The fear wasn’t about the expo. It wasn’t about the ornaments. It wasn’t even about Caleb.
It was about her. Specifically, her. The woman who’d told him about Rita in a dark kitchen and let him talk about Lauren’s bell without flinching. The woman who’d run her thumb across his compass like it was something worth holding.
Five years he’d spent not caring about anyone new. Five years of routine and repair, of fixing other people’s boats and going home to a quiet apartment. He’d called it getting by. It had been hiding. And now Margot Pine was standing in the middle of his carefully constructed nothing, with her pen and her sharp voice and her refusal to let anyone carry her bags.
Not of Caleb. But of what losing her would do to the part of him that had just started working again.
He pulled out his phone and texted Margot one more time.We need to talk about the fireworks.
He stared at the screen after hitting send. The blue glow lit his face in the dark. He knew what she’d say. She’d say the show must go on, because that was who she was, because control was the scaffolding that held her together the same way routine held him together.
She’d say she couldn’t cancel events based on feelings. She’d be right about the logic and wrong about the risk, and they’d fight about it, and it would cost them the thing they’d only just started building.
But he’d walked Caleb’s route. He’d stood in the dark where the ornaments had been and counted the seconds. He’d felt the geometry of it, the precision, the cold intelligence of a plan that used five minutes of darkness the way a surgeon uses five minutes of anesthesia.
If Caleb could do that once, he could do something else. Something worse. And the pier at night, with two hundred people watching the sky instead of the ground, was exactly the kind of moment a man with nothing to lose would use.
Some things were worth fighting about. Even if the fight broke something he was only just learning to hold.
Chapter twenty-four
The Space Between
Margotwasinthepavilion, rebuilding the vendor layout for the third time since the theft, when Evan walked in and told her she needed to cancel the fireworks at the gala.
“Cancel it?” She looked up from the tape lines on the floor. “We already lost the collection. The fireworks are the one thing left that closes this expo on something people will remember. I cancel that, and we robbed ourselves of the ending too.”
“The pier is sixty yards from the marina. The marina is where Cass was attacked yesterday.” He braced a hand against the doorframe. “You want two hundred people on a pier in the dark, three days after someone stole a hundred and seventy thousand dollars and put Cass in the hospital?”
“I want to do my job.”
“Your job doesn’t include putting people at risk.”
“My job is to run this expo. The fireworks happen unless Elaine says otherwise.” Margot stood and brushed tape dust from her knees. “I can’t cancel events because you have a bad feeling.”
“I walked the route last night.” His voice was level, controlled. “Breaker panel to display case to waterline to boat. Five minutes. I timed it. It works, Margot. Every second of it. And now he’s escalating.”
“I know he’s escalating.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
“Because the moment I start canceling events, this expo dies. And everything I’ve spent the last two weeks building dies with it.” Her voice was louder than she wanted. She could hear the edge in it, the panic underneath the professionalism. “This is all I have, Evan.”
His face closed off. “A bad feeling is what kept me alive in the Coast Guard. Ignoring one is how people drown.”
The pavilion went silent.
She had no answer for that. But she wasn’t going to be pushed. “We’ll increase security. Elaine wouldn’t take kindly to a cancellation this late.”
“I doubt she’d want to put people at risk.”
They stood on opposite sides of the empty display platform. Ten feet of bare floor between them.
She looked away. He had a legitimate concern. But to cancel the preview would do significant damage to her career. Besides, the threat was directed at her, not at the public, wasn’t it?
Turning her gaze back to him. “You don’t get to tell me how to do my job. I have spent two years putting my career back together after someone I trusted destroyed it. I am not going to let this expo fail because you’re afraid.”
The word hung in the air. Afraid. She saw it hit him. Saw his jaw tighten and his hands go still. She’d crossed a line. The instant the word left her mouth, she’d have given anything to pull it back.
