I step inside. The shed is small enough that stepping inside puts me close to the workbench. Close enough to see the concentration in his profile, the line of his jaw, the way his shoulders move under the shirt. I don't back away.
My heart is doing something it shouldn't. Picking up speed. My lungs feel tight.
“Yesterday,” I say.
“Yesterday,” he agrees.
“The boats. The girl. You didn't have to go back in.”
“She wasn't in danger. Serious danger. But the chop was pulling her wrong and she was fighting it. It would have tired her before she reached the dock.” A pause. “It was the simpler solution.”
“You were already out of the water.”
“So I went back in.”
He went back in because it was the right thing to do, and now he's fixing the wetsuit zipper, and both of those things happened in the same register.
I look at his hands on the vice. The tendons shifting under skin. The careful pressure.
“I've been trying to maintain a professional distance this summer,” I say.
The hands still.
“I'm aware,” he says.
I face him. He's two feet away. Maybe less. The shed feels smaller than twelve by sixteen.
“You left me,” I say. “No note. No explanation. Nothing. Four years.”
He turns to face me now. He's leaning against the workbench, arms at his sides, hands loose. He's watching me with thosegrey-green eyes, and he's not filling the space with anything at all. Not excuses. Not deflection. Not movement.
He's waiting.
It costs him something to stand here and not move toward me. I can see the effort of it in the set of his shoulders, in the quality of the stillness. In the way his hands stay at his sides when the distance between us is nothing. When closing it would take one step.
“Why,” I say, “would I trust you now?”
Muir is quiet for a moment. Then something shifts in his face. Confusion, maybe. Something that looks almost like hurt.
“Cora.” His voice is careful. “I left you a note.”
The shed goes very still.
The air doesn't move. The dust motes hang suspended in the light. My heart does something strange—a skip, a stutter, a lurch sideways.
“I had to leave fast,” he says. “That morning. I left a note explaining. Everything. Why I had to go, what was happening with my family.” He stops. His eyes don't leave mine. “I left it through the water channels so no one in the house would find it first. But I thought you'd get it. I thought you understood.”
My heart is doing something strange in my chest. Something that feels like falling.
“What note,” I say.
His face changes. The confusion sharpens into something else. Understanding, maybe. Or the beginning of it. His hands tighten against the workbench edge.
“The one I left in the water,” he says slowly. “Through the channels you use. I thought it would reach you. I thought you'd find it and understand why I couldn't stay.” He's watching me now like he's seeing something he didn't expect. Like the ground has shifted under both of us. “You didn't get it.”
It's not a question.
“I didn't get anything,” I say.