Chapter 7

Grant asked her up to the boathouse after hours on Wednesday, the night before the signing. "Just us," he said on the phone, easy. "A quiet drink before the circus."

The boathouse smelled of varnish and cold concrete. A work light burned over a table, and on the table sat a black audio deck and a tape, and next to it a printed sheet of paper: the merger, with her name typed neat at the bottom.

He poured two whiskeys. He didn't touch his.

"I'm going to be straight with you," he said, "because I respect you. Tomorrow, before the papers, I play the tape. My tape. The real one, not the splice the kid was carrying. Everybody hears what it actually is-a couple of drunk boatyard men goofing my voice, cut up and stitched. Then the girl's a liar, and whoever sent her is a liar, and we get married on a clean slate." He smiled. "You'll stand right next to me while it plays. That's the picture I want for the paper. You and me, done with it."

Wren looked at the tape on the table. Two hundred people tomorrow. A make-believe tape that would erase the only true thing her father had ever had said about him.

"You understand," Grant went on, "Cade handed me the whole thing. Machine, tape, the girl. It was always going to come to me. Because this is my harbor, Wren. It's just been mine a while." He said it without heat. It was not a threat. It was a fact of the geography, like the breakwater.

Her hands were shaking. She put one flat on the table.

You have to survive the night, she told herself. And you have to leave with something.

"Okay," she said. She let her voice go soft. "Okay. You're right. I've been scared. It's just-my dad. It got in my head."

He came around the table. When he put his arms around her, she let him, and hated it, and the girl in the shed boat had taught her something in the rain: you survive the way you can, not the way you'd choose.

"You and me," he said into her hair.

Over his shoulder she looked at the table.

He had the deck. He had his tape. He thought that was the whole world.

But she had sat beside a nine-year-old in a beanie who had dubbed it in the fish house at night, the way you'd fold a dollar and hide it in your shoe.

He let her go to get the coffee he'd forgotten. In the half minute his back was turned at the counter, Wren crossed to the table, lifted the black tape out of the deck's slot, and slid in the one she took from her pocket-the working copy, made by a child, played through once by her own ears that afternoon in the fish house office until she knew it by heart.

She pressed the tape flat. She put his tape in her pocket. She sat back down before he turned around, holding her whiskey with a steady hand.

"How long," she said, "have you been planning to save this dock?"

Grant smiled his clean smile. "Honey. I've owned it longer than you've known."