CHAPTER ONE
The banner read WELCOME TO THE 47TH ANNUAL CALLOWAY HARBOR DAYS in letters big enough to see from the lighthouse, and Astrid Calloway had personally approved the font.
That was the job, mostly. Not the big decisions — those belonged to her father, to the board, to men in blue blazers who’d known her since she was in diapers and still called her “Wally’s girl” like she hadn’t graduated with honors from a school that cost more than some of their boats. Astrid’s job was the font. The ribbon. The seventeen variations of community and legacy and proud heritage that went on banners and press releases and the company’s mildly embarrassing Instagram account.
She was good at it. That was the part nobody wanted to say out loud — that smoothing things over was a skill, the same way her father’s lawyers had a skill, the same way the men who actually hauled the nets had a skill. Hers just didn’t smell like diesel.
“You’re doing the face again,” said Delia, appearing at her elbow with two plastic cups of rosé that had definitely come from a box despite costing nine dollars each. “The PR face. Eyes wide, mouth closed, very fascinated by a banner you already approved three weeks ago.”
“I’m working.”
“You’re standing next to a clam shack pretending a font is interesting so you don’t have to talk to Preston Hale, who has been orbiting you for the last ten minutes like a sad, expensive moon.”
Astrid took the rosé without looking at where Delia was pointing, because she did not need to look to know Preston was there, in his quarter-zip the color of money, laughing at something with his head tipped back so the sun caught his jaw at the most flattering possible angle. He was, by any reasonable account, a perfectly nice man. That was the whole problem with Preston. He was perfectly nice in the way a piece of furniture was perfectly nice — solid, attractive, exactly where you’d expect it, never once surprising.
“I like the font,” Astrid said. “It’s doing a lot of work.”
Down at the public dock, past the rope line where the Calloway Seafood tent gave way to the part of Harbor Days that wasn’t technically Calloway’s to brand, the working boats were coming in. They came in every day, tide and weather allowing, but on Harbor Days they came in for an audience — tourists with their phones out, kids wanting to touch a lobster claw, a man in a Calloway polo doing a demonstration with a trap that had clearly never caught anything in its life.
One of the real boats, paint going thin at the bow, eased into a berth that wasn’t part of the demonstration at all. Astrid watched a man swing up out of the cockpit with the kind of economy of motion that came from doing a thing ten thousand times — not for anyone watching, just because the rope needed tying and his hands knew how. He had his back to the crowd. He did not appear to know there was a crowd.
“That’s the Marsh boy,” Delia said, following her eyeline. “Eli. Marina Faye.“ She said it like a fact she’d had filed away for occasions exactly like this. “Independent boat. One of, what, six left that aren’t under contract to your dad’s company?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were absolutely about to.”
Astrid was, in fact, about to. She watched him crouch to check a line, watched the muscle work in his forearm, watched him glance up — not at her, not at anyone, just at the sky, gauging something about the weather that she would never have known to look for — and felt the specific, irritating click of being interested in someone before she had a single piece of information to justify it.
“He hates us, probably,” she said, mostly to herself.
“Statistically,” Delia agreed, “yes.”
The man — Eli — finished with the line and straightened, and that was when he looked toward the tent. Toward the banner. Toward, Astrid understood half a second too late, her, standing under forty feet of Calloway Seafood signage with a glass of nine-dollar rosé in her hand like a flag she hadn’t meant to plant.
He didn’t smile. He didn’t scowl, either, which somehow was worse — it was a flat, assessing look, the kind you’d give a weather report you already expected to be bad. Then he turned and started hauling a cooler up the dock, and that was the entirety of their first encounter: four seconds, no words, and the distinct sense that she’d already been weighed and accounted for.
“Well,” Delia said. “That’s promising.”
“He doesn’t know me.”
“Sweetheart.” Delia clinked her plastic cup against Astrid’s, not unkindly. “He doesn’t need to. Look at where you’re standing.”
Astrid looked. Forty feet of banner. The font she’d approved. The whole gleaming architecture of welcome that her family had built on one side of a harbor that had two very different sides, and for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, she found herself wondering what it looked like from the other one.
