The salt-stung wind carried the promise of forgotten things. Clara Bennett stood on the warped wooden plank of the Haven’s Cove municipal dock, clutching a set of heavy iron keys that felt more like an anchor than a beginning. Three years, one month, and four days since the world had shrunk to the sterile smell of a hospital room, and she had finally done the unthinkable. She had left.
Not just left her house in Hartford, but driven north until the highway frayed into coastal routes, then into roads that hugged granite cliffs, finally descending into this postcard-perfect pocket of Maine. She’d done it for him. For David. A decade ago, over a bottle of ridiculously cheap wine, they’d dreamed aloud. “A little place by the sea,” he’d said, his artist’s hands sketching shapes in the air. “Somewhere the air hurts your face in winter. We’ll buy a rundown shack and fix it up. I’ll paint terrible seascapes; you’ll… I don’t know, learn to knit ugly sweaters.” She’d laughed, swatting him. “I’ll run a business. Something simple. A bookshop. Or a bait shop.” He’d roared with laughter. “A bait shop! My sophisticated, spreadsheet-loving wife, selling worms to fishermen. I love it. It’s a promise.”
A promise buried under careers, a mortgage, and the slow, quiet tragedy of illness. Now, holding the keys to ‘Finn’s Folly,’ the most ramshackle bait and tackle shop on the eastern seaboard, purchased sight-unseen via a dubious online auction, Clara felt the ghost of his laughter in the wind. It wasn’t a bookshop. It was a leaning, salt-bleached shack at the end of a short pier, its sign hanging by one rusted chain. The ‘business’ consisted of two empty coolers, a dusty counter, and a pervasive smell of low tide and regret.
Her first task, according to the terse, handwritten note from the lawyer, was to inspect the ‘vessel included in the sale,’ moored at the far slip. Clara picked her way down the dock, her city boots slippery on the damp wood. The ‘vessel’ was a fifteen-foot Boston Whaler that had seen better decades. Its paint was faded, its vinyl seats cracked. And a man was standing in it, his back to her.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, clad in worn, practical clothing—a thick sweater, oilskin pants tucked into rubber boots. He was untangling a monstrous bird’s nest of fishing line with a focused, simmering intensity that seemed to radiate off him. The late afternoon sun glinted on strands of silver in his dark, unruly hair.
“Excuse me?” Clara’s voice was carried away by the wind. She cleared her throat. “Hello?”
He didn’t turn. “It’s scrap. The engine’s seized, the transom’s soft. You’d have better luck fishing from a bucket.” His voice was a low rumble, rough like granite.
Irritation, a feeling so much more vibrant than the gray numbness she’d lived in, sparked in her chest. “That may be, but it’s my scrap. Would you mind?”
Now he turned. His face was all harsh angles, shadowed by a few days’ growth of beard. His eyes were the color of the sea under a storm—a turbulent, guarded gray. He looked her up and down, taking in her obviously new, hopelessly inappropriate peacoat and leather boots. A flicker of something—amusement? disdain?—crossed his features. “You’re the one,” he stated, not asked.
“The one what?”
“Who bought Finn’s Folly. The city woman.” He said ‘city’ like it was a diagnosis.
“Clara Bennett,” she said, forcing a note of professionalism she didn’t feel. “And you are?”
He ignored the question, nodding toward the shack. “You know the cooler’s broken, the roof leaks like a sieve, and old man Finn used to store his ‘special’ chum in the back room. Took a week to air it out after they hauled him off.”
Her heart sank, but she straightened her spine. David had always called it her ‘boardroom spine.’ “Then I have my work cut out for me. Now, if you’ll please get out of my boat?”
For a long moment, he just looked at her, as if assessing her durability. Then, with a shake of his head, he coiled the ruined fishing line, placed it on the seat, and stepped onto the dock in one fluid motion. He was even taller up close. He smelled of salt, fresh air, and something earthy like pine tar.
“You’ll need a contractor. Try Samuels, in the village. He’s the only one who won’t fleece you blind, though he’s slow.” He started to walk past her, then paused. “And for God’s sake, get some proper boots. Those are a death sentence on these docks.”
And then he was gone, his bootfalls echoing down the pier, leaving Clara alone with her rotting boat, her leaking shack, and the vast, booming silence of the Atlantic. She looked from the boat to the shack, then out to the horizon where the water met the sky in a seamless, endless line. A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. What on earth had she done? She had come here to fulfill a silly promise, to try and feel something besides the aching absence. She had not come fishing for anything, least of all a new life.
But as she turned the key in the stubborn lock of Finn’s Folly, the door groaning open to reveal the dusty, sunlit interior, she felt it. Not peace, not yet. But a tiny, fragile stir of purpose. It was a thread, thin as fishing line. She would follow it.
