Chapter 2
Barrett
I'd woken up in an unusually good mood, for reasons I hadn't fully examined yet — something about the physical yesterday, about Wren's hand steady on my wrist, about the particular quality of the ten minutes I'd spent walking beside her instead of buried in spreadsheets.
I'd actually slept seven hours, a personal record for the month, and I was standing in my kitchen congratulating myself on the small victory when my phone lit up with the kind of notification that ruins good moods permanently.
It's from a company called Halcyon Coastal Partners, and it's dressed up in the kind of polite corporate language that always means the opposite of polite.
They're interested, the email says, in discussing "strategic redevelopment opportunities" along the Anchor Bay waterfront.
They've attached a preliminary offer. I open it standing in my kitchen in yesterday's shirt, and the number makes me set my coffee down harder than I mean to.
It's not a lowball. It's not some fly-by-night developer testing the waters like the ones we've swatted away before.
This is serious money, backed by people who've clearly done their homework — the marina, the boardwalk, the surrounding business district, all of it, offered at a price calculated to be hard to refuse and paired, I'll learn by the end of the week, with a quiet campaign of pressure on the city council.
I call Dominic before I've finished my coffee.
"They're not messing around," he says, after I read him the numbers.
"No."
"You're point on this."
It's not a question. My brother doesn't ask when he already knows the answer, and he's right to hand it to me — I know the marina's books better than anyone alive, I know every lease and easement and zoning variance that keeps this town's waterfront in Anchor Bay's hands instead of some Halcyon logo.
If there's a way to fight this, it runs through me.
"I'm on it," I say, and mean it the way I mean most things — completely, immediately, at the cost of everything else in my schedule.
I drive to the compound instead of my office, needing the reassurance of the physical space my father built before I can think clearly about how to defend it.
Dominic's already in the war room — what we all still call the old meeting hall, even though its function has shifted a dozen times over the decades — pacing with his phone against his ear, Piper at the counter making coffee for what looks like an impromptu emergency meeting nobody scheduled but everyone somehow already knew to attend.
"Show me everything," Dominic says, the second he hangs up his call.
I spread out what I've got so far — the offer letter, the preliminary redevelopment concept Halcyon attached, a printout of their corporate registration showing a maze of shell companies that all trace back to the same parent entity out of state.
Dominic reads it standing, jaw tightening with every page, the particular stillness he gets when he's furious and choosing not to show it.
"They've done this before," he says finally. "Somewhere else. This is a playbook, not an opening offer."
"I'll find out where," I say, already reaching for my laptop.
By the time the sun's fully up, half the club's leadership is crowded into the war room, and what started as one alarming email has become the first council of war Anchor Bay has held in years.
I look around the room — Rhett, Silas, Griffin, Maddox, all of them quiet and focused in the specific way this club gets when something threatens what my father built — and feel the weight of what's being asked of me settle fully onto my shoulders.
I don't flinch from it. I've been preparing for this kind of fight my whole life, whether I knew it or not.
What follows is two weeks I mostly remember in fragments.
Meetings with the club's lawyer that run four hours.
Calls with the city council members I can still get on the phone, half of whom sound apologetic and half of whom sound like they've already spent the money.
A trip to the county records office that turns up an easement from 1974 I didn't know existed and that might, might, be useful.
Coffee that stops working somewhere around day nine, replaced by a kind of grim momentum that keeps me upright through sheer stubbornness.
I skip meals. I skip sleep. I answer emails at two in the morning because the alternative is lying in bed running numbers in my head anyway, so I might as well be productive about it.
Wren notices. Of course she notices. She always notices, in that quiet, relentless way she has of paying attention to me like I'm a patient she refuses to lose.
By day three, the fight has consumed everything.
I've had four calls with our attorney, two meetings with council members who won't quite meet my eyes, and one deeply unsatisfying conversation with a Halcyon representative who spoke to me the way people speak to obstacles rather than people — polite, patient, utterly unmoved.
I hang up that call and sit staring at my office wall for a full five minutes before I can make myself go back to work.
She shows up at my office on day four with a paper bag of takeout I didn't ask for and don't remember agreeing to.
"I didn't order this," I say, looking up from a spreadsheet that's starting to blur.
"I know. I ordered it for you." She sets it on my desk and pulls the food out herself, unpacking it like she's not going to leave until I eat. "When's the last time you ate something that wasn't from a vending machine?"
I think about it. I genuinely have to think about it. "Yesterday. Maybe."
"That's not an answer, that's a confession."
She sits across from me while I eat, not asking about the buyout, not pushing for details, just being there in the particular way she's always been there — a steady presence that doesn't require anything from me except that I keep functioning.
When I finish, she stands up and grabs my jacket off the hook.
"Come on."
"I've got a call in twenty minutes."
"You've got a walk right now. The call can wait ten minutes."
"Wren—"
"Ten minutes, Barrett. I timed it. You'll survive."
I go, because arguing with her has never once worked in the history of our friendship, and because some stubborn, tired part of me wants to go, wants the ten minutes of walking along the marina with her instead of staring at spreadsheets.
The evening air is cool. The boats knock gently against the dock.
She doesn't talk much, just walks beside me with her hands in her jacket pockets, and something about her presence loosens a knot in my chest that's been tightening for days.
Halfway down the dock, she stops walking and turns to look at me. "How bad is it, actually? The buyout."
I consider lying, softening it the way I've been softening it for everyone else who asks.
I don't, with her. I never really can. "Bad.
They've got money we can't match and lawyers who do this professionally.
We've got a small-town attorney, a lot of stubbornness, and whatever leverage I can dig up in property records nobody's looked at since the seventies. "
"That's not nothing."
"It's not enough either. Not yet."
She's quiet for a moment, looking out at the water instead of at me. "You'll figure it out. You always do."
"You say that like it's obvious."
"It is obvious. I've watched you figure out impossible things since we were kids.
You talked the school board out of cutting the marine biology program when we were sixteen.
You got your dad's insurance company to cover Silas's PTSD treatment when they tried to deny the claim.
You don't lose, Barrett. Not when it matters. "
I look at her, something warm and unfamiliar moving through my chest at the certainty in her voice, the easy, total faith she has in me that I haven't quite earned yet on this particular fight. "You have a lot of confidence in me."
"Fifteen years of evidence," she says, and there's something in the way she says it — light, but not entirely joking — that makes my pulse do something strange.
We keep walking, the marina quiet around us except for the gentle knock of hulls against the dock, and for ten minutes, the buyout and the lawyers and the weight of my father's legacy recede far enough into the background that I can just breathe.
That's what she does for me, I realize, not for the first time but with new clarity — she doesn't fix my problems. She just makes the air around them easier to breathe.
"Thank you," I say, when we're back at the office door.
"Don't thank me. Just eat more than one meal a day. That's the whole ask."
She stays another hour that night, sitting on my office couch with a medical journal while I finish the call she made me take.
I can hear her flipping pages while I argue zoning precedent with our attorney, the small ordinary sound of her presence somehow making the whole conversation easier to get through.
When I finally hang up, frustrated with the lack of clear answers, I glance over and find her staring at the same page she'd been on twenty minutes earlier, clearly not reading it anymore.
"You don't have to stay," I tell her. "I know you've had a long day too."
"I know I don't have to." She doesn't look up from the journal. "I want to."
I don't have a response for that, so I don't try to find one.
I glance at her over the top of my laptop screen, half a dozen times over the next twenty minutes, cataloguing small details I've never let myself linger on before — the way she chews the end of her pen when she's concentrating, the particular furrow between her eyebrows when a case in the journal frustrates her, the soft, unconscious hum she does sometimes without noticing.