up in a building that settled too, Daniel's apartment, with its warped doorframes and its radiator that clanked like a prisoner tapping code. Buildings remembered the weight they'd carried. They wore it on their walls.

He lay still. The room was bright, too bright, because the curtains were thin and the window faced east and Wrenhaven's mornings arrived without asking, barging in with light and gulls and the percussion of the harbor, sounds that had no business being cheerful.

His books were on the shelf. He hadn't touched them. He'd looked at them, several times, in passing, the way you look at a photograph of someone who died, but he hadn't taken one down, hadn't opened a cover, hadn't let his fingers find the creased spines and the dog-eared pages that still held.

His records were in the crate. He hadn't played them. He didn't have a turntable here. Camille probably hadn't thought of that, or had thought of it and hadn't known which one to buy. The crate sat on the floor, upright, a catalog of every dark hour he'd survived set to music: Ian Curtis singing about isolation, Nick Drake singing about roads, Elliott Smith singing about everything that was wrong with being alive and making it sound, somehow, like a reason to stay.

Rowan hadn't unpacked the bag. It sat on the chair, zipped, ready. A statement of impermanence. A body language that said: 'I'm not staying. I'm waiting to leave'.

Below, the house breathed.

He knew her rhythms now. Two days was enough. Camille was a creature of pattern. She woke early, before six, and moved through the downstairs like she knew the floorboards' secrets. The third step from the bottom creaked. She'd learned to skip it. He'd heard her do it, the gap in the footstep sequence, the small silence where the creak should have been, and he'd hated her for it, for the tenderness of the effort, for the way it proved she was thinking about him even in the way she walked.

She made coffee first. Then tea. The coffee was for her. The tea was for him, and it appeared outside his door, a ceramic mug on a small ceramic saucer, both handmade, both beautiful. The first time, he'd left it until it went cold, then carried it to the bathroom sink and poured it down the drain. The second time, he'd left it until it went cold and hadn't poured it out. It sat on the saucer outside his door for three hours before she came upstairs and took it away without a word.

She left food. Plates appeared on the narrow table in the upstairs hallway, not outside his door anymore, not after the first night, when she'd knocked gently, and he hadn't answered, and she'd stood there long enough for him to hear her breathing and had then gone away. The hallway table was neutral ground. Switzerland. A diplomatic surface where sustenance could be deposited without confrontation. Pasta in foil. A sandwich cut diagonally. Sliced fruit.

He ate it. 
All of it. 

He ate it in his room, sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, and he carried the empty plates downstairs at two a.m. when the house was dark and silent, and he could move through it without encountering her. He washed the plates. He dried them. He put them back in the cabinet. He did this carefully, quietly, making sure each plate was returned to its exact position.

She spoke to him through the door. Not conversations. More like transmissions. Brief, directional, stripped of expectation.

There's pasta downstairs.

I'm going to the studio if you need anything.

Goodnight.

She never knocked anymore. She'd learned. He'd taught her, and the lesson had been silence, and she'd absorbed it with the obedient grief of a woman who has been failing a test for eight years and has stopped asking for the rubric.

They orbited each other. 
That was the only word for it.
Orbit.

On that Wednesday afternoon, Rowan left.

Not permanently. 

Not with the bag, though he thought about it, standing in his room, looking at the zipper, calculating distances. Where would he go? He had no money that mattered. No car. No friends in any direction. The bus station was in the next town, fourteen miles east, and he didn't know anyone in any of the places a bus might take him.

So he left temporarily. 

He put on the black hoodie, went downstairs, and walked out the front door without announcing himself, because announcing himself would have required speaking to Camille, and speaking to Camille was something he was not prepared to do today or tomorrow, or, ideally, ever.

The door closed behind him.

He walked. He walked the way he did everything, with a tension in his stride that read as purpose but was actually its opposite, the kinetic restlessness of a body that doesn't know where it's going and is moving fast to disguise the fact. His hands were in his pockets. His hood was up. His eyes, the eyes that had, in another context, made a man twice his age forget what he'd come to say, were narrow and watchful behind the dark curtain of his hair.

The town was small enough to catalog in a single pass. He noted the grocery store, the laundromat that also sold bait, the hardware store with its hand-lettered sign, the bar with the stupid name. The Drowning Barrel. Who named a bar that? Someone who thought death by water was charming, probably.

People looked at him. This was not new. People had always looked at Rowan, on the street, on the bus, in the misery of his high school's hallways. The look was a specific thing, distinct from the way people looked at each other in the normal course of existence. It was the double-take. The held gaze. The slight, involuntary adjustment of attention.

Rowan knew what he looked like. He'd been told enough times, in enough ways, by enough people, girls at school, women at stores, Daniel's drinking buddies with their loose mouths and their beer-brave compliments that always felt like they had a second meaning. 'You're a good-looking kid'. Said across a kitchen table by a man with glassy eyes. He'd learned to fold it away. His face was a fact about him, like his height or his blood type. Unchangeable, unchosen, and useful only insofar as it gave people a reason to look and, in looking, reveal things about themselves they didn't intend to show.

But in Wrenhaven, the looking had a different texture. Smaller town, tighter frame. Faces he didn't know studied him from doorways, car windows, and the grocery store check-out line. An older woman watched him walk past from behind a window. A man on a ladder outside the hardware store paused mid-rung and tracked him down the block. Two teenagers on a bench stopped talking and just stared.

Rowan stared back. Every time. He met their eyes and held them with a flat, animal directness that said: 'Look somewhere else'. Most of them did. A few didn't. The ones who didn't, he filed away, because Rowan had been filing people away his whole life, sorting them into categories based on what their attention meant and what it might cost him.

He didn't fit here. 

The town was a watercolor, and he was a nail. 

Everything about him registered against this soft, salt-washed backdrop. He knew it. He could feel it in the way the air parted around him, in the way conversations dipped as he passed, in the way even the dogs on their porches seemed to pause and reassess.

Good. Not fitting was familiar. Not fitting was the one environment in which Rowan had always been comfortable, because it came with no expectations, and expectations were things other people held against you when you failed to meet them.

He walked until the town ran out, and the bluff path started. A narrow dirt trail splitting off through a break in the low stone wall and climbing toward the cliff's edge. It wasn't marked. There was no sign, no arrow, no indication that this was anything other than a place where the earth rose, and the town stopped, and the sky took over.

Rowan found it the way he found most things: by following the direction with the fewest people.

The trail climbed. The wind strengthened with each step, pulling at his hoodie, pressing the fabric against his body, finding the gaps at his wrists and his collar and filling them with cold, clean air that tasted nothing like the apartment, nothing like the city, nothing like anywhere he'd ever been. Below, to his left, Wrenhaven shrank.

He reached the top, and the bluff ended in a sheer drop. 

Not a gentle slope.
A drop.

Sudden and absolute, where the land stopped, and the air began. Fifty feet below, the sea moved against the rocks with a sound that was less a crash and more a conversation, the patient, repetitive argument between water and stone that water always won.

Rowan sat down.

He dropped, knees folding, body collapsing onto the cold grass at the cliff's edge. His legs hung over the side. His hands pressed into the earth behind him, fingers in the grass, feeling the cold ground through the thin fabric of his hoodie sleeves.

Every shade of gray that existed, pewter, ash, slate, smoke, the gray of old metal, and the gray of new rain and the gray that lives between colors when colors have given up, was represented in the view, and Rowan sat inside it like a body sitting inside an X-ray, everything exposed, everything stripped to its structure.

He didn't cry. 

He hadn't cried since the night they'd called him, three-fifteen in the morning, his phone buzzing on the nightstand, the caller ID reading a number he didn't know, and the voice on the other end saying his name with the careful, rehearsed gentleness that people use when they're about to tell you something that will divide your life into 'before' and 'after'.

He hadn't cried then, and he hadn't cried since, and he wasn't going to cry now, on a cliff, in a town he didn't choose, because crying was a release and he didn't want release. Release implied that the thing inside him had somewhere to go, that there was an outside to match the inside, that the grief was a liquid that could be poured out and set down. It wasn't. It was structural. It was the building. It was the walls and the floor and the cracked ceiling he stared at every night, and you can't pour out a building. You just live in it.

His father was dead.

He let the thought arrive. He didn't chase it. He didn't frame it in anger or dress it in blame. He just let it stand there, on the bluff, in the wind, the way you'd let a person stand beside you if you were too tired to tell them to leave.

His father was dead. 

Rowan's jaw tightened. He stayed for a long time. He didn't know how long. Time on the bluff didn't behave the way it did in rooms, it stretched, it flattened, it lost its edges. 

Eventually, the cold won. It found the places the hoodie couldn't reach, the base of his spine, the backs of his hands, the strip of skin at his ankles where his jeans rode up. He stood. He brushed the grass from his palms. He pulled his hood up, resetting the perimeter, sealing whatever had opened back behind the fabric and the hair and the face that told the world to keep its distance.

