Free From Brooding Boss to Adoring Dad by Dianne Drake

repair shops in Portland had all turned it down. Quite simply, it would have been less expensive to buy a new boat. And Cornelius Coulson, not being a man who cared to wander too far from home to look for any more marine repair shops, had taken that as a sign. He’d run aground on an outcropping of rocks one time and survived, and he wasn’t going to tempt fate by repairing the boat and risking another rock outcropping. Better to allow nature to reclaim the wooden 1951 Lyman Islander than let it claim him or anybody he’d loved, his grandfather always said.
    But Adam had begged to keep the boat. For a playhouse. Or they could turn it into a pretend fort or even a make-believe pirate ship. All imaginative plans for a ten-year-old. Luckily, Grandpa Coulson had seen merit in turning
Stella,
named after his wife, into a toy. And that’s how Adam Coulson had become the only kid in his school whoowned his own boat. Albeit one that wasn’t sea-, river-, or pond-worthy.
    Twenty-six years later, he still owned the boat. It was his legacy from an extraordinary man and pretty much the only thing his wife hadn’t wanted to snatch away from him in the divorce.
Stella
kept him grounded as a man, and testified to the fact that nothing was futile if you wanted it badly enough. She was nearly sea-worthy again. It had taken him the better part of the past ten years to bring her back to this point, an hour here, a few minutes there. And while he didn’t fancy himself as a master ship repairman, he’d taken a fair amount of pride in the project. Wished his grandfather could have seen the transformation. Oh, there were still some minor things to do … a bit more varnish, some work to unwarp the warped deck, a new wheel … nothing insurmountable. Which was why, when he took to sanding the deck, like he was doing today, he felt his spirits lifting.
Stella
was a symbol of what he could do. So was the white building sitting off in the distance. The hospital. The courts had seen fit to let him keep a modest inheritance from his grandfather, along with
Stella,
and he’d celebrated that small victory by buying the hospital with that inheritance. Except that was half-gone now. But maybe that was good. He was trying hard to think so, anyway.
    “It’s all good,” he muttered, crawling forward on his hands and knees to the plastic cooler with the bottle of water. He grabbed the water and two cups, poured and handed one cup across to his companion who sat opposite him on the deck, cross-legged. “It has to be all good, Tadeo,” he said to the bright-eyed boy who came so often to the beach to help him with the boat that working on the boat without Tadeo didn’t seem right. “Because if it’s not, then what’s the point?”
    “All good,” Tadeo agreed, smiling.
    “So, what kind of sandpaper do we need to use over in that corner of the deck? “ He pointed to the right stern. Another source of pride these days—Tadeo. He’d gone from withdrawn to involved. His skills at boat refurbishing weren’t bad either, for a kid his age.
    “Fine grit. To finish it. Then extra-fine, before we do the varnish.”
    Yes, Tadeo had come a long way these past few months, and the change was satisfying to Adam. But it also pointed out something painfully obvious … how absolutely, totally alone he was in the world. He looked at Davion as a protégé, and Tadeo as a protégé as well. He was doing things with them he’d have loved doing with his own son … except for the obvious. He didn’t have a son. But what could he expect? He couldn’t hang on to a relationship that might give him a son or daughter and, more than that, he didn’t particularly live a lifestyle that would be attractive to a woman. No stability, no woman, no children. There was definitely a pattern there. Or maybe it was a habit. Didn’t matter, though. Alone was alone, any way you stated it.
    His mind wandered to Erin. She had such … stability. It suited her. Became her. And he