Free A Daughter's Story by Tara Taylor Quinn

and her husband, Trick, had been a couple of years ahead
of Chris in school.
    He didn’t need to ask how they were doing. He’d just come from
their house.
    “She says Trick’s having a rough go of it.”
    Trick had been the one to pull Wayne Ainge out of the
water.
    “He’ll be fine.”
    “She was looking for someone to help out with Trick’s boat
until…” Marta looked him in the eye. She wouldn’t tell him what to do—she wasn’t
as bold with him as his mother had been—but her expectations were clear.
    “Already taken care of,” he said, thinking about the
conversation he’d just had with Anne.
    Marta’s approving smile went deeper than he’d have liked.
    “You’re a good boy, Chris.”
    He was no boy. And if he didn’t quit thinking about long legs
and dark brown curls, he wasn’t going to be good for anything, either.
    “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Aunt Marta—” Uncle Jim had
become just plain Jim around the first time Chris had worked a full day on his
father’s boat, but Aunt Marta was still his “aunt” “—but, the other night, about
the fact that I don’t come by as often as I should…”
    “You took your folks’ death hard, Chris. Everyone knew you
would. It’s understandable that you pulled away. I just hate that you still
think you have to. You’re not thirty anymore, son. If you don’t start to open
up, before long you’ll be Jim’s age and have no one but the guys at the bar to
know if you’re even alive or not.”
    “I’m not going to get married just so someone will know I’m not
dead.”
    “I’m not talking about marriage. I’m talking about opening up
to people. Letting them care about you.”
    She cared. And he’d hurt her. He read the pain in her eyes.
    And he understood. Marta knew about the life of a fisherman.
She’d accepted the dangers. The long hours. And she opened her heart to them,
anyway. All she asked in return was that they love her back.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I know.”
    He should go.
    “What’s on your mind, Chris?”
    What was niggling at him was nothing. He had more to do than
there were hours in the day and night combined.
    “The day my folks were killed,” he said, and stopped when he
saw the shadow cross Marta’s face. “Do you know where they were headed?”
    Or where they’d been?
    “Yes.”
    “My mother told you?” He wasn’t surprised. Marta and Josie
Talbot had been best friends.
    “Yes.”
    Marta would have sympathized. Women stuck together. She might
even have encouraged Josie. At the very least she’d have understood.
    Chris didn’t.
    Glancing at the older woman now, studying the lines on a face
weathered from years of looking out to sea in hopes of seeing the right bow come
up over the crest of the waves, Chris didn’t blame her.
    “I wasn’t sure you knew,” Marta said now.
    Even though she was sitting at home alone this Sunday, there
was no saying that as a younger, thinner, more attractive woman she’d been
content to spend all those long hours alone.
    “They’d just changed their wills. I was executor of both
estates. And sole beneficiary, as well.”
    Graying eyebrows drawn together, Marta said, “I’d hoped they
hadn’t gotten that far. That at least their secret had gone to the grave with
them.”
    Lyle and Josie had had a joint funeral—as husband and wife.
They were buried side by side beneath the Talbot family marker in the seaman’s
graveyard in the middle of Comfort Cove.
    The plot of land that divided the real town from the more
upscale tourist district.
    The plot that divided Chris’s life. In so many ways.
    “You’ve known all these years, and yet you never said
anything.”
    The only response he had to give was a shrug.
    “You blame her.”
    His mother had been named as the plaintiff.
    “I know that my father would never, ever have left her.” Or
turned his back on her, no matter what she’d done. Lyle had loved Josie more
than he’d loved any other human being on