The first gray light of dawn bled across the harbor, turning the water from black to pewter. Loretta Crane had not slept. The guest room at Maeve OKeefe's place smelled of cedar and dried apples, the curtains too thin to block the seabirds already screaming over the pilings. She had lain in the wide bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the cove wake up boat by boat, the soft clink of rigging, the distant putter of an early engine. Sleep would not come. Sleep had not come in three days, not since the reading of the will, not since the folded papers and the keys and the weight of what she had agreed to carry.
She pulled on a sweater the color of fog and laced her boots at the door. Maeve was already in the kitchen, a silhouette against the window, pouring coffee from a pot that had been on the stove since four. Neither of them spoke. Loretta took the mug, nodded her thanks, and slipped out into the salt-thick air.
The walk to the marina took seven minutes if she cut through the alley behind the cannery, nine if she followed the road. She chose the road. The asphalt was cracked, weeds pushing through in pale green threads, and the streetlights were still on, buzzing faintly overhead. Crescent Cove was smaller than she remembered. That was the strangest part. She had left at eighteen, certain the town would swallow her whole, and now every corner arrived too soon, every stretch of sidewalk shorter than the one before.
The marina gate stood open. Beau Hollis never locked it before sunrise; he liked to say honest people did not need fences and dishonest ones found their way in regardless. Loretta stepped through and the world opened into the familiar hush of the cove. Gulls wheeled overhead, their cries echoing off the low warehouse roofs. The boats rocked gently in their slips, halyards tapping against aluminum masts in a rhythm that was almost musical.
She walked to the end of the longest dock, where the view stretched out past the breakwater to the open sound. The air was cool against her cheeks, carrying the brine of low tide and the faint diesel tang of a working harbor. She breathed it in, trying to let it settle her. The wind picked up slightly, tugging at the loose hem of her sweater, and she wrapped her arms around herself, the coffee mug warm between her palms.
A sound behind her. Heavy boots on the weathered planks, coming fast. She turned, and a man was already there, broad shoulders filling the gap between the dock cleats. She stepped left, he stepped right. She stepped back, and he grunted, a low sound in his chest, and kept walking without slowing, without looking, as if she were a piling he had to navigate around.
Loretta stumbled slightly, catching herself on the rail. The coffee sloshed over the rim of the mug and hissed against the wood. She watched the man move down the dock, his stride long and unhurried now that the obstacle had been removed. He wore a canvas jacket the color of tar, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, and a knit cap pulled low over his forehead. When he reached a workboat tied at the end, he stepped aboard without a word, ducking into the cabin.
"Excuse me," she called out, more surprised than angry. The man did not turn. The cabin door closed with a solid click.
She stood there, listening to the water slap against the pilings, the gulls crying their indifferent chorus overhead. The breeze carried the sharp scent of creosote from the dock planks, mixing with the salt and the cooling coffee. She looked down at the splash of brown on her boots and exhaled slowly, the tension in her shoulders knotting tighter. So this was how it was going to be. She had been back in Crescent Cove for less than seventy-two hours, and already the town was reminding her that she did not belong, that she had been away too long, that the woman she used to be had been filed away in some drawer marked past .
She turned back toward the shore, and the main dock was no longer empty. Beau Hollis was walking toward her, a clipboard tucked under one arm, a smile already spreading across his face as if he had been waiting for the sun to rise just so he could greet it. He wore a polo shirt tucked into belted trousers, even at this hour, and boat shoes that had no business being on a working dock.
"Loretta Crane," he called out, his voice carrying easily over the water. "I had a feeling I'd find you down here. Maeve said you were up before the roosters, and the roosters around here are not known for their patience."
"Morning, Beau." She managed a small smile. "You're out early."
"Boat fuel delivery at six." He stopped in front of her, hands on his hips, looking her over with the frank appraisal of a man who had known her since she was in pigtails. "You're walking around my marina like you own the place."
"I was just looking."
"Looking is free. Staring is free too, though I wouldn't recommend it at the fuel dock." He grinned. "You get a look at that old ketch at slip fourteen? Needs a new mast step. I've been telling the owner for two years. Two years, Loretta. The varnish is peeling like a sunburn."
She glanced over his shoulder at the row of sailboats, their masts swaying gently against the brightening sky. "I didn't notice."