He walked down and back to the cottage. He let himself in. He took the stairs two at a time. He skipped the third step. The one that creaked.

Rowan didn't know why he did that.

He closed his door. Not a slam this time. Just a firm click, a boundary being maintained rather than a weapon being deployed. He sat on the floor. He pulled his knees up. He leaned his back against the bed and stared at the shelf where his father's books waited like patient, silent friends who would never ask him how he was doing and would never, ever leave.

Outside, the light was fading. The sea was turning from gray to a darker shade. Somewhere below, Camille was making dinner he would eat at two a.m., alone, standing at the counter, and he would wash the plate and put it back, and she would know, and he would know she knew, and neither of them would say a word.

Forty-seven cracks in the ceiling.

He counted them again.

*

Thursday came and went. 
Friday followed it. 
Saturday showed up with rain.

Elias worked the way a machine does when the governor has been removed: same output, same function, same relentless forward motion, but faster than necessary and with a low, grinding heat.

He was on the dock by five. Earlier than usual. Earlier than anyone except Old Pete, who had achieved a state of temporal permanence that made questions about his schedule irrelevant, Pete was simply there, the way the pylons were there, a fixed feature of the harbor's landscape.

Elias checked lines. He inspected holds. He audited the fuel log and found a discrepancy of eleven gallons, which turned out to be a rounding error, and he treated it for approximately forty-five minutes as though it were a federal crime. He recalibrated the ice house thermostat. He replaced a rusted cleat. He realigned the dock's fire extinguisher, which had been mounted at a slight angle since 2019 and had bothered no one, including Elias, until this week, when it suddenly became intolerable.

His phone buzzed. 

It had been buzzing for three days, the same name, the same cadence, the small green notifications that appeared on his lock screen and sat there like telegrams from a front he'd chosen not to visit.

Camille: Morning. Quiet night. He came down for coffee.

Camille: He ate dinner at the table last night. Didn't say anything, but he sat there for twenty minutes. Progress?

Camille: Found the plates washed this morning. He's been doing that. Eating at 2am and cleaning up. I don't know what to do with that.

Camille: Studio today. Left him lunch. Miss you.

The last two words sat on the screen, weighed down by a disproportion that was out of proportion to their size. Two syllables, eight letters, a phrase so common it should have been inert, and yet it landed in Elias's chest with the dull specificity of a dart.

He responded the way he had all week. Monosyllables. The linguistic equivalent of acknowledging someone's existence without engaging with it.

Good.

That's something.

Give it time.

At the dock.

He didn't say 'miss you too'. The real answer was murkier. The real answer lived in the same uncharted territory as the splinter, the thing he still couldn't name and had stopped trying to.

He was staying away from Camille's house because Rowan was in it. That was the fact. Clean, simple, damning. He was staying away because the idea of walking through that door and seeing that face again produced a sensation in his body that he could not classify as anything safe, and Elias Voss did not walk toward things he couldn't classify.

So he worked. And that Saturday morning, Elias decided to fix the window.

He drove to the hardware store in the next town. He drove twenty minutes east, bought a pane of cut glass, and drove back. He carried the glass upstairs. Set it against the wall. Stood in the flat and looked at the window.

The cardboard was still holding. Five days now. The tape had yellowed slightly at the edges, but the seal was intact, and the patch was doing exactly what it had been designed to do: keep the weather out and the evidence in. Because that's what it was, evidence, not of vandalism. Not of a boy's rage, aimed poorly and landing precisely. Evidence of a moment. A disruption. A night when a rock had come through the glass and everything on the other side of it had been interrupted by something that felt, in retrospect, less like destruction and more like announcement.

Elias removed the cardboard.

He did it methodically. Peeled the tape. Folded the cardboard flat. Set it aside. Then the glass, the broken pane, its edges jagged, still holding a few teeth of glass in the frame like a jaw that had taken a hit. He removed the old putty with a chisel. Pulled the remaining shards. Cleaned the frame with a rag, using slow strokes to work the grime from the wood grain, exposing the bare, pale surface underneath.

He worked in silence. He didn't play music. He didn't rush. He let the work take the time it needed, because the work was the only part of this that made sense, and he wanted to stay inside the making sense for as long as he could.

New putty. New glass. He set the pane into the frame, pressed it flush, and ran the putty along the edges with his thumb, smooth, even strokes, sealing the glass into the wood with a precision that was, objectively, excessive for a window in a flat above a dock office, and that was, subjectively, the only kind of precision he was capable of producing right now.

He stepped back.

The window was whole. Clean. Four panes of glass, uniform. 

No cardboard. 
No tape. 
No evidence. 

This should have felt like closure. A problem identified, a solution applied, a resolution achieved. That was how things worked in Elias's world. Engines broke: you fixed them. Lines frayed: you replaced them. Windows shattered: you installed new glass. The system was linear. The system worked.

He stood in his flat, looked at the new window, and felt nothing that resembled closure.

The fact of the matter was, the absence of the cardboard felt, absurdly and irrationally, and with a certainty that made him want to put his fist through the new glass just to have the patch back, like a loss.

*

Rowan took Harborside only when necessary. Today was necessary.

Camille had asked him for a lightbulb. She'd done it the way she did everything now: through the door, voice calibrated to the precise decibel level of 'I am making a request, not a demand'. 

The hallway light had blown. She needed a sixty-watt. Dimitriou Brothers Hardware, three blocks down Harborside. She'd given him money, left on the hallway table, folded inside a note that said 'thank you'.

He'd taken the money. He didn't know why. Some mornings the hostility was a blade, and some mornings it was a weight, and today it was the weight kind. You couldn't slam a door with a weight. You could only carry it, and carrying it out of the house and down the street and into a hardware store felt marginally less suffocating than carrying it in the room with the forty-seven cracks.

So he went.

The Dimitriou brothers, George and Nikos, had the decency to treat him like a customer. George found the bulb, rang it up, and said, "Have a good one". Nikos didn't look up from the shelf he was reorganizing. This was, by Wrenhaven standards, a flawless social interaction.

Rowan stepped out of the hardware store. Small paper bag in hand. Hood up. Eyes down.

He looked up.

He shouldn't have known the schedule. There was no reason to know it, rational, defensible, explicable reason for a nineteen-year-old who had been in this town for six days to have internalized the operational rhythms of a fishing dock he had no connection to and no interest in.

And yet.

He knew that the boats left before dawn and returned in stages through the afternoon. He knew that the dock was busiest between six and eight in the morning and again between three and five. He knew that the ice house opened at five-thirty and closed at four. He knew that the crew broke for lunch around noon, scattering to the Drowning Barrel or the benches by the harbormaster's office, and that the dock went quiet for roughly forty minutes before resuming.

He knew that at certain times of day, a particular figure walked the dock with a particular stride, shoulders slightly forward, chin down, moving between the office and the fuel shed and back again. He knew the canvas jacket. He knew the dark hair. He knew the silhouette the way you know a landmark.

He looked up, and Elias Voss was forty feet away and closing.

He was carrying a stack of mail he hadn't opened and a mood he hadn't identified. The mail was mostly invoices. The mood was mostly the same thing it had been for six days, which was a low, persistent something that sat behind his ribs like a second heartbeat and that he had, through sheer force of will, reclassified from 'unnamed feeling' to 'probable indigestion'.

He saw Rowan from forty feet.

The recognition was instantaneous, faster than thought, faster than sight. His stride didn't change. He didn't speed up. He didn't slow down. He didn't cross the street or find a sudden reason to inspect a nearby building or perform any of the evasive maneuvers that a man with a functioning survival instinct might have deployed upon encountering the person who had been living, rent-free and without permission, in the crawl space of his thoughts for nearly a week.

He walked. 
Rowan walked. 
The forty feet became thirty. 
Then twenty. 
Then ten.

They converged.

Rowan stopped. 

Not voluntarily, his body simply ceased forward motion at a distance of approximately four feet, which was close enough to constitute an encounter and far enough to constitute a boundary. The paper bag from the hardware store hung at his side. His face, beneath the hood, was arranged in its default expression: controlled, guarded, the blank façade of a building with every window shuttered.

Elias stopped. 

He stopped because Rowan had stopped, and stopping was an acknowledgment and an acknowledgment was a concession, and Elias registered, with a flare of irritation, that Rowan had stopped first and had therefore set the terms, and that he, a thirty-three-year-old man, a business owner, a person of substance and authority, had followed the lead of a brat standing outside a hardware store holding a lightbulb.

They looked at each other.

Rowan's eyes, Christ, those eyes, met Elias's. They were different in daylight. Bluer, if that was possible. More saturated. The violet tinge he'd seen through the car window was there, but subtler, visible only at the edges of the iris where the blue darkened toward something unnameable. The lashes were dark. The brows were slightly drawn. The overall effect was of being looked at by something that could see in the dark.

