“Let’s go out on the water, Nell.”

No one was at the wharf. She dug a life jacket out of the small locker that now belonged her until the lease ran out and grimaced at the grimy film covering the fluorescent orange. Better a dirty life jacket than another water rescue, she reminded herself as she shrugged into it and adjusted the straps. Morgan could take her safety course and shove it up her ass.

Water had accumulated in the bottom of the skiff again. She pulled it close to the dock and bailed it out, glad no one was around to laugh at her clumsy motions. I should have brought the kit to fix this piece of shit. Since she hadn’t, she coaxed Nell into the boat, rewarding her with a treat from the pocket of her jeans, and began to row.

The motion felt more natural this time. Her shoulders and arms burned pleasantly as the oars sliced through the calm water of the harbor. A flat, overcast sky arced overhead, and the slow ripples barely disturbed the glassy sheen of its reflection. Nell didn’t share her serenity. The dog sat hunched in the bow with her ears pressed flat against her skull.

“Almost there.” A few more strokes brought her parallel to the sailboat. She pulled the oars into the skiff and grabbed the edge of the sailboat to steady them. “Up, Nell.”

Nell turned her narrow head to stare at Emilia in disdain, then scrambled into the boat. Emilia secured the bowline to the mooring and followed, managing not to fall into the ocean. She took this as a good omen.

Setting the boat to rights didn’t take long. Despite the slow, steady breeze, she had no intention of actually sailing. Not until she followed hardware store Doug’s advice and watched a few hours of YouTube tutorials to refresh her memory. The sailboat’s small engine, however, would take them around the harbor until then. Grinning at her dog, who had curled up on the pile of seat cushions Emilia had assembled for just that purpose, she fired up the engine with a few tugs of the draw and a muttered prayer. It sputtered twice and then turned over with a little cloud of blue-gray smoke that cleared quickly. She climbed into the bow to release them from the mooring—her second successful dry feat of the day—and took a seat with her hand on the tiller.

“Ahoy, matey,” she said to Nell. The dog ignored her. “Or not.”

She guided the boat around the nearby moorings, noting Morgan’s small speedboat, the All Paws on Deck, as she passed. Morgan Donovan could fuck off. She wondered at the intensity of the thought. Morgan hadn’t done anything besides rescue her and make a stupid—and deserved—comment. Well, that and ignore her over a decade ago when they were kids, but Emilia couldn’t hold her accountable for teenage angst. Still, something about seeing Morgan again had set off her defense mechanisms, and all the logic in the world couldn’t quell them. Morgan had known her dad. She couldn’t tell if that made her jealous of Morgan or her father or both—as if her jealousy could change any of this. Her father was gone. Morgan was just a girl she’d had a crush on once, and that was where those feelings belonged: in the past, not here in her grief.