Chapter 17: A Copy of the Key

Gabe's POV

I heard her on the gravel before she reached the door.

She had always walked softly, with her heels set down a little too carefully.

I took my phone out of my shirt pocket and pressed record.

Then I put it back with the microphone facing out and picked up my plane.

"Gabe," Kendra said from the doorway. "Baby."

She wore a gray coat that I had bought her in the first year of our marriage.

She was smiling, and her eyes were wet, and she held a paper bag in front of her with both hands.

"Don't come in," I said.

"I brought you lunch. You skip it. You always skip it."

She came in anyway.

She set the bag on the bench beside my vise, and she looked around the shed with her head tilted.

"Oh, your boat," she said. "Oh, honey. What happened to your boat?"

"You know what happened."

"I think someone was cruel to you." She came a little closer. "I think a lot of people have been cruel to you, because you never let anyone explain."

I kept planing the edge of a board.

It was not the board I needed. I needed to have something in my hands.

"Say what you came to say," I said.

Her face smoothed out. It was something I had seen perhaps a dozen times in six years, and it always came before the real thing.

"I'll make this simple," she said. "I'm tired. I've been tired for a long time."

"Okay."

"You come home. You sign the boat over to me, since half the deposit was my money anyway. You tell that girl you were confused. And I'll stop."

"Stop what?"

"All of it." She spread her hands, gentle. "Colby and his family, and the filming, and the police. They do what I tell them, Gabe. They always have."

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