"Voss," Rowan said.

One word. His surname. Delivered without warmth, without hostility, without anything except a flat, clinical precision.

"Rowan," Elias said. Same tone. Same temperature.

A beat.

"Lightbulb?" Elias said, glancing at the bag.

"What?"

"You're coming out of a hardware store. Unless you've moved on from windows."

It landed. Precisely. The callback was dry, oblique, delivered without a smile but with the faintest shift in his voice, a fractional lift that suggested amusement without committing to it, the verbal equivalent of a card being shown and immediately pocketed.

Rowan's jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. But the narrowing wasn't pure hostility, there was something else in it, something quicker, more alive.

"Lightbulb," Rowan confirmed. "For the hallway. Don't worry, I didn't buy any rocks. I know where to find those for free."

The response was immediate. No hesitation, no searching for words. Just the clean, sharp return of serve, matching Elias's tone and rhythm, the hostility still there but now shaped, honed, deployed with a precision that turned it into something closer to play. A dark, barbed, dangerous kind of play, but play nonetheless.

Something moved in Elias's chest. The splinter. That second heartbeat he'd been calling indigestion, now standing four feet from this boy, making a sound so loud he was amazed the whole street couldn't hear it.

"Free's good," Elias said. "My window cost me forty bucks."

"Should've left the cardboard. More character."

"You're an expert on character now?"

"I'm an expert on cardboard. You used the wrong tape. Duct tape yellows. Gaffer tape holds better and peels clean."

Elias stared at him. The boy stared back. Neither of them blinked. The air between them was doing something, thickening, heating, acquiring a charge that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the way Rowan's mouth had just moved around the word 'tape' and the way Elias's eyes had just tracked that movement and the way both of these things had happened in the span of a quarter-second and had registered, in both their bodies, at a depth that neither was equipped to discuss.

"I'll keep that in mind," Elias said. "For the next time someone throws a rock through my window."

"Could happen anytime. Rough neighborhood."

"Wrenhaven has a neighborhood?"

"Singular. The whole town is one neighborhood. That's the tragedy."

Elias felt the corner of his mouth pull. He killed it. Quickly, the way you'd extinguish a match before it reached your fingers. But it had been there, the beginning of a smile, the muscular prelude, and Rowan had seen it. He could tell Rowan had seen it because the boy's expression shifted, a micro-adjustment, the faintest loosening of the locked jaw, the briefest widening of the pupils, a change so small it would've been invisible to anyone who wasn't standing four feet away and looking directly at his face, which Elias was, and had been, for longer than was appropriate, and he knew this, and he didn't stop.

"Elias! Elias, hi!"

The voice came from the left. Bright, eager. Linda Pruitt was crossing the road at a pace that suggested she'd spotted him from a considerable distance and had been accelerating ever since. She was wearing a red coat and carrying a canvas bag.

"I'm so glad I ran into you...I was going to come down to the dock... Margaret's anniversary is next week, and I wanted to ask about that commission...Camille mentioned she might do something custom..."

Elias turned to her. The turn was automatic, reflexive. It took one second. Less. The pivot, the eye contact, the registration of Linda's face, Linda's question, and Linda's presence.

He turned back.

The sidewalk was empty.

The space where Rowan had been, four feet away, paper bag in hand, blue eyes in daylight, was occupied by nothing. Just the faint, lingering impression of a person recently departed, like the afterimage of a bright light on a closed eyelid.

Gone. Completely, silently, immediately gone.

"...so I thought maybe a set of bowls, you know, in that blue she does? The one that matches the..." Linda was still talking. She hadn't registered Rowan. She hadn't registered his absence. Operating in a universe where Elias Voss had been standing alone on a sidewalk, and she had approached him, and this universe was, from her perspective, complete and uninterrupted.

"Sure," Elias said. The word came from somewhere outside him. "Yeah. I'll ask her."

"Oh, wonderful! And maybe you could..."

"I have to go, Linda."

"Oh. Of course. Sure. I'll just..."

He was already walking. Not toward the dock. Not toward the office. Not toward any of the places a man with work to do would walk. Just away.

He stopped at the corner. 
He stood there.

Four feet. The boy had been four feet away. Close enough to touch. Close enough that Elias could see the exact point where the blue of his irises darkened at the edge, and the individual curls that fell across his forehead, and the faint freckles on the bridge of his nose that he'd noticed through the car window and had been thinking about, 'not' thinking about, he'd been 'not' thinking about them, for six days.

And then he was gone. And the gone felt like someone had reached into Elias's chest and removed something that had been installed without his knowledge and that he'd only become aware of in the moment of its absence.

"Fuck," he said. Quietly.

It wasn't a splinter anymore. He knew that now. Splinters were small. Splinters could be removed. This was something else, deeper, wider, growing in a direction he couldn't see and couldn't stop and couldn't name.

Elias went back to work.

But the work, for the first time in his life, didn't hold.

*

(Later That Day)

Sleep was a country that had revoked his visa.

Rowan lay in the dark, stared at the ceiling, and listened to the house settle around him.

Below, Camille had gone to bed an hour ago. He knew because the sequence was always the same: the kitchen faucet running, the hallway light switching off, the third step creaking, and then her bedroom door closing, gently, always gently.

Rowan was calcifying. Every day in this house added another layer to the thing inside him, not anger anymore, or not only anger, but something denser, less aerodynamic. 

She was trying too hard. So hard that the trying had become a sound. A frequency. A constant, low-grade noise that filled the cottage like tinnitus and that Rowan could not escape because the trying was everywhere. In the food and the flowers and the clean towels and the goddamn lightbulb in the goddamn hallway that he had bought and she had thanked him for by leaving a note on the table that said 'It looks great. Thank you, Rowan', with a small hand-drawn star beside his name, as though his name were something to celebrate, as though the act of screwing in a lightbulb were a milestone in a relationship that had no milestones, only wreckage.

He couldn't breathe.

Not literally. His lungs functioned. His diaphragm contracted. Oxygen entered, and carbon dioxide departed. But the other kind of breathing, the kind that happens when the air in a room has enough space in it for you to exist, had stopped sometime around day three, and now every inhale felt borrowed and every exhale felt like a concession, and the ceiling had forty-seven cracks and he'd counted them nine times tonight and if he counted them a tenth time he was going to put his fist through the wall.

He got up.

He dressed in the dark, jeans, hoodie, boots. He took the stairs in the dark. He skipped the third step. He didn't think about why. The front door opened and closed.

A ten-minute walk and Rowan had stumbled into the Rusty Anchor.

The bar announced itself before you saw it. The jukebox, the one that skipped on every fourth song, was audible from half a block away, leaking country music with indiscriminate generosity. The sound was tinny, distorted, the treble turned up past the point of taste, and the bass turned down past the point of existence, and the overall effect was of a bar that had given up on ambiance sometime during the Reagan administration and had been coasting on inertia ever since.

Rowan stood across the street and looked at it.

The Drowning Barrel was the other option, the good bar, the one where the bartender knew everyone and the stools were worn smooth, and the clientele consisted of people who would recognize Camille's son and report the sighting with the speed and efficiency of a small-town surveillance network. So, obviously, as far as Rowan was concerned, the Drowning Barrel was warm, clean, and absolutely out of the question.

The Rusty Anchor was none of those things. Its door was dented. Its windows were tinted to a degree that suggested either privacy or shame. The sign above the entrance was missing a letter, 'RUST ANCHOR'.

Rowan crossed the street.

Inside, low light, sticky floors, the smell of spilled beer, and the accumulated musk of decades of men drinking in a room that had absorbed their sweat and their smoke and their small, persistent failures and was now exhaling it all back in a single, ambient funk. 

The bar itself was a long, scarred stretch of wood that had been polyurethaned at some point in the distant past and had since developed the surface texture of a cutting board used exclusively for regret. Behind it stood Lyle Fenton, the owner, mustache, bad posture. He glanced at Rowan as the door closed. His eyes performed a quick, economical scan of age, threat level, and spending potential, and arrived at a conclusion that was evidently acceptable, because he went back to wiping the glass with a rag that was making it dirtier.

Rowan sat at the bar. Far end. Corner stool. Back to the wall. These choices were not random.

"Beer," he said.

Lyle looked at him. The look lasted one second longer than a look that doesn't involve doubt. Then Lyle reached under the bar, pulled a bottle from a case that was not refrigerated and had possibly never been refrigerated, popped the cap, and set it on the wood.

"Four fifty," he said.

Rowan put a five on the bar. Lyle took it. No change was offered. None was expected. This was the Rusty Anchor. You didn't come here for the service. You came here because the other place wouldn't let you in.

Rowan drank.

The beer was warm. Not unpleasantly, warm the way things are warm when no one cares enough to cool them, the default temperature of neglect. He drank it the way his father drank: steadily, without pause, the glass tipped at an angle that maximized intake while minimizing taste. He was aware of this. He was aware that the awareness should have stopped him, should have triggered some alarm in the part of his brain that had spent eighteen years cataloging the precise sounds, movements, and stages of a man drinking himself into incoherence.

