Chapter 4
Barrett
The Halcyon fight doesn't slow down. It speeds up.
By the second week, I'm in meetings before the sun's up and legal calls after it sets, sandwiched around strategy sessions with Dominic and the council members still willing to talk to us.
The corporation's lawyers are good — expensive-good, the kind of good that makes our small-town attorney's face go tight every time a new filing lands on his desk.
The town is anxious. I can feel it every time I walk down Main Street, the way people's eyes track me a beat too long, hoping I've got answers I don't fully have yet.
Every conversation these days seems to start the same way.
How's it looking, Barrett? The bakery owner asks it when I stop for coffee.
The bookshop owner asks it when I pass her window.
Even Old Man Pruitt, patched up more times than I can count from bar fights and motorcycle spills, stops me outside The Crow's Nest to ask if his shop's going to still be standing come spring.
I tell everyone the same thing — that we're fighting, that we've got a real shot, that I won't let this town lose what my father spent his life building.
I mean every word of it. I just don't always feel as confident saying it as I sound.
Tuesday's council meeting is a particular kind of exhausting.
Two of the five members seem genuinely on our side, sympathetic to the town's history and skeptical of Halcyon's promises.
Two more seem to be quietly courting whatever campaign donations the corporation is dangling in front of them, careful never to say so directly but transparent enough in their hedging that everyone in the room can read between the lines.
The fifth, Councilwoman Ortiz, seems genuinely undecided, and I spend forty-five minutes after the meeting adjourns trying to walk her through the zoning precedent without sounding like I'm lecturing her.
"I hear you, Mr. Voss," she says, finally, gathering her things. "I do. But I've got a corporation offering the town a significant tax revenue increase, and I've got you offering me an appeal to nostalgia. I need something more concrete than that if I'm going to stick my neck out."
"It's not nostalgia," I tell her, keeping my voice level even though frustration is climbing in my chest. "It's the difference between a town that exists because people built something real here and a town that exists because a spreadsheet said it should.
Give me two weeks. I'll bring you numbers that make the case without needing anyone's sentimentality. "
She studies me for a long moment, then nods slightly. "Two weeks."
It's not a victory. It's not even close to a victory. But it's a door left open instead of one slammed shut, and by the standards of this particular week, I'll take it.
Through all of it, there's one constant. Wren.
She's the call I make when a negotiation goes sideways and I need someone to talk me down from the ledge of my own temper.
She's the voice on the other end of the line at two in the morning when I have the first panic attack of my entire adult life — chest tight, hands numb, certain for about ninety seconds that I'm dying — and she talks me through it in the same calm, steady voice she uses on terrified patients, until my heart rate comes back down and I remember how to breathe like a person instead of a drowning man.
It happens the night after Councilwoman Ortiz gives me my two-week deadline, the accumulated weight of everything — the marina, the clinic, my father's legacy, an entire town's expectations — finally arriving all at once in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday night.
I'm lying in bed, unable to sleep, running through numbers for the presentation I need to build, when my chest suddenly feels like it's caving in.
My hands go numb. My heart pounds so hard I'm convinced, with total certainty, that something is catastrophically wrong.
I call Wren before I've fully processed what's happening, some instinct older than conscious thought reaching for her number the way I've reached for it in every crisis of my adult life.
"Barrett?" Her voice is thick with sleep, but sharpens instantly when she hears me trying to talk and failing. "Barrett, talk to me. What's happening?"
"Chest — tight," I manage. "Can't — breathe right."
"Okay. Okay, I'm here. I need you to listen to my voice, all right?
Not your heart, not your chest. Just my voice.
" She stays on the line for the next twenty minutes, walking me through breathing exercises she must use with terrified patients a dozen times a week, her voice never once wavering even though I can hear, underneath the calm, real worry for me.
"You're okay," she says, over and over, until I believe her. "You're okay, Barrett. I've got you."
By the time my heart rate finally settles, I'm sitting on my bathroom floor, drenched in sweat, exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with physical exertion.
