Counting the Seconds
Chapter twenty-three
Evan couldn’t stay in the apartment.
The ceiling fan wobbled. The harbor sounds came through the open window, halyard and tide and the low groan of dock lines. Usually those sounds put him out in ten minutes. Not tonight.
The kitchen scene kept replaying. Margot’s voice cracking on scared crying. The way her hands had tightened around the cocoa mug when she talked about Rita. The knot he’d seen loosen behind her ribs when he’d told her that her name was the one that stayed.
And Lauren’s bell. He’d said that out loud.
Lauren loved that bell. He’d given Margot a piece of himself he hadn’t given anyone in five years, and instead of flinching, she’d let the silence hold it.
She’d sat there in that kitchen with her cocoa going cold and her gaze going soft, and she’d let him be sad without trying to fix it.
That was the thing. David had broken her trust, and Lauren’s death had broken his ability to trust himself, and somehow the two of them had ended up in a kitchen at midnight, holding broken things out to each other like shells on a beach.
He pulled on his boots and walked out into the dark.
His phone buzzed as he crossed the dock. A text from Margot.
Cass called from the hospital. She remembered something. Caleb asked her about the lock system the night of the showcase. Specifically, whether it defaulted to unlocked during a power failure. He was testing what she knew. He already had the answer.
A second text: He also walked her past the service corridor entrance. Pointed it out. Like a tour guide.
A third came before Evan reached the end of the dock: Manufacturer replied. The serial number is real, but the backup module on that sheet is not compatible with this panel. Their words: altered spec document. Someone made the paperwork look safer than the hardware.
He’d met Cass twice. Once when she was up a ladder stringing lights and arguing with Lila about wattage, paint under her nails, talking faster than anyone he’d ever heard.
And once at dawn, on the ground by the marina gate, Ray’s shout still hanging in the air, blood matting the hair above her ear while she tried to tell them she was fine.
Twenty-three years old. She’d gotten close to the truth and Caleb had put her on that ground for it.
Evan stood on the dock and read the texts twice. The harbor was black except for the dock lights throwing gold circles on the water. The resort was dark above the terrace, windows lit in scattered patterns like a half-finished puzzle.
He’d known. He’d known since the shard, the keel marks, the keycard log.
But Cass’s confirmation closed the last gap.
Caleb had tested the vulnerability, mapped the route, and timed the window.
Every step rehearsed. And then Caleb had attacked a twenty-three-year-old art student for getting too close.
Evan typed back: He planned every step.
Then he put the phone in his pocket and walked toward the service building.
He wanted to walk the route.
Not to prove anything. He already had enough evidence to take to Harker. He wanted to feel it. To stand where Caleb had stood and understand the geometry of five minutes of darkness.
He started at the breaker panel. The utility closet door was shut, his replacement padlock secure. He clicked his phone’s stopwatch. Go.
Twenty seconds to the service corridor. The corridor was dark, his flashlight cutting a narrow beam through the smell of bleach and recycled air.
Past the ice machine. Past housekeeping.
His boots were loud on the concrete, and he thought about Caleb making this walk in dress shoes, in silence, in the dark.
Through the side exit into the pavilion. Forty-five seconds.
The pavilion was empty, the display platform bare, the LED strips dark. Moonlight came through the open walls and turned the velvet cradle mounts silver.
He walked to where the case had been. Imagined it locked, full, glowing.
Imagined the keycard reader going dead. Imagined lifting twenty-four ornaments out of velvet cradles in total darkness, by feel, one at a time, knowing exactly how the grip ridges worked because you’d ordered the cradles yourself and positioned every piece by hand.
Three minutes. Maybe less, for someone who’d rehearsed.
He walked out the open side of the pavilion, across the lawn, down the dune path to the waterline. The sand was firm under his boots. The tide was low, the beach wide and flat. He could hear the water but barely see it, just the faint phosphorescent line where the waves turned over in the dark.
Four minutes twenty seconds.
He stopped at the waterline where he’d found the shard. Imagined a boat beached here, engine off, waiting.
He crouched and pressed his palm flat to the sand where the shard had been. Cold came up through his hand, the damp kind that meant the tide had been over this spot an hour ago and would be again by dawn.
He knew this beach the way he knew his own hands. He’d walked it a thousand times since Lauren, in the dark, when the apartment got too quiet. Caleb had walked it too, but for the opposite reason.
Evan came here to be close to something he’d lost. Caleb had come to measure how fast he could carry something away. A man loading a crate, pushing off, motoring into the dark channel with no running lights. Gone before anyone thought to check the water.
Five minutes.
Then back. Up the dune path, across the lawn, through the terrace entrance, to the bar. Order a club soda. Smile. Five minutes ten seconds, breaker panel to bar, with a stop at the waterline to load a boat.
It worked. Every second of it.
He stood on the beach and looked at the resort.
The pier extended from the north end of the terrace, lit by a single string of construction lights.
The gala would close with fireworks off the end of that pier.
Two hundred people in the dark, sixty yards from the marina where Cass had been attacked, all of them watching the sky instead of the ground.
Caleb was escalating. Theft, then violence. A girl in the hospital. The investigation getting closer. And tomorrow night, a crowd on a dark pier, with all eyes on the sky and nobody watching the ground.
Evan thought about the boat parade. The crowd on the water. The overloaded boats. The squall rolling in. He thought about the moment he’d realized the recall signal was being ignored, the cold certainty that he was about to take someone and he couldn’t stop it.
He thought about Margot on that pier. Pen in hand. Shoulders tight. Running the show, controlling every variable except the one that mattered.
The fear wasn’t about the expo. It wasn’t about the ornaments. It wasn’t even about Caleb.
It was about her. Specifically, her. The woman who’d told him about Rita in a dark kitchen and let him talk about Lauren’s bell without flinching. The woman who’d run her thumb across his compass like it was something worth holding.
Five years he’d spent not caring about anyone new.
Five years of routine and repair, of fixing other people’s boats and going home to a quiet apartment.
He’d called it getting by. It had been hiding.
And now Margot Pine was standing in the middle of his carefully constructed nothing, with her pen and her sharp voice and her refusal to let anyone carry her bags.
Not of Caleb. But of what losing her would do to the part of him that had just started working again.
He pulled out his phone and texted Margot one more time. We need to talk about the fireworks.
He stared at the screen after hitting send. The blue glow lit his face in the dark. He knew what she’d say. She’d say the show must go on, because that was who she was, because control was the scaffolding that held her together the same way routine held him together.
She’d say she couldn’t cancel events based on feelings. She’d be right about the logic and wrong about the risk, and they’d fight about it, and it would cost them the thing they’d only just started building.
But he’d walked Caleb’s route. He’d stood in the dark where the ornaments had been and counted the seconds. He’d felt the geometry of it, the precision, the cold intelligence of a plan that used five minutes of darkness the way a surgeon uses five minutes of anesthesia.
If Caleb could do that once, he could do something else. Something worse. And the pier at night, with two hundred people watching the sky instead of the ground, was exactly the kind of moment a man with nothing to lose would use.
Some things were worth fighting about. Even if the fight broke something he was only just learning to hold.