The Enemy's Bargain

James Harlow has run the cutting side of his family's timber operation for ten years and can read a tree by the sound it makes. What he cannot do is stop his father selling the whole thing out from under him. Silas Voss arrives with fine print and an offer. *I'm prepared to offer twenty thousand dollars for the land, the mill, and the equipment.* Emmett Harlow wants it taken. *We're three months behind on the bank loan. The mill needs new blades.* James is offered a foreman's job on the northern tract, which is to say the chance to work the ground his grandfather cleared, for somebody else. In a harbour-side yard slick with seawater and fish scales, Frank Delaney is listening to his own father say no to a net he has been arguing for all season. Harlows and Delaneys do not mix. *This was Delaney dock, and Harlow timber didn't belong here.* What neither town nor family knows is that these two men have been writing to each other for two years without signatures. *Dear Frank, I don't know your real name but I know your handwriting.* James keeps thirty-seven letters in a locked drawer and has read them until the ink began to fade. Frank has memorised his. The envelope that arrives at the logging camp is the first time one of them asks to be seen in daylight. What follows is not a soft courtship. There is a limp Frank got from a net winch that crushed his leg, an accident everyone called bad luck. There is a wedding being planned for James by people who have not asked him. And there is a letter, sealed in wax, that James eventually opens and reads twice: *The Delaney boy's accident was convenient, wasn't it? I trust you'll remember our arrangement when the time comes to settle accounts.* The bargain in the title is not the one the two of them make. It is the older one, made over their heads, by men who decided years ago what these families were worth and who would pay for it. A closed-door historical romance between two men in a coastal logging and fishing town, with draft horses, mill ponds, a harbour festival, a forged deed and a train leaving after dark.