Dad had furnished it simply. Linen sofa. Weathered oak table. Built-in bookshelves with novels and sailing manuals and exactly four mismatched coffee mugs. One bedroom upstairs. One tiny office downstairs. Wool blankets folded in a basket beside the fireplace. Through the back windows, the ocean spread out in layers of slate and silver under the moon.
It was perfect.
And it broke me.
I set down my bag, leaned both hands on the kitchen counter, and cried so hard I had to sit on the floor. Not about Grant, not at first. About Dad. About the fact that even from a hospice bed he had been thinking ahead to my escape route. About the unbearable tenderness of a father buying his grown daughter a place to land before pushing off from the world himself.
When the crying passed, I made tea in one of the mismatched mugs and took it onto the porch wrapped in a blanket.
The ocean at night is loud in a way that fills your body. Waves hit rock below the bluff with a hollow boom and a hiss afterward, like the sea reconsidering something. The wind smelled sharp and clean. I sat there until my tea went cold and my phone buzzed again.