The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: First Light

His father and I stood there by my car on Blackstone Boulevard.

Two people Holt had sent a picture of a beach.

"I'll find out where he really was," the old man said.

"So will I," I said.

He patted the roof of my car twice and walked back up to his house.

That night I texted Daniel.

"You said dinner. I'd like to collect early."

"Galilee. The town dock. Five a.m. Bring a hat."

"Five A.M.?"

"Best table in the state. No reservation needed."

At ten to five on Tuesday morning I stood on a dock that smelled like diesel and bait, holding two coffees.

It was still dark.

The fishing boats were all lit up and noisy, men shouting across the water in thick sweatshirts.

Daniel was at the end of the dock, in a wool hat and a canvas jacket, untying a boat.

Not a big one.

An old white lobster boat with a wooden wheelhouse and a name painted on the stern in faded blue.

"This is the best table in the state?"

"She was my dad's," he said. "He died in February. I came home to sell her."

"And?"

"And I didn't."

He held out his hand.

I took it and stepped down onto the deck.

He didn't let go right away.

We went out past the breakwater with the sky going grey in front of us.

He let me drive.

I was terrible at it.

"You're steering like it's a shopping cart," he said.

"You're coaching like it's a shopping cart."

"Left. Your other left. Margo. That's a buoy."

"I see the buoy!"

"The buoy sees you."

I was laughing so hard I had to give him the wheel.

He cut the engine a mile out.

The sun came up out of the ocean, orange, then too bright to look at.

A tanker sat out at anchor on the horizon, enormous and patient.

"That's tomorrow's," he said. "I'll take her up to Providence at six."

"How do you get on?"

"Rope ladder. Thirty feet up the side while she's moving."

"That's insane."

"That's why they pay me."

I drank my coffee and looked at him.

"Why didn't you ever call?"

He didn't pretend not to understand.

"You told me you'd never marry a man who was gone nine months a year," he said. "I was gone nine months a year. So I didn't call."

"For eight years."

"I wrote you about forty letters. I never mailed one."

"Why not?"

"Because you were right." He shrugged. "And because I'd have made you choose. I didn't want to be something you had to choose against your own good sense."

"So what changed?"

"My dad got sick last winter. I was in the Pacific. By the time I got home he couldn't talk." He looked out at the tanker. "I was tired of missing things. I came ashore, I sat the pilot exam, and I put your birthday on the calendar on my fridge."

"You put it on your fridge."

"In red."

"You knew I was engaged."

"I knew. I figured I'd come and lose, and then I could stop."

"Stop what?"

He looked at me then.

"Wondering," he said.

He drove me back to the dock at seven.

He didn't kiss me.

He tucked a strand of hair back under my hat with one finger, and that was worse.

"Dinner," I said. "Tonight. My house. I'll cook. Bring your own terrible wine."

That evening I was looking for my good pasta pot in the hall closet when I found it.

Holt's old iPad, in the bottom of a box of camping stuff he never used.

The screen was cracked across one corner.

I almost threw it in a trash bag.

Instead I plugged it into the kitchen outlet.

Daniel was at my stove stirring the sauce, because he'd taken one look at my onion chopping and taken the knife away.

The iPad lit up.

It still had my birthday as the passcode.

It started to ring with notifications, a whole year of them, pinging one after another.

Then the photos began to sync.

The first ones were from June.

A yellow tram on a steep street.

A café table with two glasses of red wine.

Kendall on a balcony over red roofs, laughing at the camera, in nothing but one of Holt's shirts.

Holt kissing her neck at a viewpoint with all of Lisbon spread out behind them, the date in the corner.

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