Chapter 8: The Wing

Finnegan's POV

That night I sat alone in the inn above Rockport harbor and watched the gala clip again.

Every time, I stopped it at the same frame.

Her wrist, under his hand, on the white tablecloth.

She was looking up at me when it happened.

I had seen that look before, on a different woman, in a different room, and I had not been able to do anything about it then either.

Lot 317 had come to me in an envelope from Tobias Kemper's office.

It was a clean donation form, signed and dated, with the boat's registration number written at the bottom.

I had looked the number up out of habit.

The Marigold belonged to Samantha Thackeray, not to him.

I should have called her.

Instead I put it in the program.

The board was short of its goal, Kemper was a big donor, and his signature was good.

That was the mistake, and it was mine.

Then I stood on a stage and watched her find out.

I had asked myself all night why I'd said yes to the Rockport trip.

It was the donors, I told myself, and the foundation's word.

It wasn't.

I had said yes because she stood in my office in a cardigan with her father's key in her fist and did not cry.

I had said yes because she had been sick over the rail that morning, and I knew what I was looking at.

Poppy's mother had been sick like that for six weeks, in the spring.

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