But Rowan drank anyway.

The irony was not lost on him. The irony was, in fact, so un-lost that it sat beside him at the bar like a second person, a ghost with his father's jaw and his father's hands and his father's particular way of holding a glass, at the base, not the middle, thumb along the bottom edge, as though the glass might try to escape and needed to be restrained.

He closed his eyes. Opened them. Drank.

Then, eventually, they came in. Around eleven.

Three of them. Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. The age where men in small towns have finished becoming whatever they're going to become and have begun the long, slow process of resenting it. They entered, loud and loose-limbed, occupying space the way men do when they believe it's theirs. One of them slapped the bar. Another called Lyle by name. The third, the biggest, the one with the shaved head and the neck that connected directly to his shoulders without the usual intermediary step of a jaw, dropped onto a stool three seats from Rowan and ordered a pitcher.

Rowan didn't look up. He was on his second beer. The warmth had moved from the bottle to his throat to the space behind his eyes, where it sat, not enough to alter perception, just enough to soften the edges of the room and the night and the specific, grinding misery of being Rowan in a town that smelled like someone else's life.

He felt them notice him.

It happened in stages. The way a conversation changes pitch when a new variable enters the equation, a slight drop in volume, a shift in the angle of attention, the subtle recalibration of a group's energy when it encounters something it hasn't categorized yet. One of them, the shortest, the one with the baseball cap, looked at Rowan first. Then the second, a lanky redhead with bad skin and a flannel shirt that was trying very hard. Then the big one, the neckless one, who turned on his stool with a slow rotation and looked at Rowan with an expression that was performing assessment but was actually performing something else.

Rowan knew the look. He'd seen it before, on playgrounds, in hallways, in Daniel's kitchen when the wrong friend came over, and the bottles were open and the night was long. It was the look men give beautiful things when beauty makes them feel something they can't identify and don't want to own. Not desire, or not exactly desire, not in any form they'd recognize or admit. Something more primitive. The need to touch a thing that intimidates you, and when touching isn't possible, the need to break it, because breaking restores the hierarchy that beauty disrupts.

The one in the baseball cap said something to the others. Low, not meant to carry, but carrying anyway.

Rowan heard the word 'pretty'.

He set his beer down. "Something you want to say?" he asked, without turning.

The bar went quiet.

Baseball cap grinned. "Just saying. Don't see a lot of new faces in here." He was talking past his friends, angling his voice toward Rowan. "Especially not...that kind of face."

"What kind of face would that be?"

"You know what kind."

Rowan turned. Slowly. On the stool, one leg still hooked around the rail, his body rotating to face the three men. "I don't," he said. "Why don't you tell me?" His voice was level. His eyes were steady. 

The big one, the neckless one, leaned forward. "Easy, kid. Tyler's just being friendly."

"Tyler's being something. Friendly, isn't it."

Tyler's grin didn't falter. If anything, it widened. "Touchy," he said. "Real touchy. Must be a city thing."

"Must be."

"You're Camille's kid, right? The one who showed up last week? Heard you came in with Voss." The name landed differently, with a weight that suggested history, fear, or both. "Heard he had to carry you out of a car like a toddler."

"Heard a lot for a guy who looks like he peaked in middle school," Rowan said.

The grin died.

It happened fast after that.

Tyler came off his stool. He closed the distance, three stools, five feet, and shoved Rowan in the chest with both palms, the kind of shove that men give when they want the fight but want the other person to start it, the plausible-deniability shove, the 'he swung first' shove.

Rowan didn't swing first. Rowan didn't swing at all. What Rowan did was more instinctive and less strategic. He grabbed Tyler's wrist on the pushback, twisted it inward, and used Tyler's own momentum to pull him off-balance and into the bar. Tyler's chin hit the wood. The sound was satisfying and brief.

Then the other two came.

The redhead grabbed Rowan's hoodie from behind, a fistful of fabric at the collar, yanking him backward off the stool. Rowan went down. His back hit the floor. The air left his lungs in a single, percussive burst. The ceiling spun above him for half a second before the neckless one's boot entered his field of vision, aimed at his ribs.

He rolled. The boot grazed his hip, pain, bright and clarifying. He was on his feet before the second kick came. He didn't know how. His body operated on a separate network from his brain during moments like these, the survival firmware, the code written in childhood.

He hit the redhead. Not well. He hit him with his fist, closed, the punch landing somewhere between the redhead's mouth and his nose, a split-knuckle impact that hurt Rowan's hand more than it hurt the redhead's face, but that produced a sound, a wet, meaty crack, that was enormously satisfying and entirely worth the fracture it might have caused.

The redhead staggered. Tyler was up from the bar, bleeding from a split in his chin, his face rearranged by rage into something simpler and more honest than the grin had been. He swung. The punch caught Rowan on the left cheekbone, a detonation of light and heat behind his eye, his skull ringing like a bell struck too hard.

Rowan went sideways. But he came back. He always came back. That was the thing about Rowan. He didn't fight well, he didn't fight smart, and he didn't deploy any of the tactical intelligence that a person with self-preservation instincts might use. He fought with fury. Pure, distilled, eighteen-years-in-the-making fury, the kind that doesn't care about winning because winning was never the point. The point was contact. The point was to turn the thing inside him, the grief, the rage, the bottomless, howling loneliness of being a boy whose father chose a bottle and whose mother chose a town, into something external, something with a target, something that could be hit.

He hit Tyler again. In the stomach this time. Tyler doubled. Rowan's knee came up, not aimed, just up, the body doing what the body does when it's running on adrenaline and damage, and connected with Tyler's lowered face.

Then the big one. The neckless one. He hadn't rushed in with the others. He'd hung back, the predator's patience, and now he moved, and when he moved, Rowan understood immediately that this was a different weight class. Arms like dock cables. Hands like engine parts. He grabbed Rowan by the front of the hoodie, lifted, and threw him.

Rowan hit the wall. The impact was total, shoulders, skull, the back of his ribcage compressing against plaster. The air left him. The room went white. Then gray. Then back to the stained ceiling and the bad light and the faces of three men standing over him, breathing hard, bleeding in various places.

He looked up at them. Through the blood, through the hair in his face, through the one eye that was already beginning to close. He looked up at them with those blue eyes, and he smiled.

It was a terrible smile. A beautiful, terrible, unhinged smile. The smile of a person who has been beaten and knows it and doesn't care, because the beating was never the thing he was afraid of. The thing he was afraid of was the quiet.

The beating was easy. 
The beating made sense. 
Pain was a language he was fluent in.

"That all you got?" he said. His voice was thick, filtered through blood and a lip that was already swelling. "Thought this town was supposed to be rough."

Tyler stepped forward. His fist cocked.

Meanwhile, nearby, Eddie Morrow was coming down the dock at a full sprint, boots slapping concrete, his arms moving in a motion that was technically running but more accurately resembled a man trying to swim through air.

Elias was locking the office. He heard Eddie before he saw him.

"Boss!" Eddie arrived like a package thrown from a moving vehicle, skidding, graceless, catching himself on the office doorframe with one hand. His face was red. His eyes were wide. "The Anchor. There's a...it's Rowan. He's at the Anchor, and there's...Tyler Beck and his guys, they..."

Elias was already moving.

He didn't hear the rest. He didn't need the rest. His body had departed the conversation at 'Rowan' and was now operating on a system that had nothing to do with the rational. This was something underneath. The wiring that predates thought, the circuit that connects threat to motion without consulting the parts of the brain responsible for questions.

He ran.

Up the dock and onto Harborside Road and up the hill toward the Rusty Anchor. And the only thought in his head, the single, solitary, screaming thought, was a face.

Pale skin. Black curls. Blue eyes.

Bleeding.

He heard the Rusty Anchor before he reached it. Not the jukebox but the sound underneath: a crash, glass on wood, the percussive thud of bodies meeting surfaces, and a voice, Lyle Fenton's voice, nasal and ineffectual and pitched.

"...fucking ENOUGH, I said ENOUGH, I'm calling the..."

Elias pushed through the door.

The scene assembled itself in the time it takes a camera to flash. Two of them were down. Tyler Beck was on one knee by the bar, hand pressed to his face, blood running between his fingers from what looked like a nose that had recently met a surface it disagreed with. The redhead was leaning against the wall, holding his ribs, his participation in the event reduced to the role of an audience member with injuries.

The big one was still standing. The neckless one. Kyle Tatch. Elias recognized him immediately. He was circling Rowan.

Rowan was on his feet. This fact alone was remarkable, because every visible metric suggested he should not have been. His lip was split, a thin, steady line of red down his chin. A cut above his left eyebrow had opened and was bleeding into his eye, and he was blinking against it, the lashes on that side matted and wet. His left cheekbone was already purpling, the early, angry stage of a bruise that would be spectacular by morning. His right hand was swollen across the knuckles to a degree that indicated either a fracture or the enthusiastic precursor to one.

