undertow - secret are not buried forever

chapter 5- Low Tide

The storm wasn't supposed to be anything. That was the trouble with Maine weather in early spring — it lied by omission, gave you a forecast of "showers, clearing by evening," and then decided halfway through the afternoon to mean something else entirely.

Nora was at the boatyard because the crane operator needed Dominic to sign off on ground conditions before they could bring equipment down to the Point on Monday, and what should have taken ten minutes turned into forty because the crane operator was late, and by the time he left, the sky over the water had gone the color of a healing bruise.

"You should head out," Dominic said, glancing up at it. "Ferry'll stop running before the causeway floods."

"I'm not taking the ferry. I've got the car."

"The causeway floods at high tide in weather like this, Nora, car or no car." He said it the way you'd explain something to a person who'd forgotten how the tides worked, which irritated her exactly because she had forgotten, ten years in Boston having quietly erased a whole category of knowledge she used to carry in her bones. "You'll be stuck out here till it drops. Could be four hours."

She checked her phone. He was right — the tide chart she used to know by instinct now had to be looked up, and it told her, with flat indifference, that she'd made a mistake.

"I'll wait it out at the house," she said.

"The house doesn't have power since the inspector flagged the panel. You want to sit in the dark for four hours in a storm, be my guest." He was already walking toward the workshop, not waiting to see if she'd follow, which was somehow more effective than if he'd asked. "Or you can sit in here, where there's a stove and coffee that isn't broken."

She followed him. She told herself it was the coffee.

The workshop held heat the way old buildings do, unevenly, in pockets — warm near the woodstove, cold by the bay doors where the wind found every seam. Dominic banked the fire, set a battered percolator on top of the stove without asking if she wanted any, and went back to the hull he'd been fairing when she first walked in, running a hand along the wood like he was checking a pulse.

Rain came on hard outside, drumming the metal roof in a way that made conversation either impossible or, strangely, easier — you had to lean in to be heard, and leaning in undid some of the careful distance they'd both been keeping since the ferry dock.

"What is it?" she asked, nodding at the hull, mostly to have something to say that wasn't the four hours stretching out ahead of them.

"Twenty-two foot daysailer. Guy in Camden wants something his grandkids can learn from." He kept working, unhurried. "Your dad's old design, actually. Cedar strip, same lines he used on the Merry Anne."

Nora hadn't expected that — her father, dead eleven years now, a name she hadn't heard spoken aloud in this town without her having said it first. "You still use his plans?"

"Best small-boat designer this coast ever had. Why wouldn't I?" He glanced up at her, something unguarded in it for just a second before he caught himself and looked back at the wood. "You used to help him fair the hulls. You remember how?"

"It's been a while."

"Come here, then." He said it simply, without weight, the way you'd invite someone to remember how to ride a bike, and she came, because refusing would have made more of it than accepting did, or that was what she told herself as she crossed the workshop floor and stood beside him at the hull.

He handed her a fairing batten, guided her hand along the sheer line without quite touching her — close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him, far enough that neither of them had to acknowledge it — and for a while there was nothing but the rain and the wood and the old, wordless language of feel where it's fair, feel where it fights you, which her father had taught them both, separately, a lifetime ago, never guessing he was teaching them the same thing at the same time.

"You're better at this than you used to be," Dominic said, quiet, close to her ear because of the rain.

"I had a good teacher."

"Two of them," he said, and something in his voice on the word two made her look up at him, and for a moment — one unguarded, storm-lit moment — the ten years fell away and it was just his face, familiar as her own, closer than it had been in a decade.

Neither of them moved for it. That was the thing she'd remember later — that they'd stood there, close enough, with every excuse the weather could offer, and neither one had closed the distance.

"The tide won't turn for hours yet," he said finally, stepping back, reaching for the percolator instead of her. "Might as well get comfortable."

She took the coffee he poured her with a hand that wasn't quite steady, and told herself the storm was the only reason her heart was going like that, and knew, pouring cream she didn't want into a mug she didn't need, that she was lying to herself again, same as always.