Solid Ground (Salt Flower Bay #4)

1. The Morning After

Chapter one

The Morning After

Lila waited.

The silence on the other end of the line continued.

Her pulse had climbed so fast she could feel it in her throat now.

“Dad?” she said again, quieter this time.

Nothing.

A breath. Faint enough she might have imagined it if her entire body hadn’t gone rigid listening for it.

Then panic arrived all at once.

Not dramatic panic. Not screaming or crying.

Something sharper and colder than that. The sudden unbearable awareness that this had stopped being theory.

Stopped being letters and photographs and stories told across kitchen tables.

There was a real person on the other end of the line.

A real voice that might speak in the next second and rearrange the rest of her life before she had time to prepare for it.

Lila hit END.

The screen went dark in her hand.

For a moment she just stood there in the kitchen staring at her own reflection faintly mirrored in the black glass. Then her knees felt unsteady enough that she grabbed the edge of the counter.

Her heart was beating too hard. Fast enough that she could feel the pulse fluttering in her fingertips where they pressed against the quartz countertop. Her hand was shaking. Not slightly. Enough that she tightened her grip around the phone to steady it.

“Oh my,” she whispered.

The kitchen around her looked exactly the same as it had sixty seconds ago. The overhead light above the sink still glowed warm against the pale cabinets. The refrigerator hummed steadily. Beyond the screened porch the Gulf sat dark and indistinct beneath the night sky.

But the air itself felt altered somehow.

Like something had opened.

Lila looked at the phone again.

No number. No name. Just the call duration sitting there on the screen.

Twenty-three seconds.

She stared at it. Then waited.

Because surely if someone answered and then got hung up on, they would call back. Especially if the person on the other end had just said Dad in a voice that sounded nothing like steady.

Her thumb hovered near the screen. She imagined the other person looking at their own phone right now. Confused. Or not confused at all. Maybe reaching for the buttons already.

Her breathing stayed shallow as she listened to the quiet house around her.

Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. A minute.

Nothing.

Lila stayed exactly where she was anyway, staring at the phone like willing it hard enough might make it ring.

It didn’t.

After another minute she set the phone carefully on the counter, then immediately picked it back up again.

Still nothing.

The shaking in her hands had started easing, but only slightly.

Enough for her to become aware of other things now.

The cool air against her bare arms. The ache building at the base of her neck.

The fact that she’d been holding her breath in short uneven pieces.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum.

This was insane.

She didn’t know who had answered. She didn’t even know for certain if the number still belonged to her father. All she actually knew was that someone had picked up and listened silently while she called him Dad.

Heat crawled up the back of her neck.

“Oh, good,” she muttered to the empty kitchen. “Excellent work, Lila.”

Her voice sounded strange in the quiet house. She started pacing before she realized she was doing it. Two steps toward the table. Turn. Two steps back toward the sink. The phone stayed in her hand.

If it was him, why hadn’t he spoken?

If it wasn’t him, why stay on the line?

And underneath both of those questions sat the one she still couldn’t make herself touch directly:

If it was him… what exactly had she expected to happen next?

She made herself go to bed eventually.

She didn’t sleep much. Or maybe she slept in short shallow stretches and surfaced out of them often enough that it stopped feeling like sleep at all.

Every creak of the house pulled her back awake—pipes settling somewhere in the walls, wind brushing lightly against the screen on the back porch, the refrigerator cycling on in the kitchen.

At some point she rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

By the time the sky outside shifted from black to the deep gray blue before dawn, she gave up entirely. She pulled on a sweatshirt and padded into the kitchen barefoot, feeding a pod into the Keurig by muscle memory more than thought.

While the coffee brewed, she stood at the sink looking out toward the Gulf. The water was flat and silver in the early light. A great blue heron moved slowly along the shoreline, placing each step with prehistoric patience.

Lila wrapped both hands around the mug when the coffee finished.

Are you going to call again?

She wasn’t ready to answer that yet.

She sat at the kitchen table and stared at the phone lying faceup on the table next to her. At some point she realized she was thinking about calling Wade. The thought settled over her quietly enough that she almost missed it.