He was still swinging.

And Rowan's face, behind the blood and the swelling, did something that hit Elias harder than anything in the room. It didn't stop. The face didn't stop. The eyes, one swelling shut, the other wild and wet and blazing with a blue that the blood made bluer, didn't show fear. Didn't show pain. Didn't show any of the things a face is supposed to show when a man twice your weight has your fist in his hand and is deciding what to do with it.

The face showed hunger.

Elias crossed the room in four strides.

"Let him go."

The neckless guy turned his head. The recognition was immediate. The rapid, involuntary recalculation that happens in a man's body when the variables of a situation change faster than the situation can absorb. Kyle Thatch was big. Elias Voss was Elias Voss. These were different problem categories, and Kyle's nervous system knew it before his brain did.

He let go of Rowan's fist.

Rowan, released, unmoored, still burning, didn't stop. His body, unaware that the situation had changed, launched forward, the free hand swinging at Kyle's jaw in a wide, graceless arc that had more desperation in it than damage.

Elias caught him.

He stepped between them, and his arms went around Rowan from behind. Both arms. Wrapped across the boy's chest, pulling him back, pulling him in, containing the thrashing, burning, swearing wreckage of him against the broad, solid surface of Elias's own body.

The contact was total. Rowan's back against Elias's chest. Elias's arms locked across Rowan's torso, forearms crossed, hands gripping his own wrists to hold the lock. He could feel everything, the ribcage heaving, the heart hammering, the vibration of each breath and each curse passing through Rowan's body and into his own like a current. The boy was shaking. Not from cold, not from fear. From the force of whatever was inside him, the thing that had no name and no outlet and that was now trapped between the walls of Elias's arms, pounding against them like something caged.

"Let me GO...fucking LET ME..."

"Stop."

"I'll kill him... I'll fucking KILL..."

"Stop. Rowan."

He said the name. 

Rowan fought him. Of course he did. He twisted, he bucked, he drove his elbow backward, and the elbow connected, not with Elias's face but with his shoulder. Rowan was strong for his size, but his size and strength were not Elias's, and the differential was not a contest. It was a fact.

Kyle Thatch was still there. Still close. His face was doing the math. Elias, Rowan, the situation, the witnesses, the blood on the floor that was partially his doing, and that would, in the clear light of morning, constitute evidence of something that Wrenhaven's single part-time deputy would take an interest in.

"Walk away, Kyle," Elias said. Over Rowan's head. Past the boy's thrashing.

Kyle looked at Tyler. Tyler was standing now, holding his face, blood drying on his chin. The redhead hadn't moved from the wall.

"He started it," Tyler said nasally, through swelling.

"I don't care who started it," Elias said. "I'm finishing it. Leave."

Tyler opened his mouth. Kyle put a hand on his shoulder, large and blunt, now repurposed to prevent his friend from making a decision that would involve dental work.

"Come on," Kyle said.

They left. Tyler first, sideways through the door, maintaining eye contact with Elias until the door frame broke the line of sight. The redhead next, holding his ribs, not looking at anyone. Kyle last, pausing in the doorway, turning back.

He looked at Rowan, and his expression did something complicated and brief, not remorse, not exactly, but the shadow of something in its general vicinity, and then he turned and walked into the night.

The door swung shut.

Lyle Fenton stood behind his bar, rag in hand, surrounded by broken glass and overturned stools. He looked at Elias. Elias looked at Lyle. The look contained a complete transaction: 'I will pay for the damage. You will not call anyone. This did not happen'.

Lyle nodded. Lyle was many things, but he was not stupid, and he knew what a conversation with Elias Voss's eyes looked like, and he knew that the correct response was agreement.

The bar was empty now. The jukebox had unstuck itself and was playing something slow and mournful, a song about loss or love or the highway, the kind of song that sounds the same regardless of the words.

Elias looked down.

Rowan had stopped fighting. He'd gone still, the absolute, post-combustion stillness of a body that has burned through everything it had and is now operating on nothing. He was still pressed against Elias's chest. Elias's arms were still around him. Elias could feel his heartbeat. Not his own. Rowan's. Through the boy's back, through the ribs, through the thin layers of fabric between them. Fast, ragged, gradually slowing. A heart coming down from a height it should never have been at.

"You're done," Elias said. Quietly.

Rowan breathed. One breath. Two. Three.

"Let me go," he said. His voice was wrecked. 

Elias held him for one more second. One second longer than necessary. One second that neither of them would mention and neither of them would forget.

He let go.

Rowan stepped forward. Away from Elias's chest, away from the arms, away from the warmth. Then he turned around.

His face. Christ. His face up close, bloodied and swollen and wrecked, it should have been diminished. It should have looked broken. Instead, it looked like a painting that someone had thrown water on, the features smeared and softened but still there, still devastating, still capable of the precise, targeted damage that beauty does when it has been battered and has survived.

His eyes met Elias's. One open. One half-closed, the swelling pressing the lid down to a slit. The visible blue looked at Elias with no hostility. No sarcasm. No performance. 

A cut along Elias's cheekbone was bleeding. He hadn't noticed it, hadn't noticed the hit, a glancing punch or the edge of something sharp that had connected during the extraction. A thin line of red, tracing the hard angle of his jaw, dripping slowly toward his chin. 

Rowan noticed it.

His eyes tracked the blood. His expression shifted. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Whatever he was going to say, he swallowed it. Buried it. Sealed it behind the teeth he'd clenched and the jaw he'd set and the one blue eye that was still, even now, even ruined, the most dangerous thing in the room.

"Outside," Elias said.

He put his hand on Rowan's back. Between the shoulder blades. A touch. Five fingertips and a palm against the fabric of the hoodie, against the heat of the body beneath it, guiding him forward, toward the door.

Rowan let himself be guided. This was, in the brief and violent history of their acquaintance, the most remarkable thing he had ever done.

They walked out of the Rusty Anchor. 

There was no moment of deliberation, no fork in the road where Elias weighed the options. The flat was closer. Rowan was bleeding. These facts existed, and Elias's feet responded to them, and the result was two men walking through a dark harbor toward a staircase that led to a room that belonged to one of them, and that was about to become, for the duration of a night, something else entirely.

Elias climbed the exterior staircase. 

Rowan followed.

The flat was cold. Elias had left the window cracked, the new window, the one with the fresh putty. He turned on the light. The single bulb clicked to life and filled the room with a glow closer to amber than white, the warm, insufficient light of a space designed for function and never asked to be anything more.

"Sit," Elias said.

He pointed at the kitchen counter. It was the only surface in the flat at the right height, the right width, and the right proximity to the overhead light. The kitchen table was too low. The desk was too cluttered. The counter was bare, clean, the cleared workspace of a man who ate over the sink and didn't own placemats.

Rowan looked at the counter. Looked at Elias.

He hoisted himself onto the counter.

The movement cost him. Elias saw it, the wince, compressed and quickly hidden, the way Rowan's body registered the bruised ribs and the swollen hand and the general inventory of damage as he lifted himself up and settled on the laminate surface with a controlled exhale that was trying very hard not to be a groan.

He sat. His legs hung. His boots were unlaced, and his jeans were torn at one knee, and his hoodie was streaked with blood, his own, mostly, the dark fabric showing the stains as wet, black patches that caught the light in a way that made them look like something leaking from inside.

Elias opened the cabinet above the stove. The first aid kit was where it always was, a battered tin box, rectangular, the kind you buy at a marine supply store and keep for twenty years because it never breaks and you never bother replacing it. The lid was dented. The latch was stiff. Inside: antiseptic wipes, gauze pads, butterfly bandages, medical tape, a tube of antibiotic ointment that was two years past its expiration and still functional, a pair of blunt scissors, and three individually wrapped aspirin that had been in there so long they'd fused to the bottom of the tin.

He set the kit on the counter beside Rowan. Opened it. Pulled out the antiseptic wipes.

"This is going to sting," he said.

"I know what antiseptic does."

"Then hold still."

Elias stepped closer. The counter put Rowan at eye level, a spatial adjustment that was, in its quiet way, seismic. Every previous encounter between them had involved Elias looking down: down at the car window, down at the sidewalk, down at the body he'd locked in his arms. Now they were level. Face to face. The same height, the same plane, separated by a distance that Elias measured, in the part of his brain that was still performing calculations, at approximately fourteen inches.

Fourteen inches. The length of a forearm. The width of a pillow. The distance across which a human face goes from seen to studied, from registered to known.

He raised his hand. He placed his left hand against the side of Rowan's jaw. 

