✯ North Star ✯

3 - Bad Karma

The dock was chaos when we got back.

Ambulances. Lights strobing red and blue against the water. People talking over each other in that urgent, directionless way that meant something had already gone wrong and everyone was still catching up to it. The air had that particular quality it got around emergency vehicles — compressed somehow, like the space itself was holding its breath.

Then I saw him.

A man on a stretcher, being wheeled toward the nearest ambulance. My chest did something before my brain fully processed why — a drop, sudden and specific, the way your stomach moved when you recognized something you hadn't been prepared to recognize.

I knew that face.

"Who's that?" John B asked.

"Scooter Grubbs," a girl nearby said, already holding her phone up, angling it toward the stretcher. "He was out during the storm." She turned the screen toward us, satisfied. "Check out this pic I got. Dead body. Insane."

"Holy shit," John B muttered.

"What kind of boat did he have?" JJ asked.

"That dirtbag somehow copped a brand-new Grady-White. Everyone's out looking for it." She was already moving on, already onto the next thing, the way people moved on from things that didn't belong to them.

My stomach dropped in a way that was different from before. Heavier. More specific.

Scooter Grubbs's wife. She'd been at our house this morning, trailing after my dad with that tight, distressed expression — the one people wore when they were holding something together by force and weren't sure how much longer they could manage it. I hadn't put it together then. I was putting it together now, and the putting-together felt like something I didn't want to be doing.

"Hey, Star. Come on." John B's voice, gentle and close, and I felt it before I fully heard it.

I didn't move. Something had rooted me to the dock, to that specific square of wood, watching them wheel him away and thinking about his wife and my dad and the morning and all the threads I hadn't known were connected.

"Hey." He stepped into my line of sight, making me look at him instead of the stretcher. "You okay?"

"Huh? Oh — yeah. Yeah, I'm good." I made my face do the right thing. Walked with him.

I was fine.

I kept saying it to myself on the walk back, the way you said things when you needed them to be true and weren't quite sure they were.

I was fine.

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Back at the Château, everyone was pacing or perched or doing that particular kind of restless nothing that happened when people had too much adrenaline and nowhere to put it.