Chapter 265: Jake
Three weeks since we carried her home to Northhaven; six—closer to seven—since the night a man we won’t name carved terror into our lives. She’s doing well. It still feels dangerous to say out loud, but it’s true in the ways that count: the nightmares come, yes—hard and vicious if we don’t make love and fuck her gently into being tired before she drifts off, the kind that wring sweat out of her and shake her apart until she’s crying in our arms—but her therapist sees her every week and calls it expected, survivable, a storm we’ll keep sailing through. Alleys make her tremble. I take the street side and Reid takes the wall and we don’t pretend we don’t notice.
Her body’s mending. The cast is gone, traded for a soft wrap that keeps her wrist steady; the stitches are out, leaving a clean bold scar down her forearm and another lower on her belly—proof she was broken and put back together. The bruises have lifted; freckles reclaimed the skin they covered. She’s eaten her way back into the curves I adore, and when she laughs at breakfast with jam on her lip, the word that sits in my chest is alive.
Work called and she answered. Last week we spotted the pregnant humpback again and, from that minute, Maddie refused to sit shore-side. Worth it. When she saw the mother—weeks out at most—she lit up so bright the deck felt warmer, grinning at porpoises, cooing at dolphins, whispering hello into the wind like the ocean was an old friend. More scars than before, nightmares at night, but happy in daylight. We don’t let her go anywhere alone; she hasn’t complained once about the overprotectiveness, just slips her hand into mine or Reid’s and keeps moving.
Two weeks back we crossed paths with the Grayling crew. They went starstruck and awkward, those men, hugging her with careful hands while she cried thank you for helping save her. Last time they saw her she was blue-lipped and slick with blood and seawater; they didn’t know she looks like a damn angel when she’s whole. Which, she does. They stared and stared and stared like they’d never seen anything so beautiful, like they wanted to marry her. One look from us and they remembered themselves, scattered like gulls off a trawler.
Talking about marrying—well. The day Finn, Liam, and Charlie stole her for a beach afternoon, Reid and I drove one town over to a tiny jewelry shop that smelled like polish and eucalyptus. We told the owner nothing, and he told us even less, just laid out velvet trays. We saw a dozen rings and chose the same one without speaking: an oval stone that glows instead of glares, set in warm gold with little petal-cut diamonds on the shoulders like sea-spray catching sunset. We could see it on her hand so easily it hurt. We had her size because I measured her one night while she slept—string around her finger, knot against my thumb, the kind of theft a man only commits when the outcome is a promise.
We bought it. We tucked the box away and drove home in the hush that follows a vow. We still haven’t solved the paper problem—whose name goes where, what it means, how we bend a single ceremony into a plural life. We’re arguing, gently, about how to ask her too: on the water at dawn; in the kitchen with flour on her nose; under a sky fat with stars. The logistics can wait. The truth can’t. We have the ring. We want her to marry us. And soon—when the moment feels like the one the sea itself would bless—we will.
It’s mid-August, the part of the season when the light goes honey-thick at five and every wake smells like copper and salt. Two months left—about eight weeks until we shut it down in mid-October—and she keeps counting forward instead of back. “One week,” she says, practically bouncing in my shadow on the pier, “one week until the lobster festival.” She lists it like a prayer: rolls dripping butter, paper boats of fries, the whole town lit up with strings and lanterns and tipsy laughter, music bleeding out of every doorway. Reid and I just watch her glow and it does something to my ribs.
“We’ll take you,” I tell her, “and you can point at anything.”
“Anything,” Reid echoes, mouth curving like he’s already picturing her in one of those stupid claw hats. “Rolls, cones, stupid bibs, the lot.”
She pretends to think it over, eyes bright, freckles catching the sun. “Anything I want?”
“Everything you want,” I say, and I mean it in a way that has nothing to do with food or lights or the calendar ticking toward mid-October.
We don’t even know where we’re living after the season, and for once that uncertainty doesn’t itch—it just waits. Usually, when the mid-October wind starts shouldering the moorings loose, Reid and I break the Vigil down to bones and lists, then disappear for a while—south along the coast, or back to the city to shake hands with people who like their ocean in spreadsheets. But this year isn’t a usual year, and the only plan that makes sense is the one with her name on it. If she wants city lights and late-night takeout and a place with too many books stacked under the windows, we’ll sign a lease tomorrow and carry her up three flights every night like it’s ritual. If she wants cliffs and a stove that clicks twice before it catches, we’ll stay in Northhaven, winterize the gear, make the beach ours when the tourists go home. If she wants the road—motel coffee and maps with our fingerprints worn into the corners—we’ll do that, too, throttle loose, no clock but the tide in our heads.
We haven’t asked yet, and that is on purpose. She’s relearning how to move through days without that shadow skulking at the edge of every alley, relearning the feel of her own breath at three a.m., and we are not going to crowd her choices with our hunger. So we keep the future soft and wide, a blanket we can shake out when she’s ready. We learn the small systems instead—what time her hands go cold, how much laugh a good sighting pulls out of her, which street makes her tense and which trail unwinds her spine. When she looks forward, we look with her; when she looks down, we hold the ground steady. Wherever she says “there,” that’s home.