Chapter 24: Eleven O'Clock

"A spring of choosing" turned out to be four weeks.

I used them.

I went to the first board meeting under my own name and voted my fifty percent on a new schedule for the dry dock.

I rebound the Hendricks Bible for the second time, because I'd done the first one wrong.

Each evening I stood at the bindery door and looked down the road.

A light came on at the dock house at six.

Orin kept his word.

He didn't come up the road, and he didn't call.

On the twenty-eighth night, Skye leaned on my cutting table with a coffee and looked at me.

"So," she said. "Are you a widow, or aren't you?"

"Hamish is in the churchyard," I said. "I put him there myself."

"And?"

"And I'm not married to anybody, Skye. I'm a woman with a press and fifty percent of a freighter."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the start of one."

She grinned into her cup.

"Go on," she said. "I'll lock up."

I walked down the road in the long April dusk in my father's cardigan.

The green ledger was in one pocket and my phone was in the other.

The dock house sat low at the water's edge, with a boat on stands beside it and a porch light on.

Orin opened the door before I knocked.

He had a dish towel over his shoulder and flour on his forearm.

He stood there in the yellow light and didn't say anything.

"You said a spring," he said.

"It's been four weeks."

"That's the spring, I guess."

"I picked." I held out my hand. "Take the ledger."

He took it, and opened it, and I watched him find the last page.

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