The touch was functional. It was a positioning gesture, fingers against bone, tilting the face toward the light, angling the cut above the left eyebrow into the forty-watt glow so he could see the depth and the direction and whether it needed closure or just cleaning. It was the same motion he'd made a hundred times on the dock, turning a crewman's face to check a gash, assessing damage.

Except his hand was shaking.

Not visibly. Not in any way that Rowan could have seen. A tremor so deep it was almost internal, a vibration in the muscle, in the tendon, in the architecture of the hand itself, as though the bones were registering a frequency that the skin was trying to contain. His fingers were on Rowan's jaw. His thumb was near the boy's chin. Rowan's skin was warm beneath his hand, and faintly rough along the jawline, the first, spare evidence of stubble, and beneath the warmth and the texture there was a pulse. Rowan's pulse. Beating against the pad of Elias's thumb with a rhythm that was faster than resting and slower than panic and that Elias felt, with a clarity that bordered on obscene, in every nerve of his hand.

He cleaned the cut. The antiseptic wipe met the broken skin, and Rowan flinched, a small, sharp inhalation, the muscles of his jaw tightening under Elias's palm. Not a sound. Rowan would not make a sound. Rowan had been trained, by years of worse than this, to absorb pain without narrating it.

Elias worked. He cleaned the blood away from the cut in small, careful strokes, moving outward from the wound, clearing the skin, exposing the edges of the laceration. It was shallow. Clean. The kind of cut that comes from a ring or a bottle's edge, not a fist. It wouldn't scar badly. Butterfly bandages would hold it.

He opened the packet. Peeled the strips. Leaned in.

His face was close to Rowan's now. Inches. The proximity was necessary, the bandages were small, the cut was precise, and the light was poor, and closing a wound properly required a nearness that, in any other context, with any other person, would have been purely mechanical. Elias had done this before.

But his hands were on Rowan's face, and Rowan's breath was on his skin, warm, shallow, carrying the faint copper tang of blood, and Rowan's one open eye was watching him from a distance of six inches with an expression that Elias could not look at directly, the way you cannot look at certain things directly, the sun, an eclipse, a truth that is arriving faster than your ability to accommodate it.

He placed the first strip. Pressed it down. His thumb smoothed the adhesive against Rowan's skin, and the skin was warm, and the warmth traveled through his thumb and into his hand and up his arm and into the place in his chest where the splinter had been, where the hum had been, where the thing that was no longer a splinter and no longer a hum was now something with mass and heat and a gravitational pull that was rearranging everything around it.

"Hold still," he said again. Quieter now. Something closer to a request, spoken at a volume that the room didn't require and that both of them understood, was being used for a different reason, because his voice, at full volume, would have broken something in the air between them that was, at this moment, holding.

The second strip. The third. He closed the cut. Clean, even, the butterflies aligned. He pulled back, fractionally, not away, just to the distance where assessment was possible, and looked at his work, and in looking at his work, he looked at Rowan's face, and in looking at Rowan's face, he found that Rowan was looking back.

Their eyes met. Held.
The room contracted.

It was a physical sensation, the walls pulling inward, the ceiling lowering, the space between them compressing until there was no space left, until the fourteen inches were not fourteen inches but something denser, something charged, an electromagnetic field that had been building since a car window lowered in a parking lot a week ago and that was now, in this flat, in this light, at this distance, reaching a density that neither of them knew how to survive.

Rowan's eye, the open one, the blue one, the one that had not swollen shut, was fixed on his. The pupil was dilated. The iris was dark, the blue deepened by the low light into something closer to ink, closer to the sea at night, closer to the color things become when they stop being seen and start being felt. His lips were parted, the lower lip split and swollen, the blood cleaned but the damage evident, the mouth open by a fraction that could have been pain or could have been breathing or could have been something else entirely, something that lived in the space between pain and breathing.

Elias's hand was still on his jaw. He hadn't removed it. The bandaging was done. The cut was closed. There was no medical reason for his hand to be on this boy's face, and his hand was on this boy's face, and he could feel the pulse, and the pulse was fast, and his own pulse was fast, and the room was very small and very warm and very quiet.

He dropped his hand.

The motion was abrupt, not smooth, not controlled, not the careful, deliberate withdrawal of a man acting on reason. It was a flinch. His hand came off Rowan's jaw the way a hand comes off a hot surface, and the speed of it told both of them more than he intended, because a man who wasn't feeling anything wouldn't need to pull away that fast.

"You need to shower," Elias said. "There's blood in your hair. On your neck."

Rowan blinked. The single eye refocused, the pupil contracting, the gaze pulling back from wherever it had been, some interior distance, some depth, to the surface, to the room, to the man standing in front of him who had just touched his face for three minutes and was now looking at the wall.

"Bathroom's through there." Elias pointed. Didn't look. "Towels under the sink."

He turned. He moved to the small closet near the door, two steps, an eternity, and opened it, looking for a towel, knowing there were towels under the bathroom sink and looking here anyway because here was not there and there was where Rowan was.

Behind him, he heard the sound.

The hoodie first. The zip, soft, metallic, the small mechanical whisper of teeth separating. Then the fabric, peeled upward, pulled over the head, the muffled sound of cotton clearing hair. A pause. Then the shirt underneath. Cotton again, thinner, the sound of it barely a sound at all, just the whisper of a hem rising, the faint separation of fabric from skin, and then the landing, the soft drop of cloth on the counter where Rowan had been sitting.

Elias turned around.

He shouldn't have. He knew, in the instant before his body completed the rotation, that turning around was a mistake, that the correct action was to keep facing the closet until the bathroom door closed, the water started, and the room was safe again. He knew this instinctively, cellularly, in the part of the brain that has been keeping organisms alive for four hundred million years by telling them 'don't look, don't look, don't look'.

He looked.

Rowan was standing in the kitchen of his flat, shirtless, and the world rearranged itself around the fact of him.

The body was not what Elias expected, because Elias had not allowed himself to expect anything, and the absence of expectation made the reality arrive with the full, unmitigated force of something encountered for the first time. He was lean, not thin, not fragile, but made, the anatomy of someone young and tensile, a body still in the process of becoming itself. The shoulders were narrower than Elias's but defined, the deltoids visible, the collarbones sharp beneath skin so pale it seemed to generate its own light. His chest was smooth, flat, the pectorals slight but present, and his ribs were visible, not from hunger but from architecture, the lean frame carrying just enough muscle to define the intercostal lines where bone met tissue. His stomach was flat, taut, a faint trail of dark hair beginning below the navel and disappearing beneath the waistband of his jeans, which sat low, low enough that the hip bones were visible, the iliac crests cutting upward and outward like the handles of something, like the structural lines of a vessel built for speed rather than cargo.

Beautiful. 

The word arrived in Elias's head without invitation and without apology. Not attractive, which implied preference. Not good-looking, which implied comparison. Beautiful, which implied nothing except itself. The raw, objective, devastating fact of a human body that had been assembled with a precision that bordered on cruelty, because a thing this beautiful in a world this rough was either a gift or a target, and Rowan's life had made clear which one it had been.

Elias looked away. "I'll get you a towel," he said. To the closet. To the wall. To any surface in the room that was not the boy.

He reached up. The closet's top shelf. A towel was there, clean, folded. His hands gripped it. He pulled it down.

His shirt had blood on it. Rowan's blood. The henley had a smear across the chest where he'd held Rowan in the bar. He pulled the shirt over his head. The motion was functional. It was a man removing a soiled garment, nothing more. Without ceremony, without thought, without any awareness that the act of pulling a henley over his head might constitute, in the current atmospheric conditions of this room, something incendiary.

The shirt came off. And for a moment, a single, suspended, airless moment, they were both shirtless, and neither of them was looking at the other, and both of them were looking at the other.

Elias was, by the standards of the body he'd built through twenty years of physical labor, unremarkable to himself and devastating to others. His shoulders were broad, not gym-broad, not the inflated symmetry of a man who lifts for appearance, but the thick, functional breadth of a body that had been hauling nets and equipment and the dead weight of the sea since adolescence. His chest was wide, deep, covered with dark hair that began at the sternum and spread outward, tapering at the sides, thickening again below the navel into a line that descended past the waistband of his jeans. The muscle was dense and layered, the kind that sits close to the bone rather than ballooning over it, with the architecture of endurance rather than display. His arms were heavy, the biceps and forearms thick, the veins visible along the inner wrist where the skin was lighter. The scars continued from his hands upward, a faded, silvery line along the outside of his left forearm where a cable had whipped loose five years ago, a small white nick on his ribs from a hook that had caught him at seventeen.

A body that had been used hard and had held.

Rowan saw it.

Elias was reaching for a clean shirt from the small dresser beside the closet when he felt the shift, a thickening, the particular alteration that happens in a room when someone is looking at you. He felt it on his skin. On the back of his neck. Between his shoulder blades, where the muscles tensed involuntarily.

He didn't turn around.

He pulled the clean shirt from the dresser. Held it. Did not put it on.

