I pulled Nate Cole’s chair away from the wall, close enough that his knee touched mine, and told my brother I wasn’t staying for the winter.
Nate looked at the space I had closed between us. Then he moved his leg.
That small, courteous withdrawal hurt more than it had any right to. I had been back at Cedar Lake for forty minutes. My bags were still in the car. I had not planned to begin my summer by wanting a man who could retreat six inches without appearing to move at all.
“Nobody said you were,” Jonah said.
“You just told Britta I’d take over bookings in November.”
“If you were here.”
“You left that part out.”
Britta Sandell stopped sorting keys behind the counter. She had run the marina office for eleven years and had learned to go very still when an Alcott used a conditional tense.
“I heard November,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“I also heard bookings. Which is currently my job.”
Jonah rubbed his face. He was thirty-four, five years older than me, and most likely to call me sensible when he needed something unreasonable. His suitcase stood beside the door. He was flying back to Denver that afternoon to finish negotiations for a job he very much wanted and was trying not to admit he wanted more than this place.
I understood that. What I resented was being volunteered as the proof that his departure would leave no hole.
Nate slid the winter rota off the table and turned it over.
“We haven’t agreed winter hours,” he said. “Any of them.”
I should have been grateful. Instead I wanted to ask why he could defend my freedom in a business meeting but wouldn’t leave his knee beside mine.
At twenty-nine, I could manage a budget, a difficult customer and my own rented flat. Apparently I could not manage the return of a feeling I had spent seven months describing to myself as a pleasant summer friendship.
“Right,” Jonah said. “Fine. Nobody’s agreed anything.”
He pushed back his chair and went to check on his lift to the airport. Through the glass, I watched him lean against a piling, phone at his ear, already facing away from the water.
“He means well,” Nate said.
“I know. It doesn’t improve the rota.”
His mouth moved, almost a smile. I remembered that much too clearly: the economy of it, the sense of having earned something when he let the whole thing happen.
“You could have told me you were coming today.”
“I sent an email.”
“To the bookings address.”
“I thought you’d like a professional warning.”
“June.”
I looked down before he could see how much I liked hearing him say my name without an item after it. June, the insurance. June, can you approve the fuel delivery. Our winter calls had been full of things that could be solved.
“I’m here now,” I said. “What needs doing?”
Britta put down her keys.
“Your flat needs somebody to carry a lamp upstairs. The office needs you tomorrow.”
“It’s barely three.”
“Then you can carry it slowly.”
She opened the next envelope. That was all the permission she intended to supply.
Scene break
Nate came out to my car with me. I had met him fourteen months earlier, when Jonah brought him into the marina. I had been twenty-eight, he thirty-one. He had given up fleet-maintenance work to repair boats he could look at without a supervisor timing him, and I had arrived with a consultancy contract I could do remotely and a determination not to become my brother’s unpaid second pair of hands.
We had liked each other almost at once. That was the difficulty. He had liked me enough to remember that I disliked the last inch of coffee, where the grounds collected. Enough to send me a photograph of a customer who had labelled both ends of his canoe FRONT. Enough to stay on the dock until I finished talking.
Never enough to ask for anything that wasn’t safe to give.
“You bought a lamp,” he said.
“I had one delivered here. Britta opened it to make sure I’d ordered the right thing.”
“She plugged it in behind the till for a week.”
“A rigorous test.”
He put the cardboard box in my boot. His forearm brushed mine when we reached for the lid together, and this time neither of us moved immediately. Warm skin, the rough seam of his sleeve. A small pale scar I didn’t remember.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
He followed my gaze. “Shelf bracket. December.”
“I was away for the exciting months.”
“A man brought me a lawn mower in February.”
“Scandal.”
“Asked if I could make it float.”
I laughed, and his expression changed before he could smooth it out. It wasn’t the polite pleasure of someone whose joke had worked. It was relief.
“You should have called,” I said.
“About the mower?”
“For no reason.”
His hand lay on the edge of the boot. I could have set mine beside it. I could have done a great many things if my brother hadn’t come striding across the gravel with his bag and that particular affectionate haste which expected everybody to understand.
“You two all right?” Jonah asked.
“We were discussing amphibious gardening equipment,” I said.
“Good.” He kissed the top of my head, a habit I tolerated only because I was busy being glad to see him. “Listen, June. Before I go. I’d like to sell my share this summer.”
The boot lid hovered above us.
“All of it?”
“It’s twenty percent, not the crown jewels.”
“I know how much it is.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know that too. Have you agreed anything?”
“No. The valuation first, then we talk. Nobody’s springing a buyer on you.”
He looked at Nate as he said it. Nate gave one short nod.
That was fair. We had all signed the same agreement. Neither forty-percent partner could be handed a stranger without consent. I wasn’t being cheated. Still, for a second I felt I’d come home to find both men standing in a room whose door I’d only just discovered.
“We’ll talk when you’re back,” I said.
Jonah’s shoulders dropped. “Thank you.”
He hugged Nate, quickly and hard, then climbed into the waiting taxi. We stood in the gravel until it turned at the bait shop.
“Did you know?” I asked.
“He said he was considering it. I told him to tell you himself.”
“And did you consider buying it?”
“I considered everything. I haven’t made an offer.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“Before I made it.”
He closed the boot. Across the lake a boat’s engine wound down into a cough. Someone laughed on the far dock, the sound startlingly near across the water.
“I don’t want this to turn into you and Jonah deciding what will make June happy.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then stop moving away every time I get close.”
The words were out before I could put a useful object between us.
Nate went still. He could have pretended not to understand. There was plenty of gravel, plenty of afternoon, plenty of business waiting to rescue him.
Instead he said, “That’s not because I don’t want you close.”
My fingers tightened around the car key.
“Then what is it?”
He looked at the road Jonah had taken.
“Something I should never have promised.”
I wanted him to explain right there, with the sun in my eyes and my lamp in the car. But Britta was coming out to lock the office, and this was a conversation I refused to have in the gaps other people left us.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Before we open. Coffee. No bookings.”
“All right.”
I got into the car. This time, when he leaned down to say goodbye, he didn’t stand farther away than he needed to.