Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

again. “Anyway, Dad came.”
     
    “Yeah. You told me in your e-mail. How’d that go?”
     
    Not so well. Bart Hunter scowled through the ceremony and drank through dinner, uncomfortable in a tie and ill at ease in the busy, trendy restaurant she had picked out. Not even the clatter from the kitchen and the laughter from other tables could cover the silence between them.
     
    “Fine,” Lucy said. “I loved the flowers you sent.”
     
    His eyes narrowed. Well, she hadn’t expected he’d be as easy to divert as one of her five-year-olds.
     
    “And the check,” she added hastily. “That was incredibly generous.”
     
    47
    “I figured you could use it to move into an apartment someplace.
    Augusta, maybe, or Portland.”
     
    Lucy opened her mouth. Shut it.
     
    “Why did you come back, Lucy?” Caleb asked.
     
    It was a reasonable question. But then, her brother was always reasonable.
     
    Which was why she could never explain to him why she had chosen to return. Back to the dark, cold house where they grew up, to the drafty rooms haunted by the shell of their father, the ghosts of their mother and brother.
     
    Back to the island, where—for better and worse— everybody knew their name and their business.
     
    Back to the sea she feared and could not live away from.
     
    She had tried. Once. Ran away, hitched a ride from Port Clyde as far as Richmond and wound up on the dirty floor of a gas station restroom, puking her guts into the toilet. The memory still made her sick to her stomach.
     
    Flu, the doctor on the island concluded, after Caleb had found her and brought her home.
     
    Stress, the physician’s assistant at the college infirmary told her when she collapsed on a visit to Dartmouth, where she’d been offered a scholarship.
     
    Lucy didn’t know or understand the reasons. But through cautious experimentation, she learned never to travel more than twenty miles from the ocean. She attended state college in Machias, within walking distance of the bay.
     
    She licked her lips. “Why did you?”
     
    Caleb raised one eyebrow. “I have a job here.”
     
    “So do I.”
     
    48
    “How about a life?”
     
    She stuck out her chin. “This is my life. Anyway, you’re here.”
     
    “I’m thirty-three,” Caleb said. Reasonable, as always. “You’re twenty-three. You should be getting out more.”
     
    Lucy didn’t point out that the ten-year difference in their ages didn’t give him the right to dictate to her. He meant well. He always had.
     
    “So should you.”
     
    His face shuttered. “Not a priority right now.”
     
    She shouldn’t push. Open communication wasn’t their family’s style. Lucy hadn’t even met Caleb’s ex-wife—aka the bitch —before their wedding, and she didn’t know any of the juicy details of their divorce.
    But prying into her brother’s personal life seemed safer than discussing hers.
     
    “What about that woman you were asking about a couple weeks ago? Margaret somebody?”
     
    “What about her?”
     
    “Are you going to see her again?”
     
    “No. She left,” he added, before Lucy could ask why not.
     
    “Oh.” Oops . This was why her family didn’t talk. Too many awkward moments. She searched for something positive to say. “Well, maybe she’ll come back. Like, to visit.”
     
    “No,” Caleb said again in that Drop it , Lucy tone. “She’s not coming back.”
     
    She wasn’t coming back.
     
    Caleb’s hands tightened on the Jeep’s steering wheel. Well, fine. He was trying to build a life here. Pursuing another Woman-Who-Would-Not-Stick, even one who looked like an angel and fucked like a dream, was not in his plan.
     
    49
     
    Which didn’t explain what he was doing at nine o’clock at night driving along Old North Road toward the point.
     
    Maggie’s voice whispered in his brain. I walk on the beach in the evening.
     
    Not for the last three weeks she hadn’t.
     
    She was a tourist. A one-night stand. An aberration. A mistake.
     
    And he was an idiot, because he wanted her again.
     
    Caleb scowled at the darkness beyond his windshield. It wasn’t like he didn’t have better demands on his time, more urgent claims on his attention.
     
    The warmer weather brought out tourists like a rash. Brightly striped towels dotted the docks and hung from lines behind the rental cottages.
    Boats—and sometimes boaters—hit the water. Vacationers locked themselves out of their homes and cars, lost their dogs, their