“Three years since I came back, but I’ve been gone for almost seven. I went into the Navy, took the hardest assignments I could possibly find for as much pay as I could make. That’s why I immediately told the recruiter I wanted to be a SEAL.”

“You must have been in your mid-twenties when you enlisted. Why did you wait so late? Most kids I knew went in straight from high school.”

At least she was talking. He wished they were talking about something pleasant, but he would take anything he could get. And maybe it would help her understand. “I was eighteen when my grandfather died. Pop-Pop ran the business Papillon is built around, had for fifty years. In his will he left everything to my grandmother, of course, but with the provision that after she was gone, the wharf would be split between the grandkids who worked it while she was alive. There were four of us. Me, my sister, Seraphina, my brother, Zéphirin, and our cousin, Jean-Claude.”

“So it was divided between the four of you?”

“Oh, no, ma cre…Lisa.” He had to can the sweet names. She’d already told him she would smack him if he called her a shrimp again. He believed her. He was fairly certain she thought he was making fun of her. “Zep was far too busy drinking and getting into trouble to work. He dropped out of high school and ran off for a while with some girl he met at a concert. I didn’t know where he was until I found him in prison for writing hot checks off the girl’s mom’s account. Sera was always wild. She tried college but dropped out and came home. She went to cosmetology school for a while. Finally ended up pregnant and never would tell me who the father was. So it was me and Jean-Claude. Two dumbass twenty-year-olds running a business before we were able to legally drink.”

“How did you lose it?”

“The same way people lose most things. Someone took it away from me. I thought it was time to settle down. I was kind of the head of my family from the time my father passed. Like your brother, I had to hold things together. I thought I was ready to have a wife at the age of twenty-one. Josette was the prettiest girl in town and she said yes. I wasn’t in love with her. I was just ready to start my life. I had steady work. It made sense I would have a family. She thought because I was going to own half of the biggest business in town her life was going to be easy.”