His face went pale. “He took it. Didn’t he? When I handed him the lanyard.”
“The card, not you,” Margot said gently. “There’s a difference. He counted on your trust. That’s on him, not you.”
Evan watched Derek’s shoulders loosen by a fraction. Watched Margot’s hand rest briefly on the table near the kid’s arm, not touching, just close. The same instinct she’d had in the stairwell with him. Giving someone something solid to be near.
That was the moment he knew for certain. Not the investigation. Not the evidence. This. Her kindness, offered without performance, in a breakroom that smelled like stale coffee and vending machine granola.
They walked out together. The corridor was quiet. Housekeeping carts lined the walls.
“We have enough,” Margot said. “The keycard log. Mick’s testimony. The footage. The sand. The shard. Derek’s confirmation.” She counted them on her fingers, and he watched her hands move, and he thought about the stairwell and the compass and the way she’d run her thumb across the cracked crystal like it was something worth holding.
“We take it to Harker,” Evan said.
“What about Elaine?”
“Harker first. Let the police make the call on Elaine.” He paused. “It’s her brother. She deserves to hear it from someone who’ll handle it right.”
Margot looked at him. The fluorescent light was unflattering and the corridor smelled like cleaning solution, and she was the most beautiful thing in it.
“You’re a good man, Evan Cole.”
He didn’t know what to do with that. Nobody had said it to him in five years. He’d stopped believing it around the same time he’d stopped flipping the calendar in the dock shed.
“I’ll call Harker in the morning,” he said, because that was safer than saying what he actually wanted to say.
They walked toward the lobby. Somewhere in the resort, Caleb was adjusting lights and making people laugh. Somewhere past the breakwater, the tide was running out.
But Evan was walking beside her, and for the first time in five years, the current was pulling him toward something instead of away.
Chapter twenty
Two Hundred Stars
Margotwashalfwaythroughthe first vendor contract when Jolene appeared in the doorway of the office at eight fifteen, saying, “Staff morale bonfire. Beach path, south end. Thirty minutes, that’s all I need from you.”
Margot looked up from the stack of paperwork. “I have three vendor contracts to review and a call with the electrician at nine.”
“The electrician can wait. The contracts will be there at nine thirty.” Jolene held up one finger. “Thirty minutes. You look like you’ve been inside your own head for six hours and that is never good for anybody.”
Margot glanced back at the contracts, then at Jolene again. “Thirty minutes.”
“Good girl.”
The bonfire was small and real, driftwood on the sand below the beach path, surrounded by a loose circle of resort staff who’d changed out of uniforms into the same kind of worn-comfortable clothes people wore when they weren’t performing anything.
Lou in a Myrtle Beach T-shirt. Dana the florist with her sandals off and her toes in the dry sand. Two of the housekeeping crew with cans of something cold, laughing about something she had missed.
She found a spot at the edge of the circle where the firelight reached and had her phone out before she sat down.
“No phones.” Jolene settled beside her with a steaming mug. “House rule.”
“I’m not on social media.”
“You’re on your email. I can see the glow.” Jolene took the phone from her hand. “Thirty minutes.”
Margot wrapped her hands around her knees and looked at the fire.
The ocean was invisible in the dark but audible, a low continuous presence just past the firelight’s reach. The smell of wood smoke and salt air mixed into a smell specific to this place and this night.
