Page 27 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
One night without incident since her arrival felt like a special birthday gift.
Rone sat on the couch opposite her, his shoulders too broad for the corner, bandaged hand turned palm up on his knee because she’d asked to see it earlier and he hadn’t argued. Hewasn’t a man who gave ground easily, but he seemed to give it to her one square inch at a time without keeping tally. The thought both warmed and unsettled her.
She pushed his mug toward him. “Drink. Your face looks like it lost a fight with a long night.”
He huffed, and it might have been a laugh if it wasn’t so tired. “You should see the other guy.”
“The other guy being the fire, or Sheriff Fletcher?”
“Yes.”
She wrapped both hands around her mug and let the heat settle the tremble still living somewhere behind her ribs.
They were quiet long enough that she could hear little things—the faucet’s periodic drip, the whisper of the wind teasing the flag on the stern, Echo’s slow exhale. Then, because quiet only holds for so long before it becomes a wall, she said, “Tell me about my father. And don’t hold anything back this time.”
Rone’s jaw flexed. A muscle ticked and went still. “You already know more than is good for you.”
“That wasn’t a no.”
“It was a boundary.”
She swallowed a smile. “Boundaries are movable. Fences you can shift a foot if you have a good reason.”
He tipped his head and finally looked at her. “You planning to be a good reason?”
“I plan to try.”
He took that in, eyes skimming her face, analyzing, probing, studying her as if to unravel who she was and how she ticked. He looked at her—no, saw her—like no man had ever taken the time to do. A sly half-grin unraveled on his face as if there were answers written there he could measure against his own. “If I share too much,” he said at last, each word set down like something fragile, “it puts you even more at risk.”
“I’m already at risk.”
“There are levels,” he said, and his voice went sandpaper-soft. “You don’t know all of them.”
“That’s the point.” Heat surged in her chest and came out tangled in her words. “I’m useless without the truth, Rone.”
His brows inched. “You’re not useless.”
She stared down into her coffee and saw nothing of herself there but a dark shape and the suggestion of movement when her hands shook. “I have failed at every job I’ve tried. Every relationship.” She let the sentence sit, let it be as ugly as the way the words felt scraping out of her. “People say that like it’s my fault I picked the wrong doors, as if there weren’t hands on some of those handles on the other side.” She laughed once, a breath with sharp edges. “My last boyfriend—he stole everything that wasn’t bolted down. My money, my grandmother’s locket, my credit. When he left, he took my trust and left a shadow shaped like me behind.”
Rone’s mouth flattened. He didn’t offer platitudes. He didn’t say I’m sorry. He let it sit in the air between them like something worth not stepping on.
“This boat is all I have left,” she said, voice rawer than she meant it to be. “To survive, yes. To live… maybe.” She lifted her chin. “But it’s more than the money. I haven’t truly lived since the day my father disappeared. Not really. I have been… performing life. Eating when you’re supposed to, breathing because your body’s stubborn, smiling because people worry if you don’t. I need to know the truth. If I’m going to go under, I want to go under knowing what pulled me down.”
For a long time, Rone didn’t move. Only his throat worked, a slow swallow that said more than words would have. Echo’s eyes tracked up, found Rone, then Isobel, then closed again, as if this was the sort of talking that made things safer even if nothing changed.
Rone scrubbed his left hand over his face. “Shade saved my life,” he said finally. “Not by grabbing me out of a rip current or dragging me away from a gun. He showed me where to stand so I wouldn’t get pulled in again.”
“How?” she asked, gently.
He stared past her, through her, out the window and somewhere further than the water. “Before I came here, I was a detective. We were doing something that didn’t have a name, which is another way of saying it had too many names and none of them were the ones we’d want on a report. Captain wouldn’t green-light the investigation. Information in. People out. Some nights, both. On a night that should’ve been clean, everything that could go wrong did. My partner—Torres—she…” His voice snagged on the edge of the syllable and held there. He swallowed it, tried again. “She took the round that should’ve been mine. We were both doing our jobs. That’s the part I still can’t forgive.”
She gripped her mug tighter. “You blame yourself.”
“I blame the math. There are numbers that add wrong, and no amount of prayer changes them.” He blinked once, slow, and the tired in him showed like a bruise. “I came here after leaving the department broken and disgraced. Shade found me. He was like mold—you don’t notice him until he’s everywhere. He said truth’s a weapon, use it wisely. He also said pain isn’t a plan and guilt isn’t a bed you have to sleep in for the rest of your life.”
“And you listened?”
“I didn’t shoot myself,” he said, so factual the words made her throat ache. “So I guess I listened.”
