I go back to my conversation with Liam, but a few minutes later, my eyes are drawn back to her. She’s not listening to our story anymore. Her gaze is fixed on the man at the bar. She’s smiling, a small, private smile that I’ve never seen before. She takes a sip of her beer, but her eyes don’t leave him.
A strange feeling starts to creep up my spine. I watch her for another minute. She laughs at something Liam says, but it’s automatic. Her focus is elsewhere. Her eyes keep drifting back to the bar, to the tall, broad-shouldered figure of the sheriff. Each time, there’s a flicker of something in her expression. A warmth. A connection.
Wait.
The thought starts as a tiny spark in the back of my mind, a whisper of suspicion. I remember her telling me, her voice choked with tears, about the one-night stand. A stranger. Someone she didn’t know. Someone who was just passing through.
But Knox didn’t just pass through. He stayed. He became the sheriff.
The timing clicks into place with a horrifying, sickening certainty.
Is this who she fucked?
The question slams into me with the force of a physical blow, and the beer in my hand suddenly tastes like poison. The easy camaraderie of the last hour evaporates, replaced by a cold, hard knot of dread in my stomach. I look from Millie’s distracted, hopeful face to the sheriff’s confident, unaware back, and I know. I just know.
Liam’s voice is a low, steady drone next to me, a story about some tourist at The Cocoa Nook who tried to pay for a croissant with a Canadian coin. I’m not really listening. My entire world has narrowed to the woman sitting on my other side and the man at the bar who has become the axis around which all my problems now orbit.
“…and so the guy just stares at the latte art and says, ‘Is that a seahorse or a map of Narnia?’” Liam finishes, a grin in his voice.
Millie forces a laugh, but it’s thin, brittle. She pushes her stool back. “I’m just going to head to the washroom,” she says, her gaze darting toward the dark hallway at the back of the bar.
“Don’t fall in,” I tell her, attempting a lightness that feels foreign on my tongue. It’s a stupid joke, but it’s all I’ve got.
She offers me a distracted smile before sliding off the stool. I watch her walk away, my eyes tracking her every movement. She doesn’t take the most direct path. Her trajectory curves slightly, bringing her within a few feet of the bar, of Knox. She doesn’t look at him, not directly, but her entire body is aware of his presence.
Liam clears his throat, pulling my attention back to him. “When she gets back, we can all play a game of pool,” he suggests, his tone hopeful, like it’s a brilliant plan that will fix everything. “Like old times.”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
Her silhouette disappears into the dark hallway. I take a long pull from my beer bottle, the cold liquid doing nothing to cool the fire in my gut.
“So,” I say, keeping my voice casual. “How are you two now? Really.”
Liam lets out a breath, running a hand through his curls. He looks relieved to be talking about it. “We’re just friends,” he says, and he actually sounds like he believes it. “We’re figuring that out. It’s… better this way. For now.”
I take another swig of beer and say nothing. I just nod, like I understand, like I agree. But all I can think is how naive he is. How blind.
Watching her be in love with Liam was one thing. It was a familiar, chronic ache, a wound I had learned to live with. It was part of the fabric of our three-person world, a sad but known quantity. But this? Watching her make those soft, secret, googly eyes at the sheriff?
That’s a different kind of monster entirely. One I have no idea how to fight.
Knox
The beer tastes like a victory I haven’t earned yet. It’s cold, bitter, and it slides down my throat, a welcome shock after a day spent suffocating in the stale air of the mayor’s office.
The low thrum of conversation in Bar 2.0 is a balm, a normal sound in a town that’s been anything but. I came here to decompress, to shed the weight of the day before it crushed me entirely.
I should be at home, in the quiet of my house, watching the video Amy sent of Clara’s band performance. I should be studying every note, every expression on my daughter’s face, trying to make up for the fact that I wasn’t there.
But I needed noise. I needed the illusion of anonymity.
My mind replays the day’s events on a loop. The meeting with Jake was a grueling, twelve-hour marathon of crisis management. We finally hammered out the details of the Port Blossom deal. It’s a risky, high-stakes gambit—trading a significant portion of our allotted raw lumber for a six-month supply of heat suppressants.
Jake was on the phone with their mayor for hours, his voice a smooth, persuasive blend of charm and hardball politics. Ispent the time mapping out the logistics, the transport routes, the security details. It felt like old times, like planning a major operation back in my NYPD days, only instead of taking down a cartel, we were trying to stop a town from imploding.
But the suppressants are just one piece of a crumbling dam. The power grid is the other. The temporary generators are straining, their constant hum a fragile heartbeat for the town. We spent hours with an energy consultant from the state, a man with a face full of worry and a spreadsheet full of red numbers.
Reviving the main grid is a multi-million-dollar problem, and Driftwood Cove’s coffers were bone dry. That was when Julian Vance walked in.
