What We Choose novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Point

He didn't take Main Street.

He drove around the harbor the long way, past the boatyard and the Wharf Lofts.

Then he took the narrow road that ran along the water to the point.

The sun was low and orange over the boats.

I'd never been out here. In a year in Larkhaven, nobody had ever brought me.

"This is the point," I said.

"This is the point."

"You had a house out here. With her."

"I had a house out here." He turned onto a gravel drive between two bare oaks. "I don't anymore."

The big shingled house I'd seen in Sienna's Facebook pictures was gone.

In its place was a frame.

Two stories of new lumber, still pale, stood up against the sky.

The roof was sheathed, and three of the big window openings facing the water already had glass.

It looked like a drawing of a house somebody had started to color in.

He turned off the engine.

"The divorce was final Tuesday," he said. "Her lawyer didn't fight once he read the thread. She got a car and a handshake. I kept the land."

"And the house?"

"I took it down in January. Every board." He looked at the frame through the windshield. "I didn't want to live in anything she picked."

We got out.

The ground was frozen gravel and mud. The air smelled like salt and sawdust.

He held my hand over the planks laid across the mud to the front door.

It wasn't a door yet, just a rectangle of studs.

Inside, it was all bones.

You could see straight through the walls to the water on three sides.

"Kitchen," he said, and pointed. "Sink under that window, so you can see the harbor while you're doing dishes."

"Who's doing dishes?"

"Me. You're watching."

"Good answer."

He walked me through it, room by room, studs and air.

The living room had a fireplace that was still a stack of block.

The mudroom already had hooks screwed into the framing, because he said a mudroom without hooks was a lie.

Upstairs, on plywood, he showed me a small square room at the back.

"Who's this for?"

"Kenna, when she stays over and refuses to drive home."

"She'll never leave."

"I measured for that."

Then he took me to the front of the house, to the biggest room, where the window was already in.

The whole harbor was in it. The boats, the inn, the far lights of the plaza where the Christmas tree had been.

There were moving blankets folded in the corner. A work light. A propane heater, already ticking.

He'd been out here earlier today.

He stood beside me at the glass with his hands in his jacket pockets.

"I'm not proposing," he said.

"Okay."

"I want to say that first, so you don't brace."

"I'm not bracing."

"You're bracing a little."

I was. I made myself stop.

"Here's the question," he said. "I'm going to finish this house. I want you to live in it with me. But if you don't want to live here, in this town, after what it did to you, I'll sell it in a week. I'll stay on the top floor in Dorchester. I'll build somewhere else. Ohio, if you want."

"You'd build in Ohio."

"I'd build on the moon. I'd need a permit." He turned his head and looked at me. "It's not my choice. It's yours. That's the question."

I looked out at the harbor.

At the inn, with its one lit window on the second floor, which could have been any room.

I looked at the plaza, where I'd taken a microphone out of a woman's hand.

I looked at the green, where I'd walked through three hundred people with no hair.

This town had not made it easy to be believed.

It had also driven a jar of change to a cancer center.

It had stood up in a pie tent and said I was telling the truth.

"Here," I said.

He didn't say anything.

"I'm not giving them the harbor," I said. "I've earned the harbor."

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