Holding On to Maybe

*Almost got it.* Maya scrapes the bristle brush across the dock cleat one last time and a ribbon of green algae peels off into the harbour. Dawn light catches the wet wood and turns it amber. The air smells of low tide — salt, mud, and the faint sweetness of somebody's boat exhaust mixing with diesel from the pumps. Her father's humming drifts out of the bait shed. It is *Brown-Eyed Girl*, and he is missing every third note. She does not correct him. Some mornings the song comes out right. Other mornings it wanders into different keys and different decades. This morning it sounds like he is making it up as he goes. Corrigan's Marina is thirty slips, a bait shop with a faded red door, and fuel pumps standing like metal sentinels at the end of the main dock. The Sea Rose, a thirty-footer her father rebuilt when Maya was twelve, bobs at slip seven with a hull that needs painting and a cabin that needs new windows. Everything here needs something. The place runs on duct tape and stubbornness. Caleb Whitaker has been studying at the marina at weekends since he started at university an hour away. Marine biology, oceanography, statistics. He has highlighted half of every textbook and tabbed the rest until they look like paper porcupines, and inside the front cover of one of them, in messy block print: *Caleb Whitaker. If found, return to Maya Corrigan.* His family is also the family whose offer is sitting on the office desk, and the reason Maya has not thrown it away is the same reason she cannot talk about it. What follows: an offer that cannot be binned, a dinner where everything shifts, rules of engagement, rope burns and rain, a binder of bombshells, a night-shift confession, a lie between two people who have never lied to each other, a sandcastle festival, an empty seat at a table, and a document nobody saw coming. A young adult second-chance romance in a working harbour town, about a family business, a father whose mind is going, and a boy whose name is already written inside a book that belongs to her.