A card reported missing meant a reissue. A reissue meant someone in security pulling the access list, asking who’d had it, tightening everything before the showcase. A card that simply vanished on a nervous seasonal kid meant a write-up in a file nobody would open until the season ended. The kid would search his car, his apartment, the laundry, and decide he’d lost it himself. Kids that age always assumed the failure was theirs.
So he’d keep it. Use it once. Then it would go off the end of the dock some night when the tide was running out, and the channel would do the rest. No card, no questions, just a careless boy and a power failure and a room that had been dark for five minutes.
He’d thought of everything.
The keycard sat against his thigh. Small and flat and warm, the only thing standing between the dark and the glass.
Through the open wall, he could still see the boardwalk. The dock man and the event planner had separated. She was walking toward the terrace. He was walking toward the marina with his hands in his pockets.
Neither of them looked back. But Caleb had been watching people his whole life, and he knew what it looked like when two people were trying not to turn around. He’d seen it at weddings, at galas, at every event he’d ever decorated. The invisible thread between two people who hadn’t said the thing yet.
He’d never had that. Not really. He’d had charm, and charm had built a company, and the company had built debt. Charm got people to say yes. It had never once gotten anyone to stay.
He picked up his tools. Tomorrow night. The breaker panel. Five minutes of darkness.
He’d seen the dock man hang a padlock on the utility closet that afternoon. It didn’t worry him. The lock was solid, but the hasp it hung from was screwed into trim older than Derek, and soft wood didn’t care how good the lock was. One pry bar. The closet would open whether it was supposed to or not.
Twenty-four ornaments. Enough to clear the debt, close the company quietly, and disappear to somewhere the bills couldn’t follow.
For the first time in months, Caleb could almost see a future.
Chapter eleven
Five Minutes
Evanalmostdidn’tgoto the showcase.
Showcases weren’t his thing. Crowds, champagne, small talk with strangers about things he didn’t understand. He’d planned to spend the evening in the dock shed, rebuilding the bilge pump for Slip Nine and listening to the marine weather forecast on the radio.
But Margot had asked.
Not directly. She’d mentioned it during the security walk-through that morning, pen in hand. “You should come tonight. See the finished setup. Make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
He could have said no. Should have, probably. He’d been avoiding exactly this: the slow, gravitational pull of someone else’s orbit since Lauren’s passing. But she’d looked at him when she said it, really looked, and the compass in his pocket seemed to find north again.
He’d said maybe. She’d said seven thirty. He was there at seven twenty-five.
The pavilion was full. Two hundred people, champagne flutes, Christmas music drifting from the speakers. The ornaments glowed in their case like something from another world. Fairy lights hung in loops from the rafters, and the ocean breeze carried the smell of salt and pine through the open walls.
Margot stood at the edge of the room, watchful. Her pen was nowhere in sight. Elaine moved through the crowd with the precision of a campaign manager. Caleb was at the bar, telling a story that had a cluster of vendors laughing. Tessa was filming everything.
Evan found a spot near the back wall where he could see the whole room without being in it. Old habit. He’d spent five years perfecting the art of being present without participating.
But his eyes kept going back to Margot. She looked different tonight. Not the clothes, which were the same practical black she always wore. But her shoulders were down. Relaxed. He’d never seen her relaxed before. It changed the shape of her face, softened the line of her jaw.
He looked away and accepted a glass of sparkling water from a passing waiter.
At eight fifty-two, the lights went out.
Total darkness. The music cut. The LEDs in the display case died. For one long second, the only sound was the ocean and the wind.
Then the murmuring started. Nervous laughter. A glass breaking somewhere on concrete.
Evan set down his water and moved. Not toward the crowd. Toward the back wall of the pavilion, where the storage wing connected to the service corridor. Where the electrical panel was.
He’d padlocked the utility closet the day before. But a padlock was only as good as the hasp it hung on, and the hasp on that door was screwed into forty-year-old trim, soft enough to give up the screws to anyone with a pry bar.
He pulled out his phone flashlight and walked fast. Past the ice machine. Past the housekeeping closet. The utility door was open. The padlock was on the floor, hasp pulled clean out of the trim, screws and splinters of soft old wood scattered across the concrete. Someone had used a pry bar. The marks were fresh, bright against the weathered frame.
