Chapter 28: What the Sea Gave Back

Cade's POV

I was on the headland before six, with a thermos and no reason to be there.

The pullout was empty.

The rail still had a stain on the gravel under it where forty caps of whiskey had gone.

I stood where I had stood five years ago and looked at the rocks.

The county had called on a Thursday.

A fisherman had found a body wedged in the rocks below the road, three weeks after the crash.

It was wearing a black leather vest.

They had not let me look at the face.

"Mr. Donohue, you don't want to," the man at the morgue had said, and I had been thirty years old and had believed him.

He had shown me the vest laid out on a steel tray, still wet.

The patch was at the shoulder, with the VP stitched under it by Ginny's hand.

I had put my name on a form.

I had never once asked how a vest stays on a body for three weeks in that water.

I thought about that now, because Willa had asked it in Ginny's kitchen with her hands flat on the table.

I was a different man than I had been.

The wind came off the sea.

I had a brother.

He was alive and sleeping in the loft above the bar.

Ginny had wanted him under her roof, and he had said yes before she finished the sentence.

I had hit him in the face and held him in front of forty men.

I had not cried since I was thirty.

I did not cry now either, but my chest had been loose for two days.

I told myself that was happiness.

Willa had been sick two mornings that week and called it the clinic cats.

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