“I like it,” I admit. I want to see it. I don’t admit that yet, though I don’t know why. Maybe because if I give voice to the thought, I know we’ll never leave this room tonight.

Her hands slide into my hair. “I like it, too. I like a lot of things I didn’t know before.”

There’s a moment where I wonder if she’s talking about the sex, or the rope, or something else, something bigger. Stepping away, she reaches for a washcloth and holds it under the faucet. “But don’t get any ideas. You’re taking me out.”

IT’S A HALF-HOUR drive from her hotel to my neighborhood bar but the trip seems to fly by in only a matter of minutes. What Harlow is going through with her mother is nearly identical to what I went through twenty years ago. Except she has the emotional maturity to deal with it far better than I did, and treatment is better now. Mom was diagnosed when I was ten, and I was alternately terrified of losing my mother and irritated by the responsibility I was left with because of her illness: Levi was only four, and when Mom died two years later, I was left to run the household for the two years it took my father to get his words back, to stop burying himself in sixteen-hour shifts on the boats.

If I could go back and do it all over again, I would do exactly what Harlow does, and I can tell by the doubt in her voice—Is she going over there enough or too much? What will her mother need when this second round of chemo starts? How long can her dad be the sole caregiver before he burns out?—that she needs to hear me say it out loud.

“You’re doing it just right, Snap. If I could do it all over, I’d want to handle it just like you.”

Her head whips to me. “Really?” she whispers.

“Really.”

“I’m scared it’s going to get worse.”

I pull into the small parking lot behind Dockside and shut off the engine. “It probably will for a while. But you don’t have to navigate this all on your own,” I say, repeating her words back to her. “I know I screwed up with you when I left town, but do you trust me?”

Harlow leans over and kisses me once, full on the mouth. “I do.”

For a Tuesday night, the bar is pretty busy, and I know it’s because the weather has been unbelievable. Nothing makes for a thirstier town than warm weather in October, no rain, and a day of big fish.