Chapter 17
Jackson
The mid-afternoon air is sharp this far out, pine needles and brine wafting through the rolled-down window of Jackson’s aging Corolla.
He doesn’t turn the heat on. The cold helps him think.
Trees crowd the two-lane road, tall and watchful, and the shoreline flashes between the trunks.
Jagged rock, pale sky and the dark smear of ocean breaking through the muddy browns and whites. Pretty, in a lonely sort of way.
He’d tried calling ahead to Whitaker Seafood. The administrative assistant said Ben’s calendar was booked solid. Meetings all day. Which, Jackson suspects, really means Ben’s holed up in his office, alone and quietly unravelling.
He parks beside a salt-streaked company van and heads for the front entrance. The reception desk is unmanned, same as it was Monday, with a small polite sign instructing visitors to pick up the phone and dial their party’s extension. Jackson tries Ben’s number. It goes straight to voicemail.
A lone security camera angles down at the lobby, its LED dead, its blind black lens catching the light.
If it once worked, it doesn’t now. Jackson hesitates, then presses the elevator button.
It slides right open. No keycard required.
In what feels like the world’s smallest town, this passes for security.
He steps inside. Technically, this could be considered light trespassing.
Jackson would argue it’s more like enthusiastic fact-checking.
All part of the playbook. He’s crawled through hedges, charmed his way past armed security, heavily implied he was a health inspector just to get a quote. This barely registers ethically.
The fact that he’s far more than professionally interested in his main source for this story, on the other hand, does present something of a moral quandary.
Jackson pushes the thought away with the press of the elevator button. Top floor. Single turn. Ben’s office door is closed, but light spills out from the gap at the bottom, and inside, Jackson can hear the low shuffle of movement.
He knocks twice. No answer.
So he opens the door, careful.
Ben’s at his desk, hunched over a spread of paperwork. He’s changed since breakfast: fresh shirt, crisp collar, sleeves rolled neatly to the forearm. But his face gives him away. Pale. Tight around the eyes.
Jackson arrived fully intending to walk Ben through every ugly detail of what he found on MarineSelect so far: exactly what Ben was up against, how dangerously exposed he was, and just how far-reaching the implications were.
He’d even convinced himself that the thirty minutes on Google learning anxiety-management tips might help him handle the fallout gracefully.
But one look at Ben sitting at his desk, all fragile and stretched thin, and Jackson’s whole plan evaporates. There isn’t a breathing exercise in the world that could steady Ben through news this devastating.
“You look like hell,” Jackson says, keeping his voice light.
He doesn’t add anything else. Certainly not the truth.
Not the apology, not the reassurance, not even the useless comfort he wants so badly to offer.
You’ll be fine. You’re safe with me. Jackson isn’t sure he can make either of those things true and if he can’t promise them, he doesn’t want to say them at all.
Because he’s not sure it would even be for Ben’s benefit. It might just be for his own.
Ben offers a ghost of a smile. “Thanks. I feel like it too.”
“Barricading yourself in your office? Not exactly a masterclass in ‘acting normal,’ golden boy.” Jackson steps inside and nudges the door shut behind him with his foot. “Then again, having the local investigative reporter show up might not be the best look either.”
“I know, I know. I’m supposed to be keeping it together.” Ben rakes a hand through his hair, already halfway to ashamed.
Jackson winces inwardly. He’d meant to take the edge off, lighten things a little, and give them both a foothold back into normal.
Ben lifts his chin, making a valiant effort at powering through. “I tried, really. But as soon as I got out there, I froze. What was I supposed to say? ‘Morning. How’s the family? By the way, did you commit corporate fraud and try to frame me?’”
“Surely you’ve got some suspects,” Jackson says, easing into the guest chair.
“I don’t know,” Ben admits quietly. “If you’d asked me on Monday, I would’ve said no one here was capable of this.”
Jackson nearly sighs out loud. Ben’s self-preservation skills are actually tragic; he wants so badly to believe the best of everyone. That’s why he hadn’t even flinched when Jackson told him what happened in Boston. He hadn’t judged, just offered acceptance.
It’s painfully naive and somehow also one of the best goddamn things about him.
“My closest friend at the plant handed me the binder,” Ben continues. “Saw it. Processed it. Didn’t flag anything. Technically, it could be her.” He frowns. “I mean, it’s definitely not. But that’s kinda where I’m at.”
There’s another long pause. Then, reluctantly, Ben adds, “It could be Tom McKenna.”
Jackson immediately tucks that name away. That’s the plan. Dismantle the frame-up first, then go after MarineSelect.
“He’s our Logistics Supervisor,” Ben explains.
“He undermines me constantly. Small things, sidesteps, jokes. ‘Accidently’ leaves me off emails, reroutes decisions through other managers, throws in little comments like ‘we’ll see what leadership says,’ when I am leadership.
On their own, none of it sounds like much.
But it adds up. And every time I think about calling him out, I start wondering if maybe I’m overreacting.
Like that’s the point, like he wants the reaction.
” He picks an invisible piece of lint off his sleeve.
“I can’t prove anything. But it feels like he’s working overtime to make me look incompetent without ever saying it out loud and when I asked him about the disposal weights he seemed eager to brush me off. ”
Jackson doesn’t respond right away. His fists curl against his thighs, his whole body still. He hates picturing Ben undermined that way; he knows the guy well enough already to understand how it would torture him.
Ben, brought up to please, to perform, to endure without complaint, has just been taking it.
Jackson keeps his voice steady, barely. “You think he’s the one sabotaging you?”
