His face broke, softening.
“Selena…” He shook his head. “You’re asking me to light the bank on fire. To choose between the people I love.”
I wanted to reach out, to hold him in my arms and just sink into that feeling, because in my heart I understood him.
Completely.
I knew what it was like to love your family so completely that you would do anything for them. You would give up everything—your dreams, your joy—to keep them close, to keep them alive. To keep paying a generational debt because the alternative was finding out who you were without it. We were the same kind of broken. I think I’d sensed it that first night on the beach. Standing there, I could feel exactly what it would cost him, and I believed every word.
And none of it pulled a single particle out of my sand.
“I’m not asking you to abandon them. There are other sponsors, whistleblower protections, lawyers who?—”
“There’s no version where the money keeps flowing through the gap. I’ve run it every night for three years, and it doesn’t clear. Mai’s treatment doesn’t pause for my conscience.” He stepped back an inch, but it felt like an ending. “Run it without me. The lab report, a journalist?—”
“Gets settled and sealed, and you know it.” My voice was so quiet I barely heard it. “Chase, this is bigger than you and me. This isn’t just about my beach or even Crescent Cove. RipTide is a national brand. These bottles are going out everywhere.”
“I fucking know that, Selena.”
It wasn’t fair, what I was asking him. And as much as it broke my heart, I understood, because once, a lifetime ago, I’d made a similar choice. Staying with what you knew, what you had grown comfortable with, instead of pushing into the unknown.
“Here’s what you’re not saying, so I will. You’ve felt it. You feel it with the part of you that’s always been tied to the ocean, and you came in from the waves and held the bottle anyway.That’s not debt talking, Chase. That’s turning on your smile and taking selfies so you don’t have to face what’s real. It’s how you keep yourself from wanting anything.”
“Don’t.” The first time he’d ever said it like that to me. “Selena…please.”
I grabbed the edge of the rolling door over the counter and pulled it down because my body needed a task, and I couldn’t look at him.
“I get it,” I said. “I really do. I know I’ve been doing the same thing.”
“Then—”
“But this is bigger than both of us.”
I couldn’t help it. I closed the distance between us and held his face, and the moment we touched everything felt right. My magic hummed and my heart settled, and I let it, knowing it would only make it hurt more when I walked away.
But some things were worth the pain.
“They’re poisoning everything, Chase. First it’s this beach, then it will be the whole coast, then the whole ocean. And they won’t stop, you know they won’t, even when faced with the facts. They’ll run the numbers, and what’s right always loses to what sells the most. But I don’t want you to be for sale, Chase Perez.”
I don’t know what I expected those words to do.
It was just the truth.
“I want to see your real smile again. I want to stay with you, wherever that takes us. I want us to come home, together.”
I stood on my toes and kissed him, and his stillness shattered, his tongue immediately pressing into my mouth, and I met it. I met it as I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close, letting the golden light fill me one last time.
I prayed it wouldn’t be the last time.
“Selena.” Then, quieter, “Baby?—”
I let him go and walked away, not looking back.
If I turned around, I’d stay. I’d fall right back into the easy thing, the comfortable thing. I could fill my life with him, or my family, or even volleyball, and just ignore what was happeningaround me. I could say,This is too big, why try and fight it? Someone else out there will do better, and just let it sink into all the other pain I shut out every day.
But this was my beach. This was my home. If I didn’t protect it, if I didn’t fight for it, no one else would. He said he loved my fight. Well, this was the price.
My magic hummed its objection as the distance between us grew, reaching back for him, but now I couldn’t ignore the darkness laced through it, laced through almost every grain of sand on my beach.
