Not offered—simply there. Three cups in a cardboard carrier, one each for me and Rex and whoever else needs one, sitting on the equipment shed’s outer shelf at seven fifty when I arrive, which means Muir went to the marina coffee cart, which opens at six-thirty, before he came to the dock.
I open the carrier. There is a cup with my name on it and another with Rex’s and a third with no name on it, presumably Muir’s own, and they are all still hot, which means he timed it correctly, which means he has been paying attention to what time I arrive.
I drink my coffee.
Mine is exactly right—the correct amount of milk, the sweetness I don’t always order but always want—and I think about whether I mentioned how I take it at any point in the last three weeks. I cannot remember specifically saying it. I think about what it means that he knows it anyway. My defenses were built for grand gestures, for speeches and apologies and dramatic arrivals in the rain, for things that announce themselves and are easy to dismiss.
Steadiness is not something I have a defense for.
Steadiness arrives like water does. Without announcement, finding all the available space.
I’m noting information. That’s all.
Phineas is at the dock edge when I come out with my coffee, sitting on the lower rung of the dock ladder with his feet in the water and a small collection of mussels in a bucket beside him, which means he has been doing his rounds in the north inlet and has found something worth checking.
“Morning,” he says, in that soft way of his, looking up with his yellow eyes.
“Morning, Phineas.” I sit on the dock above him. “What did you find?”
“The mussel colony on the eastern shelf is expanding.” He sounds pleased in the cautious way he always sounds pleased, like he is not entirely sure good news is something he is allowed to report. “Dr. Davis will want to know. I took samples.”
“I’ll mention it next survey dive.” I look at the bucket. “You heard anything interesting lately? In the waterways?”
Phineas is the best intelligence network in Harmony Glen. He does not know this about himself. He swims every connected waterway from the lake to the outer marsh, and the fish are not bright but the water is, and Phineas listens to both without prejudice.
He tilts his head, thinking. “There’s a selkie doing something with the water in the north cove,” he says. “Not magic, just attention. Like someone paying attention to a place. I hear it when I swim through.” He picks up a mussel and turns it in his fingers. “The water feels different in a place where someone is paying real attention to it. It makes a kind of—warmth.”
I look at my coffee.
“That’s interesting,” I say, in a completely neutral voice.
“Mm,” Phineas says, and sets the mussel back in his bucket with the focused care of someone who treats all living things as being worth the effort.
The morning tour group arrives at the end of the dock, and I go to meet them, and I do not think about north coves or warmth or the way coffee tastes when someone has paid attention to how you take it.
CHAPTER 8
MUIR
I noticethe brewing storm at six-thirty, standing on the dock behind my rental cottage with my first coffee. The surface is too still. The birds that usually work the shallows have gone elsewhere. Everything feels like the held breath before a large sound.
I check the weather service on my phone.Chance of afternoon thunderstorms, clearing by evening.
I'm not sure I agree.
I arrive at the San Pedro dock early. Cora's already there—she's always there first—reviewing the tour manifest with her dark hair loose over one shoulder, wearing a yellow sundress with embroidered waves at the hem. Different shell earrings today, elongated and goldish, catching the early light when she turns her head. She has that look she gets when she's efficiently processing information: focused, slightly abstracted, a small vertical line between her brows.
She is, as is my general experience of her in the mornings, devastating.
I note it and set it aside and get on with the work.
“I think the storm is going to come in early,” I say. “And harder than forecasted.”
She looks at the sky. Clear blue, deceptively reassuring. But she's a water creature. She carries the lake in her. I can see the moment she feels what I felt this morning, that attention moving through her like a current.
“How early?”
“Before lunch. Possibly mid-morning if it accelerates.”