“Crew.”
“Yeah?”
“She’s safer than you think,” she says. “That lighthouse has teeth.”
Then the line goes dead.
I sit on the porch steps until the sky starts graying at the edges. The cat squeezes through the door and curls beside my foot, purring like it knows better than to ask. The sea smells clean, almost sweet after the storm.
Inside, Bailey stirs. “You’re brooding,” she mumbles, voice still thick with sleep.
“Always,” I say.
She wraps the blanket around her shoulders and joins me. “Bad news?”
“Complicated news.”
“That’s your polite word for betrayal.”
I give a humorless laugh. “You’re getting too good at reading me.”
She bumps my shoulder. “Occupational hazard.”
I tell her everything—Harris, the clause, the plan to use us. By the time I finish, her coffee’s gone cold and her jaw’s set in that way that makes smart men run.
“So he wanted to save the team by destroying your life,” she says.
“Pretty much.”
“And he thought I’d crumble under paperwork.”
“People always underestimate librarians,” I say.
“Booksellers,” she corrects automatically. Then she sighs. “What do we do?”
“Wait forty-eight hours.”
She snorts. “You don’t wait well.”
“Neither do you.”
We sit there while the sun climbs out of the water. For a second, everything feels suspended—like the calm right before kickoff. I used to live for that tension. Now it just feels expensive.
By midmorning, the town knows something’s wrong again, though not the details. Coral Bell’s gossip chain runs on instinct, not information. Mrs. Winthrop shows up with muffins “for stress,” Lila with legal pads, and Ivy with a playlist titledBurn It Down but Gently.
Bailey handles them like the pro she is—gracious, grounded, funny even. Watching her, I realize she’s changed. She doesn’t shrink from chaos anymore. She orchestrates it into rhythm. The girl who once left town because someone humiliated her now runs a community that would riot for her.
I want to tell her that, but I know she’d brush it off, so I just fix another hinge in silence.
At noon, I call Marcus because I need to hear from someone who still believes in clean hits and honest work.
“You sound like a man balancing on the fifty-yard line,” he says.
“Feels that way,” I admit. “Harris forged grant documents.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. We’ve got proof coming. But Laramie wants quiet.”
