Low Tide

By Morgan Thayer

Marcus Tell has spent twenty-six years guiding ships through the most dangerous water in the harbor, his calm so practiced it no longer feels like a skill - it feels like who he is. Then his son is gone, and the only thing left that still makes sense is the work.

Three weeks after the worst night of his life, Marcus is back on the bridge of a tanker, calling headings in the same low, unhurried voice he's used for decades, certain that if he just keeps doing the job correctly, something underneath him will eventually catch up and hold. It almost does. Almost - until a four-second lapse in the Narrows nearly costs him everything, and the people around him stop pretending not to notice.

Desmond, his oldest friend on the water. Ruth, who reads exhaustion over a dispatch radio the way Marcus reads tides. Priya, the pilot he trained, who refuses to handle him gently. And Yvonne, his ex-wife, grieving louder than he ever will, in the same house their son once filled with ordinary noise.

Low Tide is a quiet, unflinching novella about competence as armor, grief that doesn't run on anyone's schedule, and the particular loneliness of being the calmest person in every room you enter. It asks what happens when the thing that has always kept you steady is also the thing keeping you from coming apart where someone could help - and what it costs, and what it's worth, to finally let the tide come in.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HFWY581X
• ISBN13: 9798193829577
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"