Four

Theo’s pov

I hear about the will before I hear about the funeral, which tells you everything about how fast money moves compared to grief. By the time I clock in Tuesday morning, half the yard already knows Edmund left the company to the granddaughter, and the other half is placing bets on how long she lasts before the board eats her alive.

I don't take a side out loud. I never do. Six years on this dock and I've made a habit of being the guy nobody has an opinion about — shows up early, keeps his head down, knows the manifests better than half the office staff and never mentions it. Easiest way to stay invisible is to be useful in ways nobody bothers to ask questions about.

But I know the will. Better than anyone here knows the will, probably better than the granddaughter does right now, and that's the part I'm not saying out loud either.

• • •

She shows up at the yard just after ten, in a coat too nice for the weather, walking the docks like she's cataloguing a house she's about to lose. I clock her before she clocks me — recognize her from the one Christmas party Edmund made the whole crew attend, years back, when she was maybe twenty-two and clearly hated the small talk as much as I did. She's older now. Tired in a way that doesn't come from one bad week.

She stops at berth six, hand on the rail, looking at the Constance like she's trying to remember something. I'm twenty feet away pretending to check a manifest I already checked an hour ago.

“You're one of the yard supervisors?” she asks, without turning around. She'd clocked me after all.

“Something like that,” I say. “Theo.”

“Sera.” Like I don't already know. “Did you know my grandfather well?”

There's a right answer here and a true answer, and they're not the same thing. “Well enough,” I say, which is both and neither.

She turns to look at me properly then, and I watch her clock something — the way I said it, maybe, or just the fact that I didn't offer condolences like everyone else has been offering her all week. “He used to talk about the Constance like she had a temper,” I say, before she can ask anything else. “Said she only ran smooth for people who respected her. Refused to let anyone rename her, even after she needed enough hull work that most owners would've scrapped her for parts.”

“He told me that too,” Sera says slowly. “Almost exactly like that.”

That's my mistake, and I know it the second it's out of my mouth. Not the story — the phrasing. I said it too much like him. Ten years of hearing a man talk does that to you, wears his cadences into your own voice like water wears a channel into rock, and I forget sometimes that not everyone gets to notice that happening to them.

“You knew him a long time,” she says. Not a question.

“Long enough,” I say again, and this time she doesn't let it go.

“That's the second time you've dodged the same question with two different sentences that mean nothing.” She's got her arms crossed now, studying me the way I imagine she studies a contract before she signs it. “Who are you, actually?”

“A guy who checks manifests.”

“A guy who checks manifests doesn't get quoted verbatim by my grandfather's ghost.”

I don't have a good answer for that one, so I don't give her one. I go back to the clipboard in my hands, and after a second, she lets it drop — or pretends to, which isn't the same thing, and I clock that too. She's not the type to actually let something drop. She's the type to file it away and come back to it later, better armed.

• • •

She's still on the dock forty minutes later when I head to the equipment shed to grab my jacket at the end of shift, and I hear her asking one of the crane operators about hull maintenance schedules, and something in my chest goes tight and careful, the way it does whenever she gets close to a part of the yard she's not supposed to be looking at too hard yet.

There's a folder in my locker. Has been for three months, since before Edmund got sick enough that everyone knew, back when he still came down to the yard twice a week just to stand on the docks and breathe in diesel and salt like it was the only air that actually worked for his lungs anymore. He gave it to me himself, folded once, sealed, told me to keep it somewhere nobody would think to look, and I didn't ask why, because you don't ask Edmund Calloway why. You just do what the man says and trust that the reasons come later, if they come at all.

I haven't opened it. That's not entirely true — I've held it up to the light more than once, turned it over in my hands at two in the morning wondering if loyalty to a dead man outweighs whatever's about to happen to his granddaughter. I know what's in the will. Everyone in this yard knows what's in the will by now. Thirty days, one marriage, a year of proof. What I don't know — what I'm almost afraid to know — is whether the folder in my locker is the reason the clause exists at all, or just something Edmund wanted kept safe for reasons that have nothing to do with any of this.

I get my jacket. I don't take the folder out. Not today.

• • •

She's waiting by my truck when I come out, which either means she asked around about which truck was mine, or she's been standing in the lot for a while working up to something. Either way, it tells me she wants an answer badly enough to wait in the cold for one.

“One more question,” she says. “And then I'll leave you alone, I promise.”

“Shoot.”

“Did he tell you anything about the will? Before he died. Anything about —” she stops, like she's not sure how to finish the sentence without sounding paranoid, “— about who he wanted me to end up with.”

And there it is. The question I've been waiting for since she walked onto the dock, the one I've had an answer ready for since the day he handed me that folder, and I still don't know if giving it to her is loyalty or betrayal, because I never got to ask him which one he meant it to be.

“I think,” I say carefully, “you should ask your lawyer to check the will for anything about marriage statutes. Old ones. Ones that maybe haven't been looked at in a while.”

She goes very still. “Why would you say that.”

“Because your grandfather didn't write vague clauses,” I say. “He wrote precise ones. And precise men don't leave a thirty-day deadline and a one-year requirement without knowing exactly how someone smart enough could get around the parts that don't work.”