Chapter 8: Boathouse Terms

I put the phone back on Abel's chest exactly as I found it, face up, rising and falling.

Then I went upstairs and lay awake until the sky turned grey.

By nine the next morning, I knew what I was going to do.

Byron took Denton and Tucker to the yard to look at a hull, and he said he'd be back by noon.

He looked at me a long second before he left, and I smiled at him over my coffee.

"Go on," I said. "I'm fine."

He went.

Abel came down at ten with his hair wet and his shirt untucked, rubbing his jaw where Byron's forearm must have caught it.

He took a beer from the fridge at ten in the morning.

I watched him walk out the back door toward the boathouse, and I followed.

The boathouse was cool and dim and smelled of cedar and gasoline.

Abel was sitting on an overturned dinghy with his phone in his hand, scrolling.

"Morning, kiddo."

"Give me the phone."

He looked up.

His smile was slow and easy, and it did not reach his eyes.

"Excuse me?"

"Phones go in a bowl, Abel. There's a blue one on the hall table. Every phone, every Friday, when you come in. Yours, Denton's, Tucker's."

"Byron's too?"

"All of them."

"Says who?"

"Says the girl who owns the house you're sleeping in on Fridays."

That was not true.

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