Page 130 of These Summer Storms

He shook his head. “She left when I was young. I don’t remember her.”

The words singed, too casual. Like it was normal. Like it was okay. Alice stiffened, angry for this man and the boy he’d once been, but she knew better than to say so. Instead, she laced the fingers of one hand through his. “And you weren’t there.”

He nodded, the movement stiff, like he wasn’t quite sure how his body worked. At least, the part of his body that wasn’t touching her. That hand at her leg was still moving. A balm. Maybe for both of them.

They sat in silence for a bit, until she couldn’t bear it anymore for him. “You don’t have to—”

“I didn’t want to be there,” he said, quickly, like he wanted to get it out. “I hated it there.”

Alice’s thumb stroked back and forth over the beautiful mechanics on his arm. “Tell me about sailing,” she said, thinking she was changing the subject. That she was giving him a port in whatever storm he was facing.

“I didn’t grow up sailing. Not the way you did. My father was a fisherman. There isn’t really time for sailing when you’re up at three to clear as many crabs as you can before the fish market opens. He had a motorized fishing boat, a rotating crew of whichever misfits were still awake at the bar by the docks when he was heading out, and afternoons and evenings free and clear to spend at that bar himself.”

She didn’t stop touching him, didn’t dare change anything for fear he’d stop talking.

And he didn’t, as though floodgates had opened. “When I was a kid, I’d go on the boat with him.”

“That’s how you learned.”

“He taught me everything he knew.Someday this will all be yours,he’d say. And I wanted it, then. I wanted the fishing boat and the boys on the pier and the harbormaster who gave him shit anytime he was the last one out. His kingdom.”

Like the one they were all vying for.

“Dads are like that,” she said, softly. “They’re the first kings we know, for better or worse.”

He returned their hands to her lap and said, “Mine was for worse. By the time I was in high school, he wasn’t getting on the boat most days. There wasn’t any money, and I was desperate to get out.” He shrugged.

“You took over the business.” Somehow, she knew the story.

He nodded. “If I was up early enough, I could be out and back before school started. A guy at the fish market would sell my crabs for a percentage.”

She sat up, annoyed. “You were a kid.”

“One who understood exactly how business works before I was in the eleventh grade. I worked my ass off to make sure I got into the University of Delaware, because it was close enough to home that I could run the boat every day until graduation.” He paused. “My dad didn’t come to it. He meant to—at least, he said he was going to—but he didn’t. And so I never went back. To the boat, or to him.” He paused. “Not even when his liver gave out. Not even at the end.”

She tightened her grip on his. “You were angry. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

He was still for a long time, and then he took a deep breath and turned his arm face up, revealing the tattoo again. “By the time he died, the boat was long gone. And I didn’t know what to do to grieve him—I wasn’t really sure how to grieve him. How do you grieve someone who you don’t really know? And who you don’t really forgive?”

The question was familiar. “I don’t know.”

“I got a tattoo.”

She traced the lines of it again. “Keeping you on course.”

When she looked up, he was watching her. “I might want a new course.”

A shiver went through Alice at the words, at the tease in them, the possibility. As though he might have found another direction to chart his course. And though she had not known Jack Dean for long, she had no doubt that he was the kind of man who got what he was aiming for. “What would Franklin Storm say?”

He stiffened at the words and she immediately regretted saying them, bringing her father into this moment. “He would be pretty pissed at me tonight.”

“Yeah, but he’s dead, so…” The words were so unexpectedly inappropriate, they both laughed louder than they should have, loud enough for it to turn into a secret, locked away in the walls of the house. When they stopped, Alice said, “God, I can’t believe hedied. He was so enormous. It’s impossible to imagine what comes next, without him.”

“He wasn’t easy,” he replied, reaching for her, his thumb stroking over her cheek. “Alice, don’t forget, your dad brought me into the innercircle five years ago. I saw the best and worst of him. I know how he was. I know how furious he could get. How entrenched. How controlling.”

“Then why—” Confusion flared and she cut off the rest of the question.Then why are you doing this?

He heard it anyway. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little loyalty to him for taking a chance on me when I wasn’t sure I was worth it. Maybe it’s a deep-seated obsession with doing my job well. At the beginning it was. But now”—he squeezed her knee—“maybe it’s because I want to make sure it all works out.”