"You noticed the water. I saw you from the office window, just standing there breathing it in." His expression softened, the salesman charm giving way to something more genuine. "It's good to have you back, kid. Even if the circumstances are about as welcome as a skunk at a garden party."
"Thanks, Beau."
"Your grandmother would be proud. Whatever you're thinking about doing with the inn, she'd be proud you came home to do it." He paused, tilting his head. "What are you thinking about doing with the inn?"
"I don't know yet."
"That's fair. That's fair. Take your time. But don't take too much time, because Della Wells has been sniffing around the property like a dog with a bone. Says the historical society has first claim. Says your grandmother signed some agreement back in the dark ages." He waved a hand. "I'm probably misremembering. You know Della. Always got a folder."
Loretta's grip tightened on the mug. "I didn't realize there was a claim."
"Probably nothing. Probably just Della being Della." He checked his watch. "Listen, I got to go count some fuel. You want to come by the office later? I got coffee that isn't mud, and I got about forty years of files on every piece of property in this town. Might save you some surprises."
She hesitated. "Maybe later."
"Fair enough. Fair enough." He started to turn away, then stopped. "Oh, and Loretta? Word of advice. The guy on the workboat, the one who almost knocked you into the drink? That's Colton Wells. Della's ex. Carpenter, does odd jobs around the cove. He's been fixing up the harbor master's office for the last month. Good with his hands, not so good with his manners." Beau's mouth twitched. "He's been through it. Don't take it personal."
"Wasn't planning to."
"That's the spirit." He tipped an imaginary hat and ambled off toward the fuel dock, whistling something that might have been a sea shanty.
Loretta stood alone again. The sun was fully up now, a pale disk behind a layer of marine fog, turning the world into a watercolor of grays and silvers. She looked down the dock toward the workboat where Colton Wells had disappeared. Through the cabin window she could see him moving around, the shape of him bent over something. She could not make out the details, only the broad sweep of his shoulders and the deliberate way he worked, as if the boat were an extension of his own body.
She finished her coffee and set the empty mug on the rail. The splash of brown on her boots had dried to a dull stain. She did not bother to wipe it off. Crescent Cove was going to leave its marks on her, one way or another, whether she wanted them or not.
The walk back up the dock felt longer than the walk down.
The cove spread out below her like a painting half-finished.
Loretta stood at the top of the bluff where the inn sat cradled in its stand of alders, and she let her eyes follow the path she had walked a hundred times as a girl. The wooden staircase, weathered gray and listing slightly to the left. The flagstone path that had been Maeve's pet project for decades, each stone chosen and placed and argued over until the whole trail looked like it had grown there naturally. The herb garden in its terraced bed, overgrown now but still holding the ghosts of rosemary and thyme in the morning air. And beyond it all, the water. The cove itself, a perfect crescent of salt and stone, hemmed in by headlands draped in Sitka spruce, opening to the Strait of Juan de Fuca through a channel marked by two stone breakwaters.
She had forgotten how small it was. How contained. Seattle had been a world of endless edges, of freeways that unspooled toward horizons she never reached, of buildings that blocked out the sky. Here the sky was the whole ceiling of her life, and the edges of everything were close enough to touch.
The Daisy Mae was at the end of the dock.
She had known this intellectually. Maeve had told her on the phone, six weeks ago, her voice gone careful in the way Loretta had learned to dread. The boat needed work, Maeve had said. Quite a bit of work. The marina had hauled her out of the water two years back and tied her to the fuel dock, and she had been sitting there ever since, slowly giving herself back to the salt air. Maeve had not been able to afford the repairs, and she had not been able to let go. So the Daisy Mae had stayed, a patient skeleton waiting for someone to come along and decide what to do with her.
Now Loretta could see her.
The catamaran sat low in the water, her twin hulls dark with years of marine growth, her mast a bare stick against the fog. The trampoline between the hulls had sagged into a hammock of torn canvas and rusted hardware. The cabin, which Loretta remembered as a warm little room with a brass porthole and a sleeping shelf for two, was a black square, its windows gone, its door hanging open on a single hinge. A cormorant had taken up residence on the bow, its wings spread to dry in the pale morning light, and Loretta could see the white splash of its droppings streaking the deck like a rude signature.
She walked down the path.
