Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
ATTICUS
Harmony Harbor’s main street looks like it was designed by someone who binge-watched every Hallmark Christmas movie ever produced and said, yes, this, but year-round.
I walk three paces behind Phoenix and Mason, hands shoved deep in the pockets of my cashmere hoodie, watching them navigate the cobblestone sidewalk like a documentary on human body language.
Phoenix bounces along with the barely contained energy of a golden retriever set loose in a dog park, head swiveling left and right to take in every storefront, every painted window box, every hand-lettered chalkboard sign advertising lobster rolls and craft lemonade.
Mason, by contrast, moves like a man on his way to an IRS audit. Phone in hand, thumb scrolling through nothing, jaw locked so tight I can see the tendons jumping from six feet away.
The contrast between them is almost theatrical.
“Oh my God, look at that!” Phoenix grabs Mason’s arm and points to a shop with a faded green awning. The window display features a taxidermied lobster wearing a tiny top hat and monocle. “That lobster is fancier than half the people at last year’s Met Gala.”
Mason glances up from his phone for approximately one-third of a second. “It’s a taxidermy shop.”
“It’s art, Mason. That lobster has more personality than most of the producers I’ve worked with.” She presses her face against the glass, breath fogging a circle on the surface. “I’m going to name him Gerald. Gerald looks like a very fancy man I’d like to get to know better.”
She’s radiant. That’s the only word for it.
Stripped of the red carpets and designer armor and constant surveillance, something has unclenched behind her eyes.
The copper of her hair catches the late afternoon light slanting between the buildings, and when she laughs, the sound rings off the brick facades like a bell.
I catch myself smiling and don’t bother to stop.
This—this is the woman who makes me want to stick around for reasons that have nothing to do with ticket sales or tabloid speculation.
Not Phoenix the brand or Phoenix the disaster.
Just her, inventing backstories for dead crustaceans and looking like she’s never been happier to just stroll down a quaint sidewalk and window shop.
“And this,” Phoenix announces, sweeping her arm toward a white clapboard building with black shutters and a brass plaque by the door, “is clearly the headquarters of Harmony Harbor’s secret society.
They meet on Tuesdays to discuss the weather, lobster trap placement, and which outsiders to sacrifice to the sea gods. ”
“It’s the town clerk’s office,” Mason says.
Phoenix stops mid-stride.
Mason’s mouth snaps shut. Something flickers across his face—a ripple of recognition, of having said too much—before his expression flattens back to neutral. He lifts his phone and scrolls with renewed intensity.
“How do you know that?” Phoenix tilts her head, squinting at him.
“Sign.” Mason nods toward the building without looking up. “Right there on the plaque.”
Phoenix turns. Studies the brass plaque. From this angle I can see it reads Harmony Harbor Town Clerk — Est. 1847.
“Huh.” She accepts this with a shrug and moves on.
But I don’t miss the way Mason’s shoulders drop half an inch with relief.
And I don’t miss the details he keeps slipping—the way his feet navigate the uneven cobblestones without hesitation, the way his body turned left toward the waterfront before Phoenix even suggested heading that direction, the way his eyes tracked to a specific second-floor window above the hardware store and held there for two full seconds before he forced them away.
Mason Aldrich doesn’t just know this town. He knows it the way you know the rooms of the house you grew up in—by feel, by instinct, by the particular muscle memory that comes from walking the same streets a thousand times before your brain was fully formed.
Phoenix rounds the next corner and gasps. “Oh, there’s a little bridge! Over an actual stream! With ducks!”
She jogs ahead, sneakers slapping the pavement, leaving Mason and me in a brief pocket of privacy.
He takes it.
His hand closes around my elbow, firm enough to slow my pace. Not aggressive. Controlled. But when I glance down at his fingers, the knuckles are bone-white.
“You said you wouldn’t say anything to her.” His voice barely qualifies as sound. Lips moving, air passing over vocal cords, nothing more. “I need you to keep that promise tonight.”
I actually regretted offering an opinion before the words were even all the way out, but there’s no helping it now.
“I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t.”
