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SHORT stories HUB, 693 John F. Kennedy Boulevard, Bayonne, NJ, New City, NY (2026)

09/18/2026

"Say the real thing, Silas. Or don't call."

"You have thirty days to contest the reassignment," the attorney said, "or it goes through automatically."

Wren took the letter but didn't look at it. She already knew what it said. She'd read it three times in the parking garage, once in the elevator, and once more with her thumb over the notary block, checking the date.

"That's not what I asked." She set the letter down on the conference table and slid it back. "I asked how it got filed at all."

Geneva Platt had been practicing franchise law in Savannah for twenty-two years, and she had the specific expression of a woman who had stopped being surprised by people a long time ago and started charging by the hour instead. She folded her hands.

"Your franchise agreement, Article Eleven, Section C," she said. "Territory reassignment requires the notarized consent of every listed founder. There are two listed founders. There is one notarized consent on file."

"Whose."

"Yours."

Wren's hands were flat on the table. She did not move them.

"Explain that to me again."

"The signature page bears your name. It's notarized by a Georgia notary. And it is, as far as the corporate registry is concerned, valid."

"I didn't sign anything."

"I believe you." Geneva opened a folder and turned it around. "Which is why I pulled the notary's stamp record. The notary who certified it — Delphine Ruiz — was decertified by the state in March. She certified four hundred and eleven documents in the six weeks before she lost her commission. Yours is one of them."

Wren looked at the copy. There it was — her name, in a hand that was almost hers. The loops were right. The slant was right. The way she crossed the final *t* with a little upward flick, the way her father had taught her when she was seven and learning to sign her own name on his shop invoices.

Somebody had practiced.

"Who filed it."

"Marchetti and Sons, LLC. Registered agent is a cousin of yours by marriage. Boone Calloway."

The room got very quiet. Outside the window, Bay Street ran gray and wet under a November sky, and a tour trolley rattled past full of people in plastic ponchos who had no idea where they were.

"Boone," Wren said.

"Boone."

"Silas didn't file it."

"Silas Calloway is not on the filing." Geneva paused. "But Marchetti and Sons shares a registered address with Calloway Logistics. Same suite, same floor, same building. The building is owned by Calloway Holdings, which is owned by the Calloway family trust, of which your husband is a trustee."

"He's not my husband."

"He's not your current husband. He is your recorded husband, according to the Chatham County marriage license you never filed a dissolution against."

Wren's jaw tightened. Seven years. Seven years she'd been meaning to file and never had, because filing meant an address, and an address meant a paper trail, and a paper trail meant Silas could find her. She'd taken his name off everything else. She'd just never gotten around to the one thing that required her to stand in a room and say this is over out loud.

"Contest the signature," she said. "Fraudulent notary. Void the filing."

"I can. That buys you ninety days while it's litigated." Geneva tapped the letter. "But here's the part you're not going to like. Under Section C, if the reassignment is contested, the agreement requires a mediation session with both founders present. In person. In Savannah."

Wren closed her eyes.

"Both founders."

"Both founders. Within thirty days. And if one founder fails to appear, the reassignment proceeds by default."

The tour trolley rattled past again. Somewhere down the block, a wedding was happening in one of the squares and a brass quartet was playing something Wren couldn't name.

"He planned this," she said quietly. "Boone didn't do this on his own."

"I would assume not."

"He found out I was coming back. He knew about the renewal deadline. He knew—" She stopped. Pressed her thumb into the edge of the table. "He knew the only way to force me back into this city was to make it so that not showing up would cost me Nine Doors."

"That would be my read."

Wren picked up the letter. Folded it. Put it in her bag, in the inside pocket, next to the eight keys on their eight rings.

"Say the real thing, Geneva."

Geneva Platt looked at her for a long moment. Then she said it.

"He's not trying to take your territory, Wren. He's trying to get you in a room."

The lobby of the Ellis Building was marble and brass and tall enough to make a person feel like an invoice. Wren came out of the elevator with her bag on her shoulder and her keys jingling at her hip, and she was already reaching for her phone to text Geneva about the mediation date when she saw him.

Silas Calloway stood by the revolving doors with his hands in his coat pockets and his back to the street, and he was looking directly at her.

