Chapter 15: The Yacht Club

Silvia's POV

Remo came back from the north buoy with a memory card and a face I didn't like.

He put the card on my drafting sheet.

"The photographer's," he said. "Every picture he took of this window."

"Where did you get it?"

"On the Delmonte dock. I lied to you about where I was going."

I put down my pencil.

"Then tell me where you were," I said.

He told me standing up, with his back against the door, and his eyes on the floor between us.

Fiora's father on the pier. The offer of the whole lake.

Then the morning of the inspection, fourteen years ago, a deckhand of twenty carrying my father's bags to a launch and being sent for coffee.

"I told the harbor police that night," Remo said. "They wrote my name down wrong and never called."

"I tried again the next year. A deckhand's word weighed nothing against a Delmonte one."

I couldn't speak for a moment.

"You said you met my father once," I said.

"I did. For about four minutes."

"What was he like?"

"He thanked me for the bags." His voice cracked on it. "Nobody else on that dock did."

I crossed the loft and stood in front of him.

"He told you to tell me this himself," I said. "Before he did."

"Yes."

"And you did."

"Yes."

"You walked across a lake and took a camera card off a man to buy time to say it. In one morning."

"It was the only way I knew to do it right."

I put my forehead against his chest.

He didn't move.

Then his arms came around me, slowly and carefully.

"I'm not done being angry about Thursday," I said into his shirt.

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