The steps creaked under her boots. The flagstones were slick with dew, and she picked her way carefully down the slope, one hand trailing along the rough bark of the alders that lined the trail. The air smelled of salt and cedar and something sweeter she could not name, a green smell that she had not realized she had been missing until it was back. When she reached the bottom of the path, she paused at the gate to the dock and let herself look at the boat for a long moment before she went any closer.
The Daisy Mae. Named for Loretta's grandmother, a woman Loretta had never met. Maeve had told her the story often enough that she knew it by heart. The boat had been her grandfather's wedding present, a sailing catamaran he had designed himself and built in the boatyard over in Sequim. They had taken her up and down the coast for forty years, my mother and your grandfather, Maeve would say, her voice soft with the telling. They had taken her to Desolation Sound, to the San Juans, once all the way down to San Francisco and back. Your grandmother could gut a salmon faster than any man in the cove, and she could reef a mainsail in a gale without raising her voice. She was something else, your grandmother. She was something else.
Loretta's grandmother had died before Loretta was born. The boat was all that was left of her, and now the boat was dying too.
She undid the latch on the dock gate and stepped out onto the weathered planks. The boards were rough under her boots, gray and cracked, missing a few along the edge where the winter storms had been hungry. She walked slowly, passing the slips one by one. Most of them were empty, the boats gone south for the winter or hauled out for repairs. A few were occupied, but the owners were not in evidence. The only person she saw was a man in a canvas apron, hosing down a sailboat at the far end of the fuel dock, and he did not look up as she passed.
The Daisy Mae was tied to the last slip on the left, her bow pointing out toward the channel. Up close, the damage was worse than it had looked from the bluff. The port hull had a crack along the waterline, and the water inside it was black and still, giving back the sky in a perfect mirror. The starboard hull was intact but covered in a thick pelt of mussels and barnacles, and the trunk that connected the two hulls to the deck was soft with rot, its fiberglass gone spongy under Loretta's fingers when she reached out to touch it.
She stepped aboard, carefully, testing the deck with her weight before she put her full foot down. The fiberglass held, but it complained under her, a low creak that sounded almost like a voice. The cormorant on the bow regarded her with one yellow eye, then took off with a sound like tearing cloth, banking out over the water and disappearing into the fog.
The cabin door was open, and she ducked her head to step through it. Inside, the air was thick and still, smelling of damp wood and old canvas and the faint sweet rot of something organic that had given up. The sleeping shelf was still there, its foam mattress gone but the wooden frame still bolted to the bulkhead. The little galley had a two-burner stove and a tiny sink, both of them filmed with a layer of gray dust. A pair of salt-stained curtains still hung at the windows, but the windows themselves were gone, leaving two ragged holes that let in the morning light.
On the chart table, bolted to the forward bulkhead, there was a small wooden box.
Loretta reached for it. The latch was stiff, but it gave after she worked it back and forth a few times, and the lid came up with a creak. Inside, wrapped in a piece of oiled cloth, was a brass sextant. The case was tarnished green, but the instrument inside was gleaming, its mirrors still bright, its arc unmarked by rust. Loretta lifted it carefully, feeling the weight of it in her hand. Her grandmother had navigated with this. Her grandmother had taken a sight on the stars with this, had steered her boat through fog and dark with nothing but this little brass instrument and the knowledge of where the sun rose and set.
She wrapped it back up and set it in her coat pocket. She would take it up to the inn. She would find a place for it, somewhere safe, where the salt air could not get to it.
She climbed back out of the cabin and stood on the deck, looking out at the cove. The fog was lifting slowly, burning off the water in long pale sheets, and through it she could see the far shore, the dark line of trees, the white shape of a house perched on the bluff above the water. A heron was standing in the shallows near the breakwater, motionless as a piece of driftwood, waiting for something to swim past that it could eat. The world was very quiet, and very still, and the only sound was the slow slap of water against the hulls of the Daisy Mae, a sound like a heartbeat, like the boat was still breathing, even now.
Loretta stood there for a long time, the sextant heavy in her pocket, the morning light coming down through the fog in long pale shafts. She thought about her grandmother, who had been a stranger to her, who had left her this boat and this inn and this whole complicated life. She thought about Maeve, who had done the best she could, and who had kept the boat for all these years even when it would have been easier to let her go. She thought about herself, and about the woman she had been in Seattle, and about the woman she was becoming here, in this place where the edges of everything were close enough to touch.
