This Heiress Doesn't Fight Anymore novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Launch

Gran looked at the tablet for a long time.

Then she looked at the man in the windbreaker over the top of her glasses.

"Five o'clock Wednesday," she said.

"Five o'clock."

"You'll be here?"

"I'll be here."

"Good," Gran said. "Bring a pen. You'll be signing something."

He left.

The old sailor sat back down on the cooler very slowly.

"She's not ready," Seth said. "The hatches aren't hung. The engine's not aligned. She hasn't got a drop of bottom paint."

"Then we launch Wednesday," I said.

Everybody looked at me.

"Not Saturday. Wednesday. Two o'clock. He pays when she floats, and the man in the windbreaker gets his money at three."

"Charlie, that's five days."

"I know."

We did it in five days.

I drew the list on the back of a bait-shop receipt and pinned it next to the napkin.

Hugo took a week off from the company he ran and nobody there argued.

Bess painted the bottom red, lying on her back under the hull on a creeper, swearing at it.

On Tuesday night at eleven, with the hatches still not hung, I put down my pencil.

"Rules," I said.

Seth looked at the hatches.

Then he turned off the lights.

On Wednesday at noon the hatches were hung, and Seth lay down in his hammock, and I lay down with him.

At one-thirty the whole harbor came.

Boats I'd never seen anchored off the cove, and boats I had.

Lobstermen who'd known Seth's grandfather.

Two old wooden yawls from the yacht club, with the old sailor's friends on deck in blazers.

The sweet young reporter, in the mud again, with her sunburn peeling.

Hugo, in his holey sweatshirt, standing beside the cradle with a mallet.

The man in the windbreaker, at the top of the gravel, with his tablet.

And behind him, getting out of a white car, Arabella.

She'd brought a man with a notebook.

She stood at the top of the yard and talked to him, low and fast, with her hand on his arm.

She never once looked down at the water.

I let her talk.

At two o'clock Gran stood up out of her lawn chair beside the railway.

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