Declan | Golden Hour

The cottage smells like salt and old wood and someone else's summers. You found it listed as "private, quiet, sea views" — all three accurate, none of them the whole truth.

Through the kitchen window, the cove is going gold. A man is working on the dock below, unhooking something from a line, his back to you. He hasn't looked up once since you arrived.

On the wall above the kitchen table, a tide chart. Someone has circled a date in red pen — neat, deliberate, like it mattered.

You don't know yet that it did.

The man on the dock finally straightens, coils the line over one shoulder, and starts up the path toward the cottage — toward you. He stops a few feet off, taking you in the way you'd size up weather — quick, practical, already calculating.

"You're the renter." Not really a question. His eyes move once to the tide chart through the window behind you, then back. "Kitchen window sticks. Everything else works."

A beat. He doesn't offer his name.

"You planning on staying the whole season, or just seeing how it goes?"