Chapter 10: For Your Absence

I didn't sleep.

At five I took the recipe tin out of the bottom of my suitcase and unwrapped it from the dish towel.

It was my grandmother's. Red, with the paint worn through to silver on the corners where three generations of thumbs had opened it.

I didn't open it.

I didn't need to.

I knew exactly which card it was under.

At seven Poppy and I walked down Front Street with the tin in my tote bag.

Lawrence's new rope was looped around her neck.

"Is it still there? Is the boat still there?"

"It's still there."

"Did he wait?"

I didn't know how to answer that.

The boat was tied at the end of the inn dock.

She was small and wooden, maybe eighteen feet, with a white hull and a deck gone grey from years in a shed.

Her name was painted on the stern in faded blue.

Sea Smoke.

His father's boat.

Lawrence was sitting on the dock beside her with two coffees.

He'd waited.

Poppy ran.

I didn't even shout at her.

"You came," Lawrence said to her.

"I almost went to Florida."

"I heard."

"But I didn't."

"Good."

He knelt on the boards and showed her where the dock line went.

She tied her bowline around the cleat with her tongue between her teeth.

The rabbit came up the hole.

The rabbit went around the tree.

It took her four tries.

He didn't help her once.

When the loop held, he looked up at me over her curls.

He didn't smile.

He looked like a man who'd been up all night too.

At ten, after the breakfast plates were stacked and before the lunch crew came in, I went into the walk-in.

He followed me and shut the heavy door.