Then she turned and walked back up the dock, and the sound of her boots on the weathered planks was the only human sound in the whole cove.
The man in the canvas apron was still hosing down his sailboat at the fuel dock, but he had been joined by a second figure. The two of them were standing at the stern of the boat, looking at something in the cockpit, and they were talking in low voices that Loretta could not hear. As she came up the dock, one of them looked up. It was the second figure, not the man in the apron. A tall man, broad in the shoulders, with a dark beard and a pair of work boots that looked like they had been through a war. He was wearing a faded flannel shirt and a canvas jacket that had seen better days, and he was looking at her with an expression she could not read.
It was Colton Wells. She knew it before he spoke, knew it from the shape of him, from the way he stood, from something in the set of his shoulders that she had seen that morning on the workboat. This was the man who had almost knocked her into the water. This was the man who had not apologized.
He looked at her for a long moment, and she looked back at him. The distance between them was thirty feet, maybe forty, and neither of them moved. The man in the apron said something low, and Colton Wells turned away, bending back over whatever it was they were working on, and the moment broke.
Loretta walked past them without speaking, and she did not look back.
The path up to the inn was steep, and by the time she reached the top her legs were burning and her breath was coming in long pulls of the salt air. She paused at the bench under the big alder, the one Maeve had put in for the view, and she sat down for a minute to catch her breath. The cove was spread out below her, and the Daisy Mae was a dark shape at the end of the dock, and the heron was still standing in the shallows, still waiting.
She thought about the sextant in her pocket. She thought about the rot in the hull, the crack along the waterline, the cost of the repairs that would be needed to make the boat sound again. She thought about the inn behind her, and the work that was waiting there, and the life she had left behind in Seattle, and the life that was waiting for her here, in this place where the edges of everything were close enough to touch.
Then she stood up, and she brushed off her jeans, and she went inside to find Maeve.
The inside of Crescent Cove Hardware smelled like cut cedar and motor oil, a combination that took her back to summer afternoons spent tagging along behind her grandfather while he bought nails and rope and whatever else a man who lived on the water always seemed to need. The bell above the door gave its familiar ring, and the man behind the counter, Hank Donnelly, someone she had known since she was small, looked up from his newspaper and smiled the slow smile of a man who had all the time in the world.
"Loretta Crane," he said, folding the paper. "Heard you were back."
"Just got in this morning," she said.
"Maeve's been on the phone with half the county about it. Sit down, sit down. You want coffee? I just made a pot."
She did not want coffee, but she sat down anyway, at the small table by the window that had a checkerboard burned into its surface, and Hank poured her a cup from a pot that looked like it had been brewing since the previous century. The coffee was strong and slightly scorched, and she wrapped her hands around the mug and tried to look like she was there for a reason.
What she was there for, really, was the lock. She had been thinking about it since the morning, about the key in her pocket and the door that would not budge, and she had decided that whatever the issue was, she was not going to call her father about it. She was going to fix it herself, or at least understand what was broken before she asked for help.
Hank was telling her about the storm, about a section of fence that had come down on his property, about the price of lumber these days, and she was half listening, nodding in the right places, when the door opened again and two women came in, both of them maybe ten years older than she was, both of them carrying the quiet self-importance of women who had been born in a place and never seen any reason to leave it. They were Eleanor Pace and her sister Ruth, if she remembered right, though she had not seen either of them in the better part of two decades. They nodded at Hank, who nodded back, and they made their way down the aisle toward the paint section, talking between themselves in the low, unhurried tone of people who assumed no one was listening.
That was the thing about Crescent Cove. People talked the same way they fished, slow and patient, and they expected you to be willing to wait for the bite. Loretta had been away so long she had almost forgotten that. Almost.
Eleanor said something about the new paint colors, and Ruth said something about the dining room, and then Eleanor lowered her voice and said a name that made Loretta's hand tighten around the mug.
"Well, you know Colton," Ruth said, and there was a weight in the way she said it, a fullness, as if the name itself carried a history. "He's never been the same."
"He's never been the same since she left," Eleanor agreed. "And that was, what, twenty years ago? More?"
