"At sunset."
"Also true."
"That's incredibly cliché."
"I know." He waited. "Is that a no?"
She grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him. Hard. When she pulled back, she was still crying, but she was smiling too.
"It's a yes," she said. "It's always been a yes."
He slid the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly, because he'd measured her ring size three weeks ago while she was sleeping, which was either romantic or creepy depending on how you looked at it.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you too."
They sat on the dock as the stars came out, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. The fireflies blinked in the darkness. The inlet whispered against the shore.
For the first time in his life, Ronan Cross wasn't thinking about what came next.
He was exactly where he wanted to be.
Six hundred miles north, Caleb Rourke sat in a coffee shop in Arlington and watched the rain streak down the windows.
The Blossom Springs operation was over. Warren Caldwell was in federal prison. The land-fraud network was dismantled, the money-laundering channels exposed, the corrupt officials scattered across various facilities with sentences that would outlast them.
It should have felt like a victory.
Instead, Caleb had spent the past six weeks pulling threads. Following patterns. Tracing connections that nobody else could see.
Blossom Springs wasn't the hub. It was a spoke. The real operation was bigger, older, and more sophisticated. Warren Caldwell had been a regional player—important but replaceable. Someone else was running the show.
And someone was erasing the trail.
Her name was Harper Wynn. Investigative journalist. Fourteen months missing.
She'd written a series for a newspaper in Mobile—sharp pieces about shell companies buying waterfront property, about permits that didn't match plats, about surveys quietly altered. The same patterns Caleb had found in Blossom Springs.
Then she'd vanished. No credit card activity. No phone. No forwarding address. Just a car abandoned at an airport and an editor who assumed she'd gone on vacation.
Caleb pulled up her photo again. Dark hair cut in a sharp bob. Eyes that looked like they'd seen too much and kept looking anyway.
Her last article had ended with a line that haunted him: "The truth doesn't disappear just because someone buries it. It waits. And eventually, someone starts digging."
She'd known she was in danger. She'd kept writing anyway.
His phone buzzed. Ronan.
She said yes.
Caleb stared at the screen. Something loosened in his chest—a feeling he couldn't quite name.
Congratulations. You deserve it.
Come to the wedding. Whenever it is. Lila's already asking about your suit.
I don't own a suit.
