She opened the vendor contact sheet and forced herself to read.
Names. Numbers. Contract terms.
The physical act of reading something practical. The way she’d always pulled herself back from the edge.
Give the brain a task. Give the hands something to hold. Keep moving.
Keep moving.
That was what she’d told herself the morning she discovered what David had done. Sitting at her kitchen table with a bank statement in one hand and a phone that wouldn’t stop buzzing in the other. The Christmas lights were still up because she’d never gotten around to taking them down. The apartment had been bright and festive and completely wrong.
She’d kept moving.
It had worked. Mostly.
She’d rebuilt. Mostly.
She’d gotten good at spreadsheets and contingency plans and holding everything together with both hands so nothing else could fall.
She scrolled to David’s name in her contacts.
His number was still there. The way things stayed until someone made the active decision to change them.
She stared at it for a long moment. Then she thought about the compass.
Cracked crystal. Tarnished brass. A man who carried the thing that had cost him everything because carrying it meant honoring it instead of pretending it had never mattered.
Margot pressed her thumb against David’s name. Delete. A confirmation box appeared. This time she didn’t hesitate. She tapped it. The contact disappeared.
It didn’t feel like closure.
It felt like a decision she’d have to keep making.
But tonight, a start was enough.
Chapter fourteen
Two Broken Things
Evancouldn’tsleepbecauseof her hand.
Not the ornaments. Not the breaker panel or the empty case or the police cars on the terrace. Her hand. The way it had felt in his when he’d pulled her to her feet in the stairwell. Small and cold and gripping hard, like she was testing whether he’d hold on.
He had. And then he’d let go, because that was what you did. And walked away, because that was also what you did.
Except he’d been lying here for three hours, and he could still feel the shape of her fingers against his palm.
He lay in his apartment above the marina office, staring at the ceiling fan that had been wobbling since March. The window was open, and the harbor sounds filled the room. Water lapping against hulls. A halyard pinging in the breeze.
She’d looked at him in that stairwell the way Lauren used to look at him when she needed him to stop fixing things and start listening. And that comparison, the fact that he’d made it at all, scared him more than the theft.
Because comparing someone to Lauren meant she’d gotten past the wall. And he didn’t remember opening the gate.
He sat up, pulled on his jeans, and went outside.
The dock was quiet before dawn. Just Evan and the water and the yellow pool of light from the security lamp. The air was cooler than it had been all week, the breeze carrying a trace of something metallic, like a storm building offshore.
“You’re up early.”
