Chapter 4 The Boathouse

 POV: Damian

Three days of board meetings and wedding talk and arrangements had left me wanting to drive my fists through a wall. Instead, I drove down to my old boathouse.

Nobody at Ashford came down here much. The path was overgrown with shrubs and the wood on the dock soft with age, and the whole place smelled like river water and rust. Nate used to tease me about it when we were kids, asking why I would rather sit alone in a shed than play tennis with the neighbors' children. I never had a good answer for him. I just knew that when my father's temper filled the main house like smoke, this was the one room it never reached.

Some habits survived everything, apparently. Even a five year memory gap.

Inside, an old boat engine sat on a workbench, half taken apart, tools laid out in a neat row beside it. According to the estate manager, I had been restoring it myself before the accident. I did not remember starting it. I did not remember choosing this particular engine, or where I learned to do this kind of work in the first place.

But when I picked up the wrench, my hand knew exactly where it belonged.

I worked for almost an hour without thinking about Vanessa, or Margaret, or the ache that settled behind my ribs since the accident. My hands moved through the motions like they had done it a thousand times before. Loosen this bolt  and check the seal. Clean the valve before it seizes completely.  My body simply knew, the way it apparently still knew how to walk and breathe and hold a coffee cup steady, even when my mind had gone dark on everything else that mattered.

For the first time in months, I felt like myself. Not the version everyone kept describing to me, the confident CEO, the golden son, the man who used to laugh easily at parties. Just a man with grease on his hands and a small, quiet kind of peace that matters.

I opened the bottom drawer of the workbench looking for a socket wrench.

Instead, I found a rag.

It was old, soft from years of use, stained dark with grease at the center. Someone had stitched a small pair of initials into the corner, careful, slightly uneven, like whoever did it had not been formally trained but had cared enough to try anyway.

The letters were not mine.

I turned the rag over in my hands, tracing the stitching with my thumb, and  without warning. A feeling with no name attached to it. No memory to explain why my throat suddenly felt thick, or why my eyes stung at the sight of two small letters stitched into a piece of fabric I could not remember ever owning.

I sat down on the old wooden stool and stared at it for a long time.

"You've been down here for hours," Nate said from the doorway, making me jump.

I didn't let him come in. My brother had a way of moving quietly when he wanted to, a habit left over from childhood, from years of trying not to wake our father when he came home late and angry with everyone.

"Lost track of time," I said, sliding the rag into my jacket pocket without fully deciding to.

Nate's eyes flicked toward my pocket for half a second, quick enough that I almost missed it.

"Mom's asking for you," he said. "Vanessa's here early. Something about seating charts."

"Of course she is."

He studied me for a moment, the way he did when we were teenagers and he suspected I was hiding something from him, except this time the suspicion ran the other direction. "You good?"

"I found a rag in the drawer," I said, watching him closely. "Not mine. Somebody stitched initials into it."

Something softened behind his eyes, there and gone so fast I almost convinced myself I imagined it.

"Probably belonged to one of the old groundskeepers," he said. "This place has been wasting here all these years “

"Right." I did not believe him. I was not entirely sure why.

"You should head up," he said, already turning to leave. "You know how Mom gets when you keep Vanessa waiting."

I followed him out of the boathouse, the rag still tucked in my jacket pocket, resting against my chest like it weighed more than a scrap of cloth should. I told myself it was nothing. A random object in a drawer, probably left behind by whoever used to own this place before my family did.

But my chest still ached, low and steady, the whole walk back up to the house.

Whoever those initials belonged to, some part of me already missed them.