"That was a panic attack," she says gently, once I can form full sentences again. "A real one. Your body's been absorbing more than it can carry, and it finally told you so."
"I've never had one before."
"I know. That's what worries me." There's a pause on the line, and when she speaks again, her voice has softened even further. "You can't keep carrying all of this alone, Barrett. Not the marina. Not the clinic. Not your father's legacy. You're allowed to let people help you."
"I know."
"Do you, though?"
I don't have a good answer for that, not at two in the morning with my whole body still shaking from adrenaline. But something about the question sticks with me long after we hang up, long after I finally manage to fall into a fitful, exhausted sleep.
I don't tell anyone else about that night, not even Dominic.
It's not that I'm ashamed of it, exactly — I know, intellectually, that stress does this to people, that a body under enough pressure eventually finds a way to signal it's had enough.
But there's something about the raw, undefended state I was in that night, sitting on my bathroom floor at two a.m. convinced my heart was about to stop, that feels too private to share with anyone except Wren.
She's the only person I've ever let see me like that.
She's the only person, I realize somewhere in the aftermath, I'd ever want to.
She shows up at the compound two nights later with my favorite takeout, unannounced, and doesn't ask for an explanation.
She just sits across from me on the old leather couch in my office while I work, comfortable silence stretched between us, occasionally stealing a fry off my plate the way she has since we were teenagers.
It's ordinary. It's the most ordinary thing in the world, us in a room together, and that's exactly what makes the realization hit as hard as it does.
I watch her scroll through something on her phone, laughing quietly at whatever she's found, completely at ease in a space that used to just be my office and has somehow, without either of us noticing exactly when, become a place that feels incomplete without her in it.
She's kicked her shoes off, tucked her feet under her on the couch, and there's a familiarity to the whole scene that I've experienced a thousand times before without ever once stopping to examine what it actually means.
"You're staring," she says, without looking up.
"I'm thinking."
"About the buyout?"
"Something like that." It's not entirely a lie. The buyout is still there, still looming, still demanding most of my waking hours. But sitting across from her right now, stealing fries off my plate and laughing at something on her phone, it's not what's occupying the front of my mind.
Normal friends don't memorize each other's coffee orders down to the exact ratio of cream. Normal friends don't have an inside joke that's survived twenty-five years without ever going stale. Normal friends don't feel their own heartbeat change the second the other person walks through a door.
I've felt that heartbeat change a thousand times over the years and never once stopped to ask myself why.
The realization doesn't arrive like lightning.
It seeps in slow, the way the tide does — you don't notice the water rising until you look down and the ground you were standing on is already gone.
I sit there watching Wren steal fries off my plate, laughing at something on her phone, completely unaware that I'm staring at her like I've never seen her before, and I think: oh.
Oh, no.
Oh, this has been true for a very long time.
I don't say anything that night. I'm too rattled by my own realization to trust myself with words yet. But two days later, when Rhett finds me in the garage staring at an engine I've forgotten how to fix, he takes one look at my face and sets down his wrench.
"You look like a man who just figured something out," he says.
"I might have."
"Wren?"
I go still. "How do you—"
Rhett laughs, the kind of laugh that has years of patience baked into it. "Brother. We've all known since you were seventeen."
"Known what?"
"That you're in love with Wren."
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I close it, open it again, and still nothing useful arrives.
Rhett walks over to the mini fridge in the corner of the garage and pulls out two beers, handing me one like this is a perfectly normal conversation to be having at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.
"Everybody's known," he says. "Gemma's known. Piper's known. I think Silas figured it out before you did, and Silas barely talks."
"That's not—" I stop. Start again. "How long?"
"You want a real answer or the polite one?"
"Real."
"Since the bonfire when we were seventeen and you nearly fought Dean Marsh for looking at her wrong. You didn't even like her that way yet, not that you'd have admitted, but the rest of us saw it coming from a mile off."
I sit down heavily on an overturned crate. "Fifteen years."