“I know,” I say, my voice cracking. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll call her. Just… just give me a minute.”
I end the call and slide down the wall to sit on the cold pavement, my head in my hands. I’m the sheriff of a town on the brink of a crisis, and I’m a father who is about to break his daughter’s heart. And in this moment, I’m not sure which role hurts more.
The cold of the pavement seeps through the fabric of my pants, a dull, grounding chill against the firestorm raging in my chest. My phone feels like a lead weight in my hand. I haveto make the call. Every second I delay is another second of cowardice, another second of letting her believe I’m still coming. I take a deep breath, the air tasting of exhaust fumes and distant salt, and tap her name.
The phone rings twice. Then she picks up. No hello. Just silence. I can hear her breathing on the other end, a soft, controlled sound that tells me everything I need to know. She’s waiting.
“Hey, superstar,” I say, my voice attempting a lightness I am nowhere near feeling. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” she says. The word is clipped, brittle. A single syllable designed to keep me at a distance.
“Look, Clara… I’m so sorry, but something’s come up here. A work thing, and?—”
“You’re not coming.” It’s not a question. It’s a verdict. The flat, dead certainty in her voice is a punch to the gut.
“No,” I admit, the word feeling like ash in my mouth. “I can’t. I’m so sorry. I swear to you, if there was any way?—”
“It’s always work,” she cuts in, her voice rising, cracking with the first hint of the storm to come. “It was work in New York, and it’s work here. You promised me, Dad. You looked me in the eye and you promised.”
“I know, and I feel like shit about it, I really do. But this is a real emergency, Clara. People are counting on me.”
“Am I not people?” The question is a knife, twisting in an already open wound. “Does what I want ever count? You left. You left Mom, you left New York, and now you’re leaving me. Again.”
“That’s not fair,” I say, my own defensiveness rising, a pathetic shield against the truth of her words. “I’m here because I’m trying to build a life for us, a better one. This is my job, Clara. My responsibility.”
“Your responsibility?” she scoffs, and I can hear the tears now, hot and angry. “Your responsibility was to be in that audience tonight. To see me play the solo I practiced for months. But you chose them. You chose a town full of strangers over your own daughter.”
“That’s not what this is?—”
“Just stop,” she sobs. “I don’t want to hear your excuses. I don’t want to hear anything. I wish… I wish you’d never moved here. I wish you’d just stayed away.”
The line goes dead.
She hung up on me.
I’m left sitting there on the cold, hard ground, the silence of the phone line roaring in my ear. The words echo in the cavern of my chest.I wish you’d just stayed away.It’s the one thing she could have said to break me completely. And she knew it.
I drop my head into my hands, the rough scrape of my stubble against my palms the only sensation I can focus on. I failed her. Again.
I don’t know how long I sit there, a statue of failure in the fading light. Eventually, I push myself up, my body feeling a hundred years old. I walk to my truck on autopilot, get in, and drive. I don’t go back to my empty house by the sea. I go to the one place that feels like it has any meaning right now. My office.
The temporary sheriff’s department is housed in a pre-fab modular building behind the civic center. It smells of new carpet and stale air. Inside, the space is a mess of unpacked boxes and mismatched furniture. My desk is a scarred metal table, clear except for my laptop, a mug of cold coffee, and a large, unfolded map of Driftwood County.
I sink into my chair, the springs groaning in protest. I need to think. I need another solution. The Port Blossom plan is a long shot, a politician’s gamble. What if Jake can’t pull it off? What if they say no? We need a Plan B.
My eyes scan the map, tracing the roads, the small towns dotted along the coastline. There has to be another way. Another source. A private clinic? A black market supplier? The thought sends a shudder down my spine. Unregulated suppressants could be more dangerous than none at all.
My gaze drifts to a stack of old case files I brought with me from New York. A memento, I’d told myself. A reminder of the life I’d left behind. On top is a thin folder, labeled simply “Riots – August 2023.”
The memory comes rushing back, unbidden and vivid. The heatwave that summer had been brutal, a suffocating blanket of humidity that had baked the concrete canyons of Manhattan for a week straight. Then the power grid failed. Not just a blackout, but a catastrophic, cascading failure that plunged half the borough into darkness for three days.
I remember the smell first. The smell of fear and garbage cooking in the sun. Then the sound. The eerie quiet of the first night, broken by the sudden, symphonic crash of a storefront window being smashed. Then another. And another. I was on patrol, my partner and I, our faces slick with sweat, the weight of our gear feeling like a tomb.
We were dispatched to a looting call at a pharmacy on the Lower East Side. By the time we got there, it wasn’t a looting anymore. It was a frenzy. The street was a war zone. People weren’t just stealing; they were fighting. Over insulin, over baby formula, over bags of ice. A rumor had spread, a toxic whisper on the wind that the emergency services were overwhelmed, that no one was coming to help. And in that vacuum of information, fear took over.
I remember the sight of a police car, overturned and burning, its sirens wailing a mournful, distorted song into the smoke-filled sky. I remember the sound of a gunshot, close, too close, and the way my training had kicked in, my body moving on pureinstinct. I remember pulling a terrified young woman out of the path of a charging crowd, her face streaked with tears and soot. I remember the sheer, animal panic in people’s eyes.
It wasn’t malice. It was desperation. It was the primal, terrifying realization that the rules had suddenly ceased to exist, and it was every person for themselves. The city had become a jungle, and we were all just animals trying to survive the night.
