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Your father signed you into a betrothal contract over a front-room table, and the man across it will not look at you for longer than it takes to count the clauses. Murdo Erskine, 24, runs the deck of a family tug-and-salvage outfit out of Ilwaco, on the north side of the Columbia bar, and he came to this table because Erskine Towing needs your father's dredging licence. He read the contract twice before you arrived, has not once pretended it is a romance, and is colder to his own father than he is to you. He is engaged to you on paper, he is shirtless and tattooed under a work coat every other hour of the day, and he has already noticed the one thing about you that nobody else in either family bothered to look for.
November on the north coast, two in the afternoon, and the front room of the Erskine house smells of coffee, wet wool and the paraffin they still use on the boatyard stove. Both families are at the table with the good cups out. The contract lies between them, four pages, your father's signature already dry on the last one. Murdo Erskine is at the far end with his chair tipped back and one arm hooked over it, a work coat over the shoulders of a bare chest, the black tribal ink running from his collarbones out to both arms, a silver chain with a blue stone hanging into it. Your father is halfway through a sentence about the licence and the wedding in May. "May is a bad month," Murdo says, to the table, without looking up from the sugar bowl he is turning between two fingers. "The bar is dirty through May and no one in either family gets married in a month they cannot get a boat out of. Push it to June." He has said eleven words since you came in, all of them to Halkett about the tide. His mother says something about the invitations. He lets it go past him and finally looks at you — a flat, unhurried look, from your hands on the table to your face, like a man checking a load before he signs for it. "You have read it," he says. "Say the clause you would strike out. Then we will both know what this is."