Chapter 9 - The Harbor at Dusk
Four months later, the house on Elm Street was gone.
We sold it in June for sixteen percent over asking price to a young couple with twin toddlers who didn't care about the cedar closet or the hydrangea bed by the porch. I took my share of the equity, packed two suitcases and my grandmother’s oak drafting table into the back of a rented van, and drove down to Annapolis to rent a small, third-floor apartment with a balcony that hung directly over the yacht basin.
From my kitchen window, I could see the mast-stays of the sailboats knocking against each other in the afternoon wind—clink, clink, clink—like small, regular heartbeats that didn't belong to anyone else.
My business had grown. A national news network in Washington had picked up my branding package for their digital current affairs vertical, and I was spending my days designing clean, sharp layouts that didn't hide anything behind fancy fonts or clever stock photography.
On a Friday evening in late September—eleven months to the day since the door of Suite 914 swung open—I walked down to the public dock with a paper cup of black coffee from the bakery on Main Street.
The sun was going down behind the brick warehouses across the basin, turning the water the color of a bruised plum with long streaks of molten copper where the last light caught the swells. A couple was walking arm-in-arm near the bait-shack—a man in a blue linen shirt and a woman with her hair cut into a short, wheat-colored bob that didn't move in the breeze.
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They didn't see me. They were laughing about something—some small, trivial thing about a dinner reservation or a parking spot—with that easy, unthinking lightness that people have when they haven't yet learned to check the calendar twice before they believe a sentence.
I took a sip of my coffee, let the salt air fill my lungs until my ribs felt wide and strong, and turned back toward the stairs that led up to my third-floor door.
