Chapter 4 - The Haven by the Marsh
Harbor Pines was salt-crusted, loud, and alive. Gulls screeched over weather-beaten piers, and the air carried the pungent, honest aroma of diesel, wet marsh grass, and fried dough. Sarah rented a tiny two-bedroom apartment above an independent marine hardware store owned by an elderly Scottish immigrant named Calum.
"Plumbing’s loud, but the roof doesn’t leak," Calum said, handing Sarah an old brass key attached to a plastic cork. He looked at Nora, who was hiding behind her mother’s leg, eyes wide. Calum bent down slowly, groaning with arthritic knees, and produced a wooden carved seagull from his pocket. "For you, wee lass. Keeps the gulls from stealing your chips."
Nora took it hesitantly, her small fingers wrapping around the smooth wood. "Thank you, sir."
Sarah unpacked their few belongings into the sparse rooms. The wood floors were scratched, and the window overlooked a marsh rather than Eleanor’s manicured rose gardens, but the breeze blowing through the screen was cool and clean.
That night, Sarah set Nora’s medical supplies on the nightstand: two spare rescue inhalers, a daily steroid disk, a spacer, and a battery-operated nebulizer. Nora curled under a faded quilt, her breathing steady, rhythmic, and unimpeded.
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Sarah sat on the linoleum kitchen floor, staring at her bank account on her phone. Her joint accounts with Julian’s trust had been frozen by noon—Arthur Sterling’s doing. She had four hundred dollars in cash and a mountain of legal bills looming on the horizon.
She opened her sketchbook. Before Julian died, before Eleanor insisted she abandon her "frivolous dabbling" to become a proper high-society mother, Sarah had been an illustrator. With a charcoal pencil, she began drawing her daughter running through tall grass, hair wild, lungs open wide.
