Page 106 of Code Name: Harbor

“No. Figured that was yours to give.”

He’s quiet for a while. The halyards keep up their tinny music, and a ferry crosses the Sound out past the breakwater.

“I keep thinking about Connie,” he says finally.

They never found her. The Coast Guard worked the water for four days and pulled up miniscule bits of wreckage, but they never found her. She’s just gone. Out there. Part of the strait now.

“I’ve been so angry at her I can’t see straight,” Marcus says, quiet, his eyes on the water. “She sold us. All of us. She gave them you”—a glance at Josie—“and she gave them the run and she had to have known what those people do, what they were always going to do.”

I have nothing to say to that. I’ve been dealing with my own internal friction of grief and anger.

“The three of us nearly died and one of us did, and it’s her fault, and I hate her for it,” Marcus says, his jaw working. “And then I think about a sixteen-year-old kid on a corner in the Central District that you pulled off the street, and I think about years of her sitting on this exact kind of dock with me at three in the morning waiting on a tide.” He shakes his head. “And I can’t hold both of those at the same time, Finn. I’ve tried for two weeks, and I can’t make them fit in the same chest.”

“I don’t think they’re supposed to fit,” I finally say. “I think you just carry them both and they stay heavy. I think that’s what it is when somebody’s family and they do something unforgivable. It doesn’t resolve. You just carry it.”

Josie’s hand finds mine, giving me a soft squeeze. Ironically, she’s already moved past the anger and has been focused on supporting me in the grief side of things.

Marcus looks at the blank transom of his new boat for a long time. “I’m going to name her the Modesto.”

I go still.

“Not because she earned it.” His voice is hard and certain and grieving all at once. “Not because I forgive what she did, because I don’t, and I never will. But she doesn’t have a grave, Finn. There’s no stone, there’s no plot, there’s no place anybody can go stand and say her name. And she was family long before she became an enemy. I’ll call it the Modesto in remembrance of the honest work she gave and the water she loved.”

Josie’s eyes are wet. Mine aren’t dry either.

“The Modesto,” I say, testing it out on my tongue. “You know if you go legit, she’d have hated a boat that runs legal.”

A laugh punches out of Marcus, surprised, real. “God, she would’ve. She’d have been furious.”

“Pristine, clean, paperwork in order—”

“She’d have shredded it herself.”

And the three of us are laughing now, which turns into a heavy pressure in my lung that I struggle to breathe through. Fuck, I hate being incapacitated, but I don’t stop, because it’s the first time since the explosion that the laughing doesn’t feel like a betrayal of anything.

We stay a while. Marcus shows us the galley he’s already planning to use, the berth he’s going to put a real mattress in, the spot on the flybridge where he says he’s going to drink his coffee every morning for the rest of his life. I’d offer to help him wrestle a mattress down to the berth or coil a line or do any single useful thing, but I’m not cleared to lift more than a few pounds for another month. Marcus narrates his future. He talks about Lori bringing the kids up in the summer. He talks about it out loud for the first time since I’ve known him, and I stand in the cockpit of the boat I bought him, and I let myself believe we’re all going to get one.

“We should let you take her out,” Josie says eventually, gentle. “We’ve got to get going, anyway.”

Marcus walks us to the gunwale. He hugs Josie first, careful with the cast, and says something low in her ear that makes her press her lips together and nod. Then he grips my good shoulder.

“We’ll keep in touch,” he says, and it isn’t a hope, it’s a fact, the way he says it. “Friday dinners. You and Josie. Down here or at your place or wherever. We don’t lose each other now. Not after this.”

“Not after this,” I agree.

He squeezes once and lets go, and Josie and I step onto the dock.

Hand in hand.

We’re almost to my Range Rover when a woman steps out from between two parked cars like she’s been waiting for exactly this moment.

Which she has.

“Mr. Marlowe.” Special Agent Valerie Royce is in a dark coat with her hands in the pockets and an expression I can’t read. “Ms. McAdams. Mind if I have a minute?”

Beside me I feel Josie go still, and I match her, and the easy afternoon goes taut as a line with a fish on it.

“Agent Royce,” Josie says, pleasant and even. “We were just leaving.”