Page 31 of Better Love Next Time
What had she imagined his yard would be? Not this.
She hiked up her skirts and marched down to the slipway. Julian warned her to watch her step. She paced the length of the port side. Roughly sixty feet of draft and extending the line of the timbers, it had a wide beam. Stepping over the keel, she braced her hand on a pitted half-timber.
Angry tears singed her eyes. Not for her. But for all the hopes of millions lost. For the lives, wooden and flesh and blood, who had failed to be rescued, who hadn’t survived. This sad beautywho could have been, built for speed and left to rot. And her precious Andrew. Impish, sweet, and so very dead.
In the scent of marshland, she caught Andrew’s scent of milk and innocence. She turned her face to the riverbank, and in the wind which failed to dry her tears, she felt Andrew’s baby-soft skin against her cheek. He was dead. The hours and hours, days and days, of prayer hadn’t saved him. But with her determination and Julian’s brilliance, she could save this.
Kitty found the handkerchief and blotted her face. She tramped up to Julian. One day he had simply walked away from his dream. How long had he toiled before giving up? Why had he? He had been such a stubborn boy and then a man so certain in the face of his father’s disgust. She had thought him an unstoppable force.
She nodded to the outbuildings behind him chained at the doors. “Are those ours as well?”
“They are.”
“I gather they hold inventory of value.”
“As well as supplies and tools,” he said. “And the cottages, they are mine.”
She looked to the chipped sign,St. Clair Shipwrights, dangling by one hook above a dirty window. “The sign will need to be replaced immediately.”
“The sign?”
“On the warehouse.”
“It’s a loft,” he said.
“Oh. Well. Appearances are everything in a business venture. If we do not have a sign, who will work for us? Men must be proud of their employment.”
“And men must also have ships to build and wages to feed their families.”
She pointed to a wide basin of water walled in on three sides and an open gate at the water’s edge. “What is that?”
“A graving dry dock. A place for a boat to enter from the water for repairs.”
Below a sycamore, Kitty found a branch on the ground and hoisted it up. Returning to the sign, she whacked it down, having taken a grave disliking to the sign for it reeked of failure.
But she would keep it as a reminder.
She picked it up and asked Julian to open the door, which led to narrow stairs. Atop the landing, she chose the door to the left: an office with an expanse of windows for viewing the floor below littered with discarded tools and wood in various sizes and stages of completion. In the room, there was a table surrounded by four high-backed chairs and on her right a desk covered with yellowed papers. The floor, the table, the chairs—all of it was blanketed in thick dust.
Behind the desk, a bookcase stocked with three ledgers caught her eye. Broken glass crunched beneath her boots as she crossed the office and cracked one open.
Julian’s footsteps approached, his body warming her where he stopped close at her back. His hands landed softly on her shoulders. “How far do you plan to take this?”
She winced at the flutter in her breast caused by his touch. She concentrated on his words, not the urge to turn in his arms. “Do you own this land? And all within it?”
“I do.”
She regarded the case of model ships, one she recognized as the cutter Julian had built in his fourteenth summer. “Then we shall take this as far as we are able. And our ability is only limited by our doubts.”
“Kitty.” He squeezed her shoulder. “My plan is for you to see the futility in this. And to sell the land and what is left. Quit my lease on the Dolphin apartments and buy you a home.”
Something sickening crept up her spine. “A home? Where?”
“Wherever you wish.”
“And you? Where will you live?”
His forehead pressed at the top of her head. After a heavy span of time, he said, “Wherever I wish.”
