chapter 1- Return
The ferry cut through fog so thick that Bell Harbor didn't so much appear to accumulate — first the black teeth of the breakwater, then the huddled roofs, then, unmistakably, the boatyard.
Nora Calloway stood at the rail with her mother's ashes in a cardboard box because she hadn't been able to bring herself to buy an urn, and she watched the gray shape of Cole & Son Boatworks rise out of the mist like something she'd tried to drown and failed.
The sign still said & Son. Ten years, and no one had bothered to change it, or maybe someone had wanted it to stay exactly that way. She didn't know anymore what any of the Coles wanted. She'd made sure of that.
"You gonna be okay?" the ferry deckhand asked her, not because he recognized her — he was too young, maybe twenty-two, with the wind-chapped look of a boy who'd grown up on boats — but because she was gripping the rail like it might buck her off.
"Fine," she said, which was the least true word in the English language, and one she'd used more in the last three weeks than in the previous ten years combined.
Her mother had died on a Tuesday in March, alone in the lighthouse-keeper's house on Widow's Point, with the kettle still warm on the stove and a half-finished crossword on the table. The neighbor who found her — Nora didn't even know the neighbor's name, that was the kind of daughter she'd become — said it looked peaceful. Nora had flown up from Boston, identified a body that was and wasn't her mother, signed seventeen forms, and driven back to the city in a fog that had nothing to do with weather.
Now she was back, with the ashes and a house to sell and a fiancé she no longer had, and the only person in Bell Harbor she was afraid of running into owned the property she'd have to cross to get to the water.
She should have hired someone to handle all of it. She had the money now, or she would once the Whitfield account settled. She could have paid a local realtor, signed things remotely, never set foot on this rock again.
But her mother's house didn't sell itself, and some stubborn, grief-stupid part of Nora wanted to see it — wanted, God help her, to walk through it one more time — before she let it go to strangers who'd gut the good bones and put in granite countertops and call it "coastal chic."
The ferry groaned against the dock. Nora picked up her bag, tucked the box of ashes against her hip like an infant, and stepped onto land that still, after everything, felt more like home than any square foot of Boston ever had.
She told herself she wouldn't look at the boatyard again.
She looked at the boatyard again.
A man was standing at the water's edge with his back to her, sanding the hull of an overturned dinghy in long, unhurried strokes, and something about the set of his shoulders — broader now, sure, ten years broader — made her stomach drop the way it used to when she was seventeen and hadn't yet learned that wanting a person that badly was a kind of danger.
He didn't turn around. She made herself walk toward town, toward the rental car waiting at Higgins Auto, and didn't look back again until she was safely behind the wheel with the doors locked, feeling, absurdly, like she'd gotten away with something.
She hadn't gotten away with anything. She knew that even then. Bell Harbor had two thousand people and one grocery store. She would see Dominic Cole again within the week, and there was no version of that meeting that wouldn't cost her something.
