Chapter 14: Before Morning

Lachlan's POV

By nine that night I thought I had won the week.

I had held two hundred crewmen for the price of a speech and a promise I could not afford.

I had watched my mother be laughed at on my own dock.

I had watched Ione stand in front of her with a borrowed hard hat on and not give an inch.

I had seen her nod up at me: I'm all right.

I had never been so proud of anyone.

Then I sat down in the pilot office with a cold cup of coffee.

The thing my mother had whispered to her came to me all at once.

Ione had not told me what it was.

She had walked away from the dock to her sister's car and said, "Call me tonight," and left.

I called at nine.

It went to voicemail.

Her shift at the clinic ran late on Tuesdays.

I tried again at ten.

Then I opened my laptop and typed in the name of the attorney who had handled the paperwork the summer we married.

It took me six minutes to find the file.

The email was where I had known it would be, in an archive folder from a June two years ago.

The subject line that said only: Beaufain / Dufresne.

I had written it on the eleventh.

One week after the courthouse.

I had been in my father's old office with the door shut.

The portrait looked down at me.

My mother's voice in my head said that a CEO does not marry a woman he met at an ER.

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