THE HARBOR BETWEEN US
Spring salted the inlet with pollen and tourists. The bridge's replacement began in earnest, staged not with bunting but with humility: different bolts, different oversight, different men. People used other routes and learned abbreviations they hadn't needed since 1987. The town hall stopped selling bracelets; the fundraiser bought books for the library; the library changed the display in the front window to Corruption in American Small Towns and Women Who Kept the Notes.
Benny Cross took a plea. In the allocution he looked smaller, scar white in the strip light, voice subdued. He said he was a man who had loved the feeling of being near power and had confused proximity with belonging. He asked if his mother could be spared the details; the judge said the details were the part that made the punishment fit, and promised to redact what could be redacted without lying.
Ward wore a suit he couldn't afford without the job he'd lost and looked like a man practicing a new kind of contrition. He would speak in high schools for a decade and never be sure whether the kids liked him for the right reason. That seemed fair.
Ellery learned that the sound of a ring tapping a rail is only charming if the rail doesn't remember. He went to trial and convinced some and not others; the verdict was the closest thing a group of strangers could come to accuracy. He would not rebuild his reputation. His wife, we had not met her, because she had learned invisibility as an art, bought a small house two towns over with a porch that did not need a ring to open.
Rowan's piece won an award she did not fly to receive. Instead, she shot the harbor every morning for a month—first light, mid tide, gulls arguing, a dog in someone's skiff—and hung the prints in the bakery where gossip happens. The town looked at its own face and decided it could live with it.
Sloane added two more lines to her forearm tattoo: one for a saved kid, one for a saved friend. When asked, she said the lines were tally marks for people she yelled into staying alive.
Rishi bought himself a new pair of headphones and a better coffee grinder and announced he was sticking around awhile because the pixels here were particularly affable.
Caleb moved his books from the boxes under his bed to the shelves beside the window and called a man about a rescue dog. The dog turned out to be nervous around sirens and excellent with camera straps. Rowan taught him not to chew evidence and forgave him when he did.
On a clear afternoon that smelled like a promise, Caleb and Rowan walked the newly opened span. The boards sang only one note: true. At mid-span, they stopped. Boats stitched white wakes along the channel, and a child on a scooter paused to look out and announced to no one in particular that the water was beautiful today.
"It is," Rowan agreed.
Caleb leaned on the rail, ringless silhouette of a man who had chosen the right side of his own rules. "The first time I saw you," he said, "you were crawling along a beam with the harbor in your teeth and the whole town on your back."
"I thought I was alone," she said.
"You were," he said. "And you weren't."
She turned the camera on him, framing him small against the large patient water. He didn't pose. He didn't look away. The shutter took the moment and kept only what it needed.
"Title?" he asked, because he had learned her rhythms and liked to ask questions that made her answer on purpose.
"The Harbor Between Us," she said, and he nodded, and they walked on, and the bridge didn't groan. The tide, like honesty, turned and returned, and Winter Harbor—faithless, constant—learned to count in a new language that still sounded like home.