Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Dean
The charter cancels at eleven seventeen on a Thursday morning, and I watch four thousand dollars walk off my dock in a three-minute phone call.
“I’m sorry, Dean.” The man on the other end sounds like he means it. “The wife saw the posts. The whole treasure thing. Says she doesn’t want the kids around metal detectors and drones. Not the trip we signed up for.”
I grip the phone. “We can adjust the route. Stay offshore. The north passage doesn’t get the foot traffic.”
“It’s not just the route.” He hesitates. “The island’s different. She says it feels like a circus right now. Old Salt’s was standing room last night. People asking where to dig. I don’t know, man. She’s nervous.”
Four days. Four thousand dollars. Booked six months ago.
“I understand.” I don’t. “Appreciate the heads-up.”
I hang up and stare at the water. Doug snores from his nest of life jackets. Captain mutters something about fuck me sideways and I don’t have the energy to correct him.
The marina is busy. Too busy for April. Three boats at the fuel dock. A group of tourists clustered around the information board, pointing at the north shore on the map. One of them has a metal detector propped against the rail. I haven’t seen a metal detector on this dock in twenty years.
I need coffee. Badly. The Driftwood’s two blocks up, but the walk takes me through Main Street, and Main Street is a museum of everything I don’t want to see.
A tour group outside Brine and Bean. Donna behind the counter, arms crossed, watching them through the window with the expression of a woman counting the minutes until they leave.
A drone buzzing somewhere overhead—low, civilian grade, the kind you buy online and fly without a license. The sound sets my teeth on edge.
Old Salt’s has its doors propped open at eleven in the morning. The Salt never opens before three. Inside, every stool is taken. Whiskey Jim holds court behind the bar, arms spread wide, telling some version of the Old Salt legend to a crowd that’s leaning in like he’s dispensing gospel.
Fish Monroe stands at the far end, watching. He catches my eye through the open door and gives me a slow nod. The nod says: I see it too.
Patty Sue corners me halfway to the Driftwood. “Hon. You look like you swallowed a hornet.”
“Rough morning.”
“The Rosen charter?”
“You heard.”
“Everybody heard. Bev Castellano’s cousin works at the Tidewater front desk. The Rosens called to cancel their room this morning.” She pats my arm. “It’ll blow over. These things always do.”
“Will it?” I gesture at the street. A family in matching windbreakers crosses in front of us, the father consulting a map on his phone. “Because this doesn’t feel like blowing over. This feels like the beginning of something.”
“It’s a story, Dean. Stories come and go.”
“Not this one. This one’s got eight million people behind it and a production company bankrolling it.” I step around her. “Thanks for the coffee, Patty Sue.”
The coffee doesn’t help. Nothing helps. I drink it standing at the counter while the diner fills around me, and every conversation within earshot is some variation of the same question: where do we start digging?
I walk back to the marina with the empty cup crushed in my fist.
The dock feels wrong. Too many people. Too many unfamiliar faces. A woman in a Patagonia vest asks me if I run tours to the north shore and I tell her no, we don’t, it’s private property, and she looks at me like I’ve personally denied her something she’s entitled to.
I’m elbow-deep in the port engine when I hear her footsteps on the dock.
I know it’s her before I look up. I know the sound of those boots now, which is its own kind of problem.
Scarlett stands at the edge of my slip with the journal under one arm and her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. No makeup. Dark circles under her eyes. She looks like she’s been up all night, and something in my chest twists at the sight of it.
“Hey.” Her voice is quiet. Careful.
I wipe my hands on a rag and don’t stand up. “Hey.”
“I need a favor.”
Of course she does. “What kind of favor?”
“I need you to take me to No Name Island.”
No Name. Gull Shit Rock. The place I threaten tourists with when they get difficult. The place I’ve never actually left anyone because it’s exposed, rocky, genuinely unpleasant, and the cell signal is nonexistent.
“No.”
She blinks. “I haven’t told you why yet.”
“Don’t need to.” I reach for a wrench. “The answer’s no.”
“Dean.” She steps onto the boat. Not asking permission.
Doug raises his head, assesses her, and drops it again.
Even the dog has given up pretending he doesn’t like her.
“I found something. In the journal. Evangeline mentions a cove on the east side of No Name. She went there. With Thomas. The night they left.”
“So?”
“So Malcolm’s archive has nothing about No Name.
Nothing. It’s not on any of his maps. It’s not in any of his documents.
He edited it out. Completely.” She holds the journal like it’s evidence.
“If Evangeline and Thomas did conspire to steal the Fairchild treasure, that’s where they would have hidden it. Not the north shore. No Name.”
I set the wrench down. “Scarlett. Look around.”
She does. The dock. The tourists. The metal detector leaning against the rail.
“This is what happens,” I say. “This is exactly what I told you would happen. You post a story, and people show up, and the place stops being itself. The Rosens just canceled a four-day charter because they’re nervous about all the attention.
