He looked at the compass. Then at her. The almost-smile was gone. His jaw had loosened, and the careful blankness he wore most days had gone with it. Whatever he kept behind his face, he wasn’t keeping it now.
“That’s why I pushed about the fireworks. About all of it. I’m not afraid of Caleb. I’m afraid of what happens if we don’t stop him and someone else gets hurt.” He paused. The compass turned in his fingers. “Someone specific.”
She heard what he wasn’t saying. “We make a good pair.” She chuckled. “I control too much. You carry too much.”
“Maybe that’s why this works.”
She looked at him. He was looking at the water, but the corner of his mouth had moved. The almost-smile. The one she’d started to need.
“Are we okay?” she asked.
“We’re okay.”
They sat on the dock until the sun touched the horizon and the chapel bell rang six times across the water. The space between them narrowed. Then vanished, her shoulder against his, warm and solid.
When they finally stood, his hand found hers. Not the stairwell grip. Not the handshake. Just his fingers lacing through hers, easy and unhurried. They stood like that for three heartbeats. The harbor turned from gold to rose. A pelican crossed the channel in a long, low glide.
Then he let go, and she let him, and they walked back toward the resort in the last of the light, neither of them saying a word.
Chapter twenty-five
Three Copies
Margotwasn’tsurewhetherthe butcher paper on the dock shed wall looked more like an investigation board or a cry for help.
Names, timestamps, red-marker lines connected Caleb to every piece of evidence they’d gathered over the past four days. She stood in front of it with a cookie in one hand and a marker in the other, and the picture staring back at her looked like the work of two people slowly losing their minds.
Or two people slowly finding the truth. She wasn’t sure there was a difference anymore.
Evan was at the workbench, pouring coffee from the camp stove. He’d started making two cups every morning without being asked. She’d started arriving at six thirty without being invited. Neither of them had acknowledged this. It was just what they did now. Part of the rhythm of things.
He handed her a cup. Their fingers brushed on the transfer. She noticed.
She’d added his handwriting to the wall without thinking of it as his. Blocky capitals, every letter the same height, the printing of a man who labeled parts bins and tide charts. Her own notes ran beside it, fast and slanted, half of them abbreviated past the point anyone else could read them.
Two hands on the same wall. She hadn’t shared a workspace with anyone since David, and she’d promised herself she never would again. She studied the two columns of handwriting and waited for the old alarm to go off. It didn’t.
A knock on the shed door. Tessa, laptop under one arm, hair in a messy bun, sunglasses pushed up on her forehead. “I found something.”
She set her laptop on the workbench between the coffee pot and the wire brush and opened a video file. “My GoPro was on the whole showcase. Mounted on my bag strap. I forgot about it because I was focused on my phone footage.” She hit play. “It ran the entire reception. No editing. No framing. Just a chest-level view of everything that happened.”
The footage was raw and shaky. Crowd noise, Christmas music, champagne glasses catching the pavilion lights. Margot smelled Evan’s coffee from six inches away. Her arm brushed up against his.
Tessa narrated as the footage played. “Eight thirty-three. Watch the far edge of the frame.”
Margot leaned in. He leaned in beside her, his shoulder touching hers.
In the background, barely visible between two guests, Caleb was walking toward the back of the pavilion. His right arm was pressed against his body, holding something flat and dark against his hip.
“Collapsed crate,” Evan said.
“Or a folded tarp,” Margot added. “He’s heading for the service corridor.”
“Watch.” Tessa scrubbed forward. “Eight thirty-eight. No Caleb. Eight forty-one. Still gone. Eight forty-four. He’s back.”
The frame showed the bar, the crowd, the warm pavilion glow. And there was Caleb, sliding back into the reception like water filling a glass. Hands empty. Smile in place.
“Eleven minutes,” Evan said. “First trip. He staged the crate near the breaker panel and came back.”