In the space behind him, Rowan was looking at his back. At the breadth of it. The way the muscles moved beneath the skin when Elias reached for the dresser, the latissimus spreading, the scapulae shifting, the controlled articulation of a body that knew itself completely and moved with unconscious authority.

Rowan looked. He couldn't stop looking. The looking was involuntary, gravitational, the visual equivalent of falling, a surrender to a force he hadn't consented to and couldn't resist. He looked at Elias's body the way you look at a landscape from a height: with the understanding that you are seeing something vast, and that the vastness contains things you haven't found yet, and that finding them would require getting closer, and that getting closer would be the end of something and the beginning of something else, and that both of those things terrified him equally.

Elias turned around with the towel.

Their eyes met again. Briefly. A glance that was not a glance, a collision, an impact, a two-car accident in the space between two people that lasted less than a second and produced enough wreckage to fill a salvage yard.

And that's when it happened. 

That's when Elias saw the scars.

He'd been looking at the towel in his hand, at Rowan's face, at the bandaged cut, at anything that constituted the sanctioned visual territory of a man handing a towel to a person who needed a shower. And then his eyes, moving without permission, moved lower, across the collarbones, down the arms, along the ribs, and he saw them.

Small. Scattered. Precise.

Not the scars of accident or labor or any of the honest ways a body accumulates damage over the course of a physical life. These were specific. Located. Placed with the careful, strategic intent of someone who knew where to put marks so that clothing would cover them and mirrors would miss them, and no one, no teacher, no doctor, no well-meaning neighbor, would ever have reason to ask.

On the upper arms: thin, pale lines, three on the left, two on the right, the width of a belt edge or a switch, or the particular shape a hand makes when it grips too hard, and the fingers leave their own geography.

On the ribs: a cluster of small, faded marks, circular, uniform, the diameter of a cigarette end. Old. Healed to flat, white discs that sat against the pale skin like punctuation marks in a sentence no one had ever been meant to read.

On the back, Elias had seen a flash as Rowan turned, as the boy shifted toward the bathroom door, more lines. Longer. Fewer. The marks a body carries when someone has used an object, a cord, a wire, the narrow edge of something designed for a different purpose, across the skin with enough force to break it and enough precision to ensure the breaking happened where it wouldn't show.

Elias's face changed.

It happened beneath the surface, not a movement of features, not a rearrangement of expression, but something deeper, structural in the bedrock of who he was. His eyes went flat. Not cold, dark. The brown irises, which had been warm and amber, went opaque, the pupil expanding, the warmth retreating behind something ancient and absolute and dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with what violence had done to the boy standing in front of him.

He understood. 

In a single, complete, nauseating instant, he understood.

Daniel had beaten his son.

Daniel, who was dead, who had wrapped his car around a tree with twice the legal limit in his blood, whom Rowan grieved for with a ferocity that seemed disproportionate to the man, it was not disproportionate. It was exact. The grief was the size of the wound, and the wound was the size of a childhood, and the childhood was written on the boy's skin in a language that Elias could read because it was a language made of hands, and hands were something he understood.

The fury arrived. 

It came from below, from the basement of himself, from the place where he kept the things he didn't let out, the old, dark, dangerous things that had no place in a man who controlled himself, who managed his crew, who lived a careful, contained life on the edge of the sea. It came up through the floor of his composure like magma through rock, and it was hot, and it was immense, and it had nowhere to go.

So Elias said nothing.

This was the hardest thing he had ever done. Not saying anything, not reaching out, not asking, not letting the fury or the sorrow or the devastating tenderness that lived underneath both of them reach his face, his voice, or his hands, was an act of discipline so total it left him trembling.

Because he knew. 

He knew with the certainty of a man who has spent years learning to read people, that if he said anything, if he named what he'd seen, if he let the pity enter his eyes, if he made Rowan's scars into a conversation, the boy would run.

He handed Rowan the towel.
Rowan took it.

Their fingers touched. The contact, skin on skin, the pad of Elias's index finger against the ridge of Rowan's knuckle, lasted less than a second. A fraction. A duration so brief it barely qualified as touch and that registered, in both their nervous systems, with the force and clarity of a shout in an empty cathedral.

Rowan's breath caught. 
Elias heard it. 
Their eyes met. 

Rowan's face, battered, bandaged, beautiful, the one open eye blazing with something that was not hostility and was not gratitude and was not anything that had a name in any language either of them spoke, held Elias's gaze for two seconds.

Then he turned. Walked to the bathroom. Closed the door.

The lock clicked.

The water started. A hiss, a rumble, the old pipes in the wall vibrating with the passage of water that was cold and then warm and then hot, the sound filling the flat with a white noise that was, in this moment, the most merciful thing in the world, because it covered every other sound, the sound of Elias's breathing, the sound of his hands gripping the counter, the sound of whatever was happening inside his chest. He pressed both hands flat against the counter. He breathed.

In. 
Out. 
In. 
Out.

He opened his eyes. He reached for his phone. The screen lit. The keyboard appeared. His thumbs moved.

Camille: Rowan's with me. He got into a scrap in town. He's fine. Cuts and bruises. Nothing serious. He's cleaning up at the flat. You should come get him.

He stared at the message. At the words. At the shape of them on the screen, the clean, informational sentences, the reassuring tone, the calm accounting of a situation that was, from Camille's perspective, a simple report: her son had been in a fight, and her friend had handled it.

He sent it.
He put the phone down.
The water ran.

The shower was the first kind thing to happen to Rowan in a week.

Rowan stood under it for longer than was necessary, longer than was polite, longer than a guest in a stranger's flat had any right to stand under a stranger's hot water. He didn't care. The water was hot, genuinely hot, aggressively hot, the scalding, punishing heat of old pipes that didn't know how to do anything halfway, and it fell on his shoulders and his back and his bruised ribs with the simple, indiscriminate mercy of a thing that doesn't ask what you've done to deserve it.

He watched the blood leave him. It ran off his body in thin, pink rivulets and swirled around the drain in patterns that were briefly beautiful and then gone. His blood and the water and the heat, all of it leaving, all of it circling the same drain, and standing in the center of it was a boy who was shaking and not from the cold.

The shaking had started when the bathroom door closed. 

Not from the fight. 
The fight was over. 
He was shaking because of hands.

Because of a hand on his jaw, tilting his face toward a forty-watt bulb. Because of fingers, rough, scarred, trembling with a vibration so faint it was almost imagined, cleaning a cut above his eyebrow with a precision that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the way a person touches something they're afraid of breaking.

Nobody touched him like that.
Nobody had ever touched him like that. 

He stood under the water. He let it burn. He pressed his forehead against the tile, and he breathed, and the breathing was ragged. The steam filled the small bathroom like a fog, and somewhere on the other side of the wall a man was standing in a kitchen with shaking hands, and Rowan knew this because he could feel it, could feel the presence of him through the plaster and the pipes, the way you feel the proximity of something that has altered the field around you permanently and irrevocably and without permission.

He turned off the water. He dried himself with the towel, the clean towel, the one their fingers had touched over. He put his jeans back on. His hoodie was in the kitchen, bloodied, and he had no shirt, and the idea of walking out of this bathroom shirtless into a room where Elias would be standing was a prospect that produced in his body a response so complex and so contradictory that he spent thirty seconds staring at the bathroom door before he could bring himself to open it.

He opened it.
The kitchen was different.
The air was different. 
The light was different. 

The quality of the space, which had been, ten minutes ago, suspended, charged, had been punctured, deflated, replaced by something louder and more familiar and infinitely less dangerous.

Camille was standing in the middle of it.

She was wearing a coat over pajamas. This detail registered first, before her face, before her voice, before the rest of her, the coat buttoned wrong, one button off, the misalignment producing a subtle asymmetry. Beneath it: flannel pants, a cotton shirt, slippers that were not designed for outdoor use and that had been used outdoors, evidenced by the mud on the soles and the wet marks they'd left on the floor of Elias's flat.

She'd driven. 
She must have driven. 

"Rowan." Her voice broke on it. A hairline fracture, a fissure in the single word, just enough to let the inside show through.

She crossed the kitchen. Three steps. Her hands rose, automatic, instinctive, the hands of a woman whose body remembered holding him before her mind remembered earning the right. They went to his face. Both hands. Palms against his cheeks, fingers curving along his jaw, the tips touching the edges of his damp hair.

Rowan let her. One second. For one second, he was a boy, and his mother was touching his face, and the touch didn't hurt.

Then, he pulled away.

The motion was small. A turn of the head, a step backward, the minimal physical adjustment required to break contact without breaking the person who'd initiated it. He didn't slap her hands away. He didn't flinch or jerk or recoil. He just withdrew. Quietly. 

Camille's hands hung in the air for a moment, empty, still shaped around the face that was no longer between them. Then they lowered. She pressed them together in front of her chest, one hand wrapped around the other, holding herself.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Elias said...he said it was a fight."