Seven years had done something specific to him. The shoulders had filled out; the face had hollowed. He'd cut his hair short where it used to curl at his collar, and there was a scar on his jaw that hadn't been there before — small, white, the kind of thing you got from a bottle or a fight or a job gone wrong. He was in a charcoal coat and no tie, and he was not smiling.

Neither was she.

"Wren."

"Move."

"You didn't answer any of my calls."

"I've answered the ones that mattered." She kept walking. He didn't step aside; he turned with her, keeping pace, which meant that by the time she reached the revolving door they were side by side and she had to either stop or walk into him.

She stopped.

"Ten years," she said. "Ten years of calls. You want to know how many I got?"

"Tell me."

"None." She looked up at him. "Which is fine. That was the deal. You said stay away, I stayed away. So I need you to explain to me why your cousin just tried to file a signature that isn't mine on a document that takes my company."

Something moved behind his eyes. It was fast, and she almost missed it, but she'd spent four years of a marriage learning to read that face, and she caught it.

He didn't know.

Which meant he did know something, because Silas Calloway's face only did that when he was being lied to by someone he trusted.

"I didn't file anything," he said.

"Marchetti and Sons."

"Boone."

"Boone."

Silas's jaw worked once. "When did it go in?"

"Nine days ago."

"Nine days." He said it like he was doing math on something. "I was in Atlanta nine days ago."

"I don't care where you were."

"I know." He stepped aside — finally, a half-step, enough to let her pass, though he didn't go far. "Wren. The mediation. Are you coming to it?"

"I don't have a choice."

"You have a choice. You always had a choice. That was the whole point."

The words landed somewhere under her ribs and sat there.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what."

"Don't stand in this lobby seven years later and try to make leaving into something you gave me." She adjusted her bag on her shoulder. "You told me to go. You told me you didn't want me here. You told me I was a liability. So I went. You don't get to call it a gift now that you've noticed the invoice."

A man in a suit came through the revolving door and had to swerve around them. Neither of them moved.

"Tell me what you need," Silas said.

There it was. Seven years and the same six words, the same reflex, the same man who thought every broken thing was a maintenance ticket.

"I need you to leave me alone until the mediation," Wren said.

"That's not—"

"That's what I need. That's the whole list." She pushed through the revolving door into the rain. "Say the real thing next time, Silas. Or don't call."

She walked fast down Bay Street toward the parking garage, rain hitting her shoulders, keys hitting her hip, and she did not look back, which was the only reason she didn't see him standing in the doorway of the Ellis Building watching her go with his hand still half-raised.

She got to her car. Unlocked it. Sat down in the driver's seat, and only then, with the doors shut and the rain drumming the roof, did she let her hands shake.

In the back seat, clipped into the far-side booster, was a canvas bag she hadn't unpacked yet. On the side of it, in Sharpie, in an eight-year-old's determined capital letters:

TOBY B.

She had thirty days to kill the reassignment.

And thirty days to make absolutely certain Silas Calloway never found out what she'd left Savannah carrying.

09/18/2026

"I know you're not Marcus Cole. I don't know who you really are yet, but I will. And when I find out, I'll decide whether to kill you or keep you."

The brass knuckles made a sound against the traitor's jaw that Jin would remember for years—not the crack of bone, but the wet gasp after, the sound of a man remembering he was mortal.

"Do you understand now?" she asked, crouched in front of him. Blood dripped from his split lip onto the concrete floor of the walk-in freezer. Behind her, three of her men stood in careful silence. In front of her, Park Do-yun—her father's accountant for eighteen years, her accountant for six months—tried to remember how to breathe.

"I—" He coughed. A tooth came loose. "I was going to tell you—"

"You were going to tell the Jeons where we keep the port ledgers. You were going to sell my father's legacy for a down payment on a house in the suburbs." Jin turned the brass knuckles—her father's, worn on her hand like a wedding ring—and set them on her knee. "You've been with this family since I was a child. You taught me how to check the books for fraud."

"I didn't—"

"You did." She stood. Her heels—black, impractical, deliberate—clicked once on the concrete. "The first payment cleared three weeks ago. The Jeons have been using your access codes. Did you think we wouldn't notice?"

Do-yun's face went grey.

Jin looked at her men. "Take him to