“I’m not sure,” Ben says, quiet now. “It would almost be easiest if it was him. I already know he hates me. At least he wouldn’t have been lying to my face.”
Jackson’s hand twitches with the urge to reach out and offer comfort, the urge to burn this place to the ground and help Ben start over with a better goddamn blueprint.
Instead, he pulls the brown Klaussen’s bag from under his arm and sets it down on the one clear corner of Ben’s desk. A different kind of offering.
“Brought you lunch.”
Ben stares at the bag in faint confusion. “Jackson, it’s three in the afternoon.”
“And?” Jackson shrugs, gesturing vaguely at the state of him. “It’s clearly my turn to carry the ‘functional’ title right now. I figured you for a guy who doesn’t eat when he’s stressed.”
Ben gives a tiny, rueful smile. “Accurate.”
Jackson unpacks the containers from the bag. “I have a soup and salad combo, and a reuben sandwich. Wasn’t sure which you’d prefer. You’re welcome to both if you want.”
The tension that was in Ben’s forehead doesn’t disappear, but it eases a fraction. “The soup and salad, please. I think I’ve done enough emotional processing through carbs for one day.”
“More carbs for me, then,” Jackson says, smiling faintly as he slides the food across.
They eat quietly. The only sound is the occasional scrape of plastic utensils, the faint rustle of wax paper. Jackson looks around Ben’s office with new eyes.
There’s a potted plant in the window, leaves browning at the tips but somehow stubbornly alive.
Next to it, a framed, faded photo. It’s another ribbon cutting, but in this one, Ben looks elated to be there.
He’s no more than seven, wielding scissors almost as big as he is alongside someone who couldn’t be anyone but his mother.
Same shade of golden blonde hair, same wide open blue eyes.
Ben catches him staring. “My mom. She was just this, like, incredible force for goodness. She did all this work around food insecurity programs and education access and marine sustainability research funding.”
“She sounds incredible.”
“She was.” Ben looks at the photo for another heartbeat. “She had this huge heart. She just went wherever it told her. Truly, late for everything and always disorganized but it was like it was because she needed to get to everyone and she knew she didn’t have enough time.”
It’s clear that Ben’s taken up the mantle.
The corkboard is pinned thick with preserved thank-you notes from the town’s charities: the food bank, the Rotary club, the Silver Shoals’ branch of Habitat for Humanity.
Center is a snapshot from the local soup kitchen, Ben smiling next to a petite, fiery-haired woman with matched aprons and grins.
It’s all painfully sincere, not an ounce of irony in any of it.
Ben’s best effort is clear everywhere Jackson looks.
The desk, though, Christ, the desk is something else entirely.
It makes a certain kind of sense, that Ben’s response to crisis would look like order. Jackson would bet good money it’s how he was raised: work harder, longer, make sure nothing slips by.
Which is why, covering every square inch of his workspace, he’s built this shrine to desperation disguised as control.
Color-coded tabs, printed emails, stacked invoices.
Jackson runs his thumb over the pages of a ledger Ben’s clearly combed through line-by-line, annotated margins thick with notes.
Every single scrap on MarineSelect he could find, paperwork stacked like sandbags against a flood.
It’s a cry for help, and Jackson gets the sense he’s the first one to answer it in a while.
“I was going to send it over to you once I had it all organized,” Ben says apologetically.
“What you’ve put together here is incredible, Ben.”
Ben looks skeptical, wary, like he doesn’t quite know what to do with the praise. He’s not used to hearing it.
“But you’re already running this whole place,” Jackson goes on. “You shouldn’t be the one trying to chase down every loose thread on top of that. Let me do this. I am doing this.”
Ben hesitates.
Jackson knows instantly that this isn’t about doubt, even if he might deserve it; knows it isn’t about him at all. It’s about wiring. Ben doesn’t know how to let go, how to loosen his grip without thinking it’s weakness.
And God help him, that’s what breaks Jackson a little.
So he waits.
Until finally, softly, Ben agrees. “Okay.”
Jackson smiles at the surrender, not of control, but of part of the burden. But there’s still a tension left behind inside of him that he can’t quite smooth out because as much as Jackson wants to help shoulder this, part of him is already dreading the moment it ends.
Not the story.
This.
Ben, right there across the desk, fingers curled gently around a spoon like he’s forgotten he’s holding it. The lock of hair that’s slipped loose across his forehead, begging for Jackson to smooth it back. The way his shoulders stay squared despite how heavy they must feel.
The ridiculous, unshakable goodness of Benjamin Whitaker III.
Watching Ben now, pushing through doubt and responsibility and the bone-deep fear of getting it wrong, just so he can keep doing what’s right, Jackson feels it again. Low and warm and impossibly certain: the same pull he’d felt in the diner.
He wants to kiss Ben.
He wants to reach across the desk and erase the last few inches of space between them. To cup Ben’s jaw in his palm, careful and steady, and tell him, show him, that he doesn’t have to keep holding the whole world up on his own.
That he never should have had to.
That he was never, ever meant to do it alone.
But Jackson doesn’t. He can’t. He knows if he forces Ben to confront something so fundamentally at odds with how he’s been taught to move through the world, then Ben will retreat to whatever quiet, unreachable place keeps him safe and not come back.
Jackson’s already seen the edges of it. He nearly sent Ben there this morning.
So, instead, Jackson leans back in his chair. Reaches for the sandwich he’d nearly forgotten about. He takes a bite. Chews. Swallows. A concession to patience, to timing.
Not yet.
But when Ben finally lets it all go, Jackson hopes like hell he’s still close enough to catch him.