The Harbor Master Is My Emergency Contact

How it begins

The hospital called Mina because Ben had never taken her name off the form.

She was standing in the harbor studio with both hands full of blue glass.

“Is he all right?”

“A minor injury. He asked us not to trouble you.”

“That sounds like him.”

She put the glass down carefully.

For twelve years she had lived three hours inland, visiting for birthdays, funerals and the kind of holidays that became repairs to her mother's kitchen. Ben had remained beside the water, organizing rescue crews and pretending the town's needs arrived in a sensible order.

She found him in the clinic with a bandaged hand and an expression of deep irritation at a paper cup.

“You're still my emergency contact,” he said.

“So I gathered.”

“I meant to update it.”

“When?”

He looked at the cup.

She sat beside him.

Outside the clinic window, the harbor cranes moved in slow arcs. Mina had returned to make a memorial from sea glass, a commission she wanted badly enough to resent everyone telling her how lovely it was to be home.

Ben had been the only person to ask what tools she needed.

Now his good hand rested between them on the bench.

“Why didn't you call someone closer?”

“I didn't call anyone.”

“The form did.”

He smiled.

“Efficient system.”

Mina looked at the bandage. There was no dramatic injury, no story that would excuse an emotional conversation through the urgency of something worse.

Just a man who had left her name where someone might find it.

She took the paper cup and fetched fresh water.

When she returned, he had moved his jacket so there was more room beside him.

“You don't have to stay,” he said.

She sat down.

“I know.”

For a while they watched the cranes. Mina knew the harbor's colors, its changing light, the exact green she needed beneath the memorial's blue.

She did not yet know what to call the quiet relief of being the person somebody had never quite stopped expecting.