A few months ago, the impulse would have felt strange. There had been no one she would have called at five in the morning. Or maybe more accurately, no one she would have wanted to explain herself to, which amounted to the same thing.

Now the thought came naturally.

Not because Wade fixed things. He didn’t. That wasn’t what this was. Somewhere along the way he had simply become the person she thought about telling things to.

Lila leaned back in the chair and looked out toward the water again.

She didn’t call him. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she still couldn’t work out how to explain what had actually happened.

I called the number. Someone answered. I said Dad and then I hung up before I found out whether I was wrong.

The whole thing sounded unhinged now that the adrenaline had worn off.

She had said the word into silence that could have meant anything. A wrong number. Someone who answered accidentally. A man who hadn’t spoken because he didn’t know what to say. A man who had been waiting thirty-eight years for that phone call and still wasn’t ready when it came.

And she had ended the call before any of those possibilities became real.

Lila closed her eyes. The phone remained silent on the table.

She finished the coffee and made another. By then the light outside had started changing quickly, silver turning gold across the water.

At seven-forty-two her phone buzzed.

She was halfway across the kitchen before she fully registered the sound. The drop in her stomach came first. Then she looked at the screen and exhaled.

Danny: I’m out today but Marco’s coming solo. You around?

Lila typed back.

Lila: I’m here. Coffee’s on if he wants some.

The thumbs up emoji appeared almost immediately.

Lila set the phone down and pulled the thick file toward her from the end of the table.

The stack had grown steadily over the past several months—newspaper printouts, property records, names circled in pen, notes tucked into folders.

Dead ends clipped together beside things that suddenly mattered again weeks later.

At some point this had stopped being a search for one answer and become the slow reconstruction of an entire life.

Frank Forsythe.

She flipped to the tab she’d marked three weeks ago.

Special Agent Frank Forsythe. FBI field office, Tampa.

The name appeared once in a 1990 Tampa Bay Tribune article tied to the Suncoast Land Partners convictions, then nowhere again.

Lila had spent weeks working outward from that single mention. Old databases. Retirement directories. Archived community profiles. A LinkedIn page abandoned sometime around 2015. Eventually the trail narrowed toward Tallahassee.

She opened her laptop and searched again anyway. There weren’t many Frank Forsythes in Florida. One in the right age range with a listed landline in Tampa.

Lila stared at the number on the screen before writing it carefully beneath his name in her notebook.

Then she closed the laptop. She was not calling Frank Forsythe before nine in the morning after a night without sleep and approximately three minutes of emotional catastrophe.

That seemed like poor judgment even for her.

Outside, the Gulf was fully awake now, brightening toward blue-white beneath the rising sun. Marco would probably be here by nine. The exterior trim was nearly finished. Just a couple of days and the outside of the house would finally be done. After that, the only thing left were the bedrooms.

The Sherwin-Williams 2026 Color of the Year paint palette was tucked inside her renovation notebook. She had been carrying it around for weeks now like a woman incapable of making a simple color decision without emotional processing.

Lila pushed back from the table and opened the back door. Warm Gulf air moved immediately into the kitchen carrying a tinge of humidity. The cleared path through the scrub curved toward the beach, bordered now with fresh mulch Danny’s crew had spread two days ago.

It looked right.

That thought had been happening to her a lot lately. About the path. The porch. The house. The mornings here. About Salt Flower Bay itself.

The coffee at the Starlite. The sourdough vendor at the farmer's market. The way this town moved through the day without making urgency feel like a moral virtue.

Lila rested one hand against the doorframe and looked out toward the water.

She was not thinking about the phone call. Except she was.

Because the phone still sat on the table behind her. Because it still hadn’t rung. Because someone had answered.

She thought again about the silence on the other end of the line. The breathing. The pause after she’d said the word, Dad.

He could have hung up first. He didn’t.

Lila went back inside. She rinsed out her coffee mug, dried her hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle, and reopened her laptop.

Suncoast Land Partners had left a paper trail. Thirty-eight years hadn’t erased it completely. There was still more to find.

She pulled the file closer and went back to work.