It’s not Mal.
I believe the voice echoing in my fragile skull. Another instinct I can’t ignore. And then I see the hunched figure board Sol’s boat and recognition tumbles through me.
Sol’s dad.
Fuck. Relief wars with dread. I carry a lot of affection for Daveth Bosanko. Can’t count the times he and Lisa fed me and Mal when our own dad was too drunk to care. But a lot of years have passed since then. Years that have left Sol burned and hollowed by every fire he’s had to put out, and as I watch Dav paw through Sol’s things, the dread in my belly morphs into anger.
I want to kill him. Seize his shoulders, launch him from the boat into the abyss and leave him to drown. But in the dark, I ease to a stop, thwarted by age-old knowledge that Sol would drown himself before he saw his father hurt, even with the lines of love and duty so blurred I don’t know how he feels anymore.
About Dav.
About me.
Dav works the latch on the bait locker. Searches the cabinets where Sol and Oscar keep a few personal things. He even opens the engine hatch, but his conscience seems to get the better of him. Or maybe he hears Sol’s voice carrying in the wind as a rowdy shanty pours out of the Joker.
Either way, the hatch falls shut and Dav backs off, frustration binding his frame, lanky limbs nothing like Sol and everything like Sev, the younger son he’s ignored since the day he was born.
What happened to you, Dav?
I know the answer to that.
Addiction—same as my dad. But any sympathy I had for either man expired years ago.
Dav fucks off, vanishing into the night.
I ease back from theSironaand face the pub again.
Sol’s still singing, laughter in every note, and the music wraps around me. Swaddles me in memories, forgotten and realised, in emotions old and new, and I don’t know what to do with any of it. So I stand with it for as long as I can bear. And then I go inside. I go tobed, alone, without saying goodnight, to Sol or anyone else while Fiadh curls up on my pillow. She has the answers, I’m sure of it.
But she’s not giving them up tonight.
Or any night for the next week.
I go back to avoiding Sol. To dying a little more inside every time he notices and hurt creases his face before he catches it. To hating myself as he tries so hard to make whatever this is easier for me.
Eventually, he must figure I don’t want him around. He takes theSironaout by himself and he doesn’t come back.
I find out from Oscar that he’s sailed offshore, chasing the slight spike in crab prices. That he’s hauling the catch to a remote harbour too far away for me to contemplate, where the buyers are more hungry for stock.
“Why did he go alone?”
I don’t mean to growl. But it happens anyway, and Aras, Oscar’s little boy, shrinks behind his father’s legs.
Shit.
Regret bites hard. I search for the faculties to make it right, but Aras spies someone better in the distance and skips off to jump into the arms of a Rebel King biker as they roll up on the lifeguard station building site.
It’s River O’Brian. And his husband, Rubi. His best friend who hemarriedand didn’t ignore until he sailed into the winter fog, never to be seen again.
“Jack, he will be okay.” Oscar slings an arm around my shoulder, watching the bikers take his son for a walk on the beach in the heavy winter gloom. “We have made the trip to St Helier a hundred times.”
“You’re not with him.” I’m growling again. For no other reason than I wish Oscar was somewhere else when Aras needs him here. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
For snapping. For scaring his child. For blaming him for Sol’s decision to sail the Channel alone.
Oscar just pulls me in a little closer. “Do not worry, my friend. Aras knows who you are.”
He speaks with kindness and I hate it. Aras has seen me cry. Seen me shout and break things. He’s seenmebroken more times than I can count and it hurts my heart that he always comes back to me and calls me Uncle Jack. A good hurt, maybe. But pain is pain.