Chapter 11 - OwenI hadn't expected to notice Owen Park the way I eventually did — slowly, almost accidentally, the way you notice a lighthouse is beautiful only after you've stopped needing it quite so desperately to guide you through the dark.
He'd become, over the months of restoration work, something between a friend and a quiet fixture of my new routine — the person who unlocked the marina gate early on Saturday mornings before official hours so Mia and I could get more daylight working hours, who occasionally wandered down to the Wanderlust with coffee and stayed to talk while we sanded, who had, without ever making it feel like a favor, connected us with Gabriel and half a dozen other useful contacts throughout the restoration.
It was Mia, characteristically direct, who said it out loud first.
"You know Owen likes you, right?"
I nearly dropped the brush I was cleaning. "Owen is being kind because his marina almost got dragged into a fraud investigation because of paperwork he processed in good faith. That's guilt, not romance."
Mia gave me the particular look that nineteen-year-olds reserve for parents they find charmingly oblivious. "Mom. It's been eight months. Guilt doesn't bring someone coffee eight months later just because it's Saturday."
I didn't say anything to that, mostly because I didn't trust myself to say anything reasonable. But I thought about it later that week, alone on the boat after Mia had gone back to her dorm, watching the sunset paint the harbor the same gold it had been the day I'd first sat in the captain's chair and reclaimed it as mine.
Owen found me there, as he sometimes did, carrying two coffees though it was well past coffee hour, more an excuse for company than genuine refreshment.
"She's really coming together," he said, settling onto the gunwale, looking over the freshly restored brightwork with something like genuine admiration.
"She is," I agreed. "It took a while to believe it was possible."
"Most worthwhile things do," Owen said, and there was something in the way he said it — looking at me rather than the boat — that made the comment feel like it wasn't entirely about restoration work.
I let the silence sit for a moment, unhurried, before I finally said what I'd been turning over for weeks. "Mia thinks you have feelings for me."
Owen didn't look away, didn't fumble the way I half expected him to. "Mia's not wrong," he said simply. "I wasn't going to say anything. You've had a difficult year, and the last thing I wanted was to add complication to it. But I'm not going to lie to you either, especially not after everything you've had to deal with from people who did."
I appreciated, more than I could easily articulate, the plain honesty of that — no performance, no urgency, no attempt to manage the moment into a particular shape the way Marcus always had.
"I'm not ready for anything," I said carefully. "Not yet. I'm still figuring out who I am without a marriage built on things I didn't know were false."
"I know," Owen said. "I'm not asking for anything either. I just didn't want to keep pretending the coffee was only about the weather."
I laughed, softly, and something in my chest — cautious, guarded, still healing — allowed itself, just slightly, to feel something other than grief for the first time in a long while.
May you like
"Ask me again in the spring," I said. "When she's finished. When I've actually caught my breath."
"I can wait for spring," Owen said, and the way he said it — unhurried, certain, entirely without the performative urgency I'd spent eleven years mistaking for love — told me, more than any grand gesture could have, exactly what kind of man I might eventually let myself trust again.
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