Phần I
Nobody slept.
The Coast Guard ran a boat up and down the river until three in the morning with a spotlight sweeping the marsh. The sheriff's marine unit checked every dock between Rockville and the Stono. Tom drove the river roads in the white Ford with the windows down, calling his son's name into the dark like a man calling a dog home.
At 5:40, as the sky over the marsh was just beginning to go gray, Tessa called.
"I found my boat," she said. "Ellie. It's tied up at your dock."
Your dock. The crooked one. Across the water.
Of course. Of course that was where he'd go.
Tessa drove the Grady-White across - the same boat, Ellie realized halfway over, the same route Harlan Ashby had taken fifteen years earlier with his running lights off. The river was flat and pink and silent. Ellie sat in the bow in sweatpants and Julian's Clemson sweatshirt. In ten and a half hours, she was supposed to be walking down an aisle.
The skiff was tied to the last piling. And at the very end of the crooked dock, with his legs hanging over the water, sat her brother.
He didn't turn around when their engine cut. He just held up the bottle so she could see it.
The seal was unbroken.
"Fourteen months and one day," Wade said. His voice was wrecked. "I've been holding it for seven hours. I haven't decided yet."
Ellie climbed onto the dock and walked out to him over the missing boards and sat down beside him, close, her shoulder against his.
"Then don't decide yet," she said. "Let me read you something first."