“At the bar.” He swallows. His Adam’s apple bobs like it’s fighting against something trying to climb up his throat. “It would really help if you kept Dominic and Phoenix as far away from each other as possible.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“This isn’t about me being embarrassed. This is about—“ He stops. Starts again. “Phoenix has a way of turning solving other people’s problems into a suicide mission. She’ll dig. She’ll push. She’ll put herself between me and whatever she thinks is hurting me, and she won’t care what it costs her.”
“That’s not the worst trait in the world.”
“It is when the press tour is hanging by a thread and her career can’t survive another scandal.” His voice cracks on the last word—hairline fracture, barely audible, sealed over almost instantly. “Promise me. Tonight, no matter what Dominic says, no matter what comes up. You keep her distracted.”
Lying to her, even by omission, feels wrong in a way I didn’t expect it to.
“Please.” The word sounds like it physically hurts him.
“Yeah.” I scrub a hand over the back of my neck. “Yeah, okay. I’ll keep her distracted.”
Mason nods once, sharp, and walks ahead without another word. His spine is a steel rod. His stride is measured, precise, each footfall placed with the deliberate care of someone crossing a minefield.
The local dive bar smells like spilled beer, fried food, and decades of stories soaked into wood that nobody has ever bothered to refinish.
I duck through the doorway and stop. Not because anything’s blocking my path, but because my brain needs a second to recalibrate.
Every bar I’ve been to in the last five years has been a variation on the same theme—bottle service, mood lighting, a DJ booth, and a bouncer who checks your follower count before letting you past the rope.
This place has a pool table with duct tape on the felt, a jukebox that appears to predate the internet, and Christmas lights strung along the ceiling that I suspect have been hanging there since well before last December.
Behind the bar, Dominic spots us and raises a hand. He’s wiping down a pint glass with a rag that’s seen better centuries, sleeves rolled to his elbows, tattoo ink catching the neon beer signs in shifting colors.
“There they are.” His grin is wide, genuine. He sets three glasses on the scarred bartop and starts pouring without asking what anyone wants. “Welcome to the finest establishment in Harmony Harbor. Don’t touch the pool table. Drinks are on the house.”
“You really don’t have to—“ I start.
“Shut up and drink.” He slides a dark amber beer toward me, then one toward Phoenix.
His hand hesitates—just a fraction of a second—before he places the third in front of Mason.
Their fingers don’t touch. But Dominic’s eyes hold on Mason’s face a beat too long, tracking something there that I can’t read.
Some silent inventory, like he’s checking for damage.
“You good?” Dominic asks him. The question is casual. The question is anything but casual.
Mason wraps his hand around the glass. “Fine.”
“Cool.” Dominic nods. Already turning to a fisherman flagging him from the other end of the bar.
Already moving. But even as he pours a whiskey and makes change and laughs at something a grizzled man in a cable-knit sweater says, his eyes keep cutting back to Mason.
Quick glances. Barely perceptible. The kind of thing you’d miss entirely if you weren’t watching for it.
I’m watching for it.
Phoenix has already migrated three stools down, where a woman in a Red Sox cap is asking for an autograph. If Phoenix is bothered, she doesn’t show it. She leans in, all warmth and dimples, and within thirty seconds the woman is digging through her purse for a napkin and a pen.
The girl is a natural performer, I’m not sure she even realizes just how much.
“My daughter is going to lose her mind,” the woman says, hand pressed flat against her chest. “She watches your old show every single day after school. The reruns.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sadie. She’s nine.”
Phoenix takes the napkin and writes something in careful, looping letters. Not just a signature—a whole message. She draws a little star in the corner and hands it back, and the woman clutches it like it’s a winning lottery ticket.
Two men at the next table lean over. One of them pulls out his phone.
Phoenix doesn’t stiffen. Doesn’t calculate angles or check for cameras the way she does at industry events.
She just turns to them with that same easy openness, asks their names, asks about the festival, asks if the lobster rolls here are really the best in the state, like the sign outside claims.
Within ten minutes she’s holding court at the bar without trying.
Fishermen, tourists, a cluster of college-age kids who recognized her from social media—they orbit her like she’s generating her own gravitational field.
She laughs at their jokes. She asks real questions and listens to the answers.
She steals fries off a stranger’s plate and the stranger lets her.
This is who she is when nobody’s managing her. When there’s no publicist curating interactions, no photographer monetizing smiles, no mother calculating market value. Just Phoenix, being herself, and people falling in love with her for it.