"Twenty-two. The summer her mother died. Remember? She got on that bus and nobody ever heard from her again, not really. I always thought he'd go after her. I always thought he would get in his truck and drive to New York and bring her back. But he didn't. He just stayed here, and he fixed things, and he raised that girl of hers like she was his own."
"And he never married. Not once. Not ever."
"I heard Della tried to talk him into it, early on, but he wouldn't. He just looked at her and said he was done."
The words fell into Loretta's chest like small stones dropped into still water, and the ripples spread out through her in a way she was not prepared for. She stared at the surface of her coffee and tried to make her face do nothing at all, and she kept her eyes on the checkerboard on the table, on the dark squares and the light ones, on the pattern that had no beginning and no end.
She thought about the morning on the dock. She thought about the way he had looked at her, the way he had said her name, the way his hand had closed around hers and then let go too fast. She thought about the way he had not apologized.
"Well, you know how he is," Eleanor was saying. "Colton doesn't smile. Hasn't smiled since the day she got on that bus. I remember it, because I was there, and I saw his face, and I have never seen a man look so lost. Not even when his father died, and that was terrible. No, Colton Wells stopped smiling the day Loretta Crane left Crescent Cove, and I don't think he's started again."
The bell above the door rang, and Loretta looked up, and the man who came in was no one she knew, a tourist in a rain jacket, confused and slightly lost, and Eleanor and Ruth stopped talking and turned their attention to him, and the moment passed.
Loretta finished her coffee in two long swallows that burned her throat. She set the mug down, and she thanked Hank, and she walked to the back of the store where the locks were, and she stood in front of the display for a long time without seeing any of it. She was thinking about a bus depot in Seattle, about her mother's hand in hers, about a man on a dock who had watched her walk away and had not tried to stop her. She was thinking about the twenty-two years that had followed, and about the silence that had lived in the space where his voice should have been.
She picked out a deadbolt that looked sturdy enough for a storm and brought it to the counter, and Hank rang her up without comment, and she paid in cash, and she walked out into the afternoon.
The wind had picked up while she was inside, and the clouds were thickening to the west, dark and heavy with the promise of weather. She crossed the parking lot to her car, and she sat behind the wheel for a minute before she started the engine, and she watched a gull wheel overhead in the gray light, and she thought about all the things she had been told, and all the things she had not been told, and all the things she was going to have to figure out for herself.
Then she started the car, and she drove back to the inn, and she did not let herself think about Colton Wells until she was inside, and the door was closed, and she was alone with the sound of the wind in the cedars and the slow tick of the clock in the front hall.
Maeve was in the kitchen, and the kettle was on, and the smell of something baking, bread or maybe a cobbler, filled the air with the kind of warmth that made Loretta's chest ache in a way she could not quite name. Maeve looked up when she came in, and her eyes were sharp and knowing, and she did not ask where she had been. She just poured two cups of tea, and she set one in front of Loretta, and she sat down across from her, and she waited.
"I'm going to fix the lock," Loretta said.
"Good," Maeve said.
"I'm going to fix the lock, and then I'm going to paint the porch, and then I'm going to start on the rooms. One at a time. The way you said."
"The way I said," Maeve agreed.
Loretta wrapped her hands around the mug, and she looked at her grandmother across the small kitchen table, and she thought about all the years between this kitchen and the kitchen in Seattle, and all the years between this woman and the woman who had raised her, and all the years between the girl she had been and the woman she was now.
"The boat needs work," she said.
"I know."
"A lot of work."
"I know that too."
Loretta took a breath, and she let it out slow, and the sound of it was louder than she meant it to be.
"I'm going to need help," she said. "I don't want to, but I am. There are things I don't know how to do, and there are things I can't do alone, and if I'm honest with myself, I should have said that a long time ago."
Maeve's hand moved across the table and came to rest on top of Loretta's, and the touch was warm and firm and absolutely certain.
"You don't have to do anything alone," Maeve said. "That's not what home is for."
Outside, the wind shifted, and the first drops of rain began to fall, soft and steady against the windows, and the heron on the dock lifted its head and folded its wings and stepped out into the shallows, and the tide began to turn, and the afternoon stretched out ahead of them, long and full of work, and Loretta sat at the table and drank her tea and let herself, for the first time since she had come home, begin to believe that she might actually be able to stay.