Four thousand dollars. Gone. Because eight million people decided my island was content. ”
“I know. I saw Malcolm’s metrics. I know what’s happening.” She takes another step. “That’s why I need to go to No Name. Today. Before anyone else figures it out. If I can confirm the location, I can shut this down. I can tell Malcolm the north shore is a dead end. I can redirect the story.”
“Or you can post about No Name and bring eight million people to a two-acre rock with no facilities and no cell service and get someone killed.”
“I’m not going to post about it. I’m trying to contain this, Dean. The same way you’ve been trying to contain me since I got here.”
That does it. That cracks something open.
I stand up. “Contain you. Is that what you think this is?”
“You’ve been three feet behind me since day one.
The Driftwood. Harbor Street. Saltbox. Every conversation I have, there you are.
” Her chin comes up. “You don’t trust me.
Fine. I get it. But this isn’t about trust anymore.
This is about finding the truth before Malcolm spins it into something worse. ”
“The truth.” I laugh. The sound is ugly even to me. “The truth is my family folded you in because that’s what they do. They take in strays. They adopted a goose, for Christ’s sake. They’d adopt a rabid raccoon if it showed up looking sad enough. You don’t belong here. You never will.”
She goes very still.
“You mistook kindness for belonging.” I keep going because stopping now would mean facing what I’m doing, and I can’t.
“This place is not your story. These people are not your characters. You’ll write your piece, you’ll collect your footage, and you’ll go back to whatever morning show hires you next, and we’ll still be here cleaning up the mess. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” I step toward her. Close enough now that I can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, the pulse in her throat, the way her mouth tightens when she’s hurt.
I see it all and I keep going. “You want fair? Your career is built on turning real people into content. You stood in front of a camera for five years and smiled at America every morning like nothing was eating you alive, and now you’re here making a show out of being a victim of the same machine you profited from. ”
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch. Just stands there with my words hitting her full in the face, and for a second I want her to hit back. To scream at me. To call me a coward or a bastard or a hypocrite, because all three would be true.
She nods once, sharp, and all the color drains from her face. “Okay,” she says. She turns on the heel of her boot and climbs back off the boat, not looking at me.
I stand there with my fists clenched and my jaw aching and the sick, sour taste of the argument in my mouth.
Doug lets out a sigh like a punctured tire. I look at him, and he looks back at me, disappointment in his droopy eyes.
“Not now, buddy.”
He sighs again. Louder.
I scratch behind his ears because it’s the least I can do, and he melts against my leg like I’ve offered him a steak. Then I go forward and start pulling lines.
I’m not going anywhere. There’s nowhere to go.
The Rosen slot is empty for four days and the next charter isn’t until Tuesday and the port engine is still half apart on the deck behind me.
I cast off anyway. Captain shrieks as we clear the slip, and I take her out past the breakwater into open water where nobody can reach me.
The Rosen cancellation hurt. I won’t pretend it didn’t.
Four days of guaranteed income gone because the island I’ve been trying to protect became content for eight million strangers.
That’s real money. Groceries and diesel and the mortgage payment on the house Henry still insists is half mine even though I sleep on a boat.
But it wasn’t the reason.
The reason is simpler and it sits in my chest like a stone. I wanted to take her to the island.
I wanted to load her onto my boat and point it toward Gull Shit Rock and spend the day with her, the two of us with the water between us and the world.
I wanted to watch her face when we rounded the point and the island came into view.
I wanted whatever theory she’d cooked up from that journal, wanted to watch her mind work the way it does when she’s onto something real.
I wanted the version of her that exists when the camera’s off and the performance drops.
The woman who chops potatoes because Shea asked her to, who follows a five-year-old around a dinner table without being asked, who kissed me on a porch like she was trying to start a fire.
I wanted that. Badly enough that the want itself terrified me.
Because wanting things is how you lose them. My mother wanted to live. The Coast Guard wanted me whole. My father wanted to die in his own bed with his hands still useful. None of those things happened the way they were supposed to. Want something enough and the universe finds a way to take it.
I chose those words. Every one of them. I didn’t stumble into cruelty.
I mapped it. I targeted her career because it’s the thing she rebuilt from ash.
I mentioned the clip because it’s the wound that hasn’t healed.
I told her she doesn’t belong here because I know, with the same certainty I know the sound of fog moving over water, that part of her wants to.
I wanted to hurt her enough that she wouldn’t come back. I wanted a door I could close permanently, because every time she walks through it, the room gets harder to leave.
“Fuck me sideways,” Captain says from his perch.
“Yeah.” I hold the wheel and keep the bow pointed at nothing. “You got it.”
Port Haven is a smudge behind us by the time I let myself think the rest of it. She didn’t argue. She’s argued with me every single day since the ferry, and today she nodded and got off my boat.
I’ll turn us around eventually. I have to.
But for now, I need to be on the water.