The Weather Mark

Eider Bay, Maine, has trusted one family with its old boats for seventy-six years: the Flahertys of Flaherty Boatworks. Tommy Flaherty, thirty-one and the youngest of three brothers, learned to read a hull's lines before he could drive. He's the quiet one - the master shipwright who hears what tired wood is trying to say, who spends his nights finishing Patience, the thirty-eight-footer his father started in 2019 and never lived to launch. The plan is set: this September, at the town's 150th anniversary regatta, all three brothers will launch her together. Then the town's other old lady comes home. The Kittiwake - a fifty-eight-foot gaff-rigged schooner built in Eider Bay in 1926, hauled out and going soft on the yard's side lot - has been bought by Will Lowell, the new owner of Salt Spray Marina, and he wants her sailing by September. Will paid for her with his grandmother's money, and her instructions were simple: keep it a working waterfront, and learn to stay. His grandmother crewed on the Kittiwake in the summer of 1964, and Will has decided the Flaherty yard is the only one on this coast he trusts to bring her back. He's funding the whole job - but the first sounding of the survey finds three dead frames and six feet of punky keelson, and the historical society president would rather see the old boat as a static museum piece than risk her on open water again. Tommy has been watching Will Lowell since last summer, and telling himself it means nothing. Will is gay, and has known it since he was nineteen. Tommy has been with women his whole life - happily, exclusively, without a single question. Except lately, working shoulder to shoulder in the bilge of an old schooner, he's started catching Will looking at him the way you look at something you want and don't understand wanting. And when Tommy reaches out, without thinking, to wipe a smear of grease from Will's cheekbone, the careful distance between them finally collapses. Restoring the Kittiwake will take everything the yard has through one thin summer. Convincing the town to let her sail, finishing his father's boat, and untangling the hot-wire hum under his skin may take even more. But some things, Tommy is learning, you can only fix by listening - to the boat, to the town, and at last, to himself. The third novel in the Fogline series - a standalone coastal Maine romance about family, craftsmanship, and learning to stay. Fans of the series will find the Flaherty brothers and their partners settled into their own happy endings around the edges of the story; new readers can start here with no catching up required. Guaranteed happily-ever-after.