'Elias said'.

The words landed. Not on the surface, deeper, in the place where the shower hadn't reached, where the hands on his jaw and the towel and the twelve feet of wall and water had been sitting, private, unshared, belonging to a room that was just his and Elias's and no one else's.

'Elias said'.

Elias had texted her. Of course, he had. Of course the man who had cleaned his cuts and bandaged his face and looked at his scars had picked up his phone and sent a message to Camille, because Camille was the mother and Elias was the friend and the friend calls the mother, that's how the hierarchy works, that's how the triangle functions, and the triangle did not include, had never included, would never include, whatever had been building in this room before the coat and the pajamas and the slippers walked through the door and turned it back into a kitchen.

Rowan looked at Elias.
Elias looked back.

The expression Rowan gave him was not anger. It was the look of a person who has been given something they didn't know they needed and has then watched it be taken away, not by force but by protocol, by the ordinary mechanics of a world that doesn't know what it's interrupting.

Betrayal was too strong. Disappointment was too soft. What moved across Rowan's face was somewhere in between: a flicker, a shadow, the brief illumination of a room that has been opened and is now being closed, and, in the closing, a question that is also an accusation. And underneath the accusation, in the layer below, in the place where Rowan kept the things he would never say and barely allowed himself to feel: something else. Something that had no face and no words and that lived, for one instant, in the way his eyes held Elias's, not with hostility but with a naked, terrified question that asked: 'Did you feel it too?'

Elias's expression didn't change. His arms stayed crossed. His body stayed still. But his eyes, the ones that had looked at Rowan's scars without speaking and at Rowan's body without permission and at Rowan's face with a care so precise it had its own heartbeat, those eyes answered. They answered with a flicker. A single, involuntary shift in the depth of the gaze, a dilation, a darkening.

One second. Less. Then Elias looked away.

"He's fine," Elias said to Camille. "I cleaned him up. The cut above his eye's closed. His hand might need ice. Ribs are bruised, not broken."

"How do you know they're not broken?"

"Because I've had broken ribs. He'd be breathing differently."

Camille turned to Rowan. "Who were they? Why did they..."

"It doesn't matter," Rowan said. Flat. Aimed at the wall between them, Camille's question and his refusal to answer it, the conversational equivalent of a closed door. "I handled it."

He walked to the counter where his hoodie was. Picked it up. The blood had dried, dark, stiff. He pulled it on over his bare chest. The fabric was cold. He zipped it.

Camille moved toward the door. She paused beside Elias. Looked at him. "Thank you," she said.

"Go home, Camille."

She put her hand on Elias's arm. A brief touch, the back of her fingers against his forearm. She walked out. 

Rowan followed. 

*

The cottage was quiet.

Rowan lay on his bed.

The cuts on his face stung, a low, insistent heat that mapped the damage with chemical precision. The antiseptic had done its work and left its residue, a tightness in the skin around the butterfly bandages that he could feel when he moved his eyebrows or his mouth. His cheekbone throbbed with each heartbeat, the bruise deepening in real time as the tissue swelled against the bone. His knuckles, the right hand, the punching hand, were hot and stiff, the swelling converting his fingers from independent instruments into a single, aching unit.

His ribs hurt when he breathed.
It felt good.

Not the pain itself. But the aliveness of it. The specificity.

He reached into his backpack, the one he'd carried from Daniel's apartment, the one that contained the sum total of his portable life: a phone charger, a wallet with forty dollars, a book he hadn't opened, headphones, and the thing his hand was reaching for now, the thing his fingers found in the bottom of the bag where he'd shoved it, quick and thoughtless, in the brief window between Elias walking to the counter to text Camille and Elias coming back.

He pulled it out.

The henley unfolded in his hands. Dark gray. Soft. Worn to a thinness at the collar and the cuffs that came from years of washing and wearing and washing again, the fabric thinned by repetition into something that was less cotton and more memory. It was large, too large for Rowan, the shoulders wider, the chest broader, the proportions of a garment built to fit a body that was bigger than his in every dimension.

He'd taken it.

He'd taken it the way animals take things, instinctively, without strategy, the grab preceding the thought by a margin so wide that the thought, when it arrived, found the act already completed and could only stand there, appalled, trying to construct a reason. There was no reason. There was no plan. There was only Elias turning away, the shirt on the counter, Rowan's hand closing around the fabric, and the moment had bypassed every checkpoint his brain maintained between impulse and action and had deposited the shirt in his bag before he'd drawn his next breath.

He'd stolen Elias shirt.

He was aware of how this would look. He was aware of how this would sound, if spoken aloud, if confessed, if discovered. Stealing a grown man's clothing from his apartment. The word that would be used. The category it would be filed under. The assumptions that would follow: desperate, pathetic, the behavior of someone unwell, someone fixated, someone who needs help, and not a henley.

He didn't care.
He put his headphones on.

The world muffled. The house receded. The wind against the window became a distant, underwater sound, and the ache in his ribs became a rhythm, and the room became a capsule, sealed, private, the only space in the world that was entirely his.

He found the song.

"Atmosphere." Joy Division. The opening notes arrived like something surfacing from deep water, slow, heavy, the synthesizer's drone spreading through the headphones like fog through a harbor. Then the drums, spare and funereal, marking time in the way that time is marked in places where time is not a comfort. Then Ian Curtis's voice.

The voice. That voice. The one that sounded like a man singing from inside a locked room, from behind a door that would never open, his words arriving not as lyrics but as dispatches from a place where beauty and damage were the same thing and the same thing was the only thing and the only thing was loss.

"Walk in silence…"

Rowan pulled the shirt to his face.

He pressed it against his nose and mouth. Both hands, holding the fabric, the heels of his palms against his cheekbones, the henley covering the lower half of his face like a mask, like a compress, like the hand of someone who isn't there cupping the breath of someone who is.

He breathed in.

Coffee. That was the first layer, dark and bitter, the particular roast that Elias drank by the gallon and that had stained the fabric at the molecular level, infused into the fibers over years of mugs held against the chest and splashes wiped with the hem. Sea salt. Not the salt of tears or sweat but the salt of the harbor, the ambient, oceanic salt that saturates everything within a hundred yards of the water and that clung to Elias the way it clung to the dock and the boats and the pylons. The faint mineral trace of metal, engine parts, tools, the particular chemistry of a man who works with his hands on machinery and carries the residue in his pores.

And underneath. Beneath the coffee and the salt and the iron. Something else.

Warm. Animal. Specific.

The scent of skin. Of a particular skin, belonging to a particular body, carrying its own signature, the unique, unreplicable composition of oils and heat, and the indefinable thing that makes a person smell like themselves and no one else. It was warm the way certain woods are warm, the way the earth is warm after rain, the way a bed is warm when someone has just left it. It was the scent of a man. Of this man. Of the chest that had pressed against Rowan's back in the bar, of the arms that had locked around him, of the neck that had been inches from Rowan's face when the bandage was applied and that had smelled, at that distance, like this. Exactly like this.

Rowan breathed.

He breathed like a man surfacing. Like a man who had been underwater and had found air.

His eyes were closed. The music played. Ian Curtis sang about silence and atmosphere and the walk between two points that might be life and might be death and might be the same thing.

Rowan didn't understand what he was feeling.

He was nineteen. He'd kissed a girl once, at a party, at sixteen, and it had felt like reading a book in a language he didn't speak, technically accomplished, semantically void. He'd watched boys at school with an attention he'd disguised as hostility, because hostility was the only frame his world provided for the looking he was doing. He'd lain in his bed in Daniel's apartment and thought about things he couldn't name and touched himself to images he couldn't save and felt, afterward, not relief but a loneliness so total it was indistinguishable from suffocation.

He'd never been in love. 
He'd never been close enough to love to recognize its silhouette.
But he knew what this was.

This was a shirt pressed to his face. This was coffee and salt and the warm, secret, devastating scent of a man who had held him without hurting him, who had looked at his scars without speaking, who had touched his face with hands that shook because the gentleness in them was costing him something.

He didn't understand it. His mind didn't understand it. His mind was nineteen years of armor and anger and locked doors and the conviction, so deep it was architectural, that wanting things was how you got hurt.

But his body knew.

His body curled around the shirt in the dark. His body pulled its knees up and its shoulders in, folding itself around the fabric the way a hand folds around a flame, not to extinguish it but to protect it, to keep it from the wind, to hold the heat close against the immense, indifferent, cold night.

The song played. 
The drums beat. 

Forty-seven cracks in the ceiling. He didn't count them. For the first time since he'd arrived in this house, in this room, in this life he hadn't chosen, he didn't count them.

He held the shirt. 
He breathed. 
He slept.

And in the flat above the dock, a mile and a half away, a man with a rock on his nightstand lay in the dark and did not sleep, and the harbor breathed between them like a lung they now shared.

(To be continued...)

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