Page 212 of At First Catch

Somewhere over the past few weeks, I stopped thinking about the marina as home, community, life, and started seeing it as something I could lose.

Fear changed the way I looked at everything.

The truth leaves me exhausted.

Walter watches me for another moment before asking, “You told her everything yet?”

Guilt crashes through me again.

Not all of it. Not the revised numbers. Not the investor timeline. Not how close the marina actually is to becoming financially unstable again after the storm.

Walter exhales heavily toward the water.

“Son.”

The disappointment in his voice physically hurts now.

“I was trying not to dump all of it on her.”

“You mean you were trying to control how she reacted.”

Exactly that. I’ve been deciding what Hadley should know based on what feels emotionally manageable for me.

Not for her.

Not for us.

I scrub one hand harshly across my jaw.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

Walter looks genuinely surprised.

“The relationship?”

“No.” My voice roughens. “The being present. Staying.”

That’s the real fear underneath everything else. The horrifying realization that I’ve built a life so precious that its loss would be devastating.

Walter leans beside me against the railing. I glance over tiredly.

“I think you’re so scared of losing your home that you’re accidentally making it harder for the people in it to reach you.”

I still kept slipping back into old survival instincts anyway.

My phone buzzes again.

Hadley

Come over tonight?

Hadley

We don’t have to solve everything.

The sky over Back Bay darkens with the approaching sunset and rolling storm clouds, and as I gaze at the message for a considerable time, a dreadful realization dawns on me before I can halt it. If I keep letting fear drive me, I’m going to lose the best thing that’s ever happened to me long before the marina actually disappears.

Chapter Twenty-Six