‘‘She meant kids grow up fast.’’ Since it didn’t look as though his appetite would be coming back, Ethan closed the top on the pizza and took out bills to pay for it. ‘‘Let’s take this back to the boatyard. Since you don’t have school in the morning, we can put in a couple more hours.’’

HE PUT IN MORE THAN A couple. Once he got started, he couldn’t seem to stop. It cleared his mind, kept it from wandering, wondering, worrying.

The boat was definite, a tangible task with a foreseeable end. He knew what he was doing here, just as he knew what he was doing out on the Bay. There weren’t so many shadow areas of maybes or what ifs.

Ethan continued to work even when Seth curled up on a drop cloth and fell asleep. The sound of tools running didn’t appear to disturb him—though Ethan wondered how anyone could sleep with the best part of a large sausage-and-pepperoni pizza in his stomach.

He started work on the ends and corner posts for the cabin and cockpit coaming while the night wind blew lazily through the open cargo doors. He’d turned the radio off so that now the only music was the water, the gentle notes of it sliding against the shore.

He worked slowly, carefully, though he was well able to visualize the completed project. Cam, he decided, would handle most of the interior work. He was the most skilled of the three of them at finish carpentry. Phillip could handle the rough-ins; he was better at sheer manual labor than he liked to admit.

If they could keep up the pace, Ethan calculated that they could have the boat trimmed and under sail in another two months. He would leave figuring the profits and percentages to Phillip. The money would feed the lawyers, the boatyard, and their own bellies.

Why hadn’t Grace ever told him she wanted to buy a house?

Ethan frowned thoughtfully as he chose a galvanized bolt. Wasn’t that a pretty big step to be discussing with a ten-year-old boy? Then again, he admitted, Seth had asked. He himself had only told her she shouldn’t be working herself so hard—he hadn’t asked why she insisted on it.

She ought to make things up with her father, he thought again. If the two of them would just bend that stiff-necked Monroe pride for five minutes, they could come to terms. She’d gotten pregnant—and there was no doubt in Ethan’s mind that Jack Casey had taken advantage of a young, naive girl and should be shot for it—but that was over and done.

His family had never held grudges, small or large. They’d fought, certainly—and he and his brothers had often fought physically. But when it was done, it was over.