Chapter 22: Final

Flora's POV

The decree came sixty-one days after the filing.

My lawyer sent it in an email at seven in the morning, with no greeting at all.

It was a single attached page.

It had a seal at the bottom and a date, and my married name was no longer on it.

I read it on the edge of my bed in the cottage, with frost on the window.

I waited to feel something huge.

What I felt, mostly, was hungry.

I went downstairs and ate three of my mother's biscuits standing at the counter.

She looked at me, put the kettle on, and said nothing.

Then I drove to the boatyard.

I had not planned to, and I did not call ahead.

The shed was warm with a woodstove.

The sailboat stood on its stilts, painted now, deep green with a thin white line.

Elias was on a ladder, doing something to the bowsprit with a brush.

He saw me in the doorway and put the brush down very carefully across the can.

"Flora."

"It came," I said, and held up my phone.

He climbed down the ladder.

He didn't come toward me.

He stood with his hands at his sides on the far side of the stove.

I understood he was keeping to my rule until I said it ended.

"Sixty-one days," he said.

"You counted too."

"I'm a numbers man."

I laughed, and then I stopped, because I had to say the other thing, and it was ugly.

"Elias, I need to ask you something, and you won't like it."

"All right."

"Would you be standing here if I didn't own fifty-one percent of Saltmarsh House?"

He did not answer right away.

He didn't look hurt either, only thoughtful, which was worse.

"Why do you ask?"

"Because everyone who has been kind to me this year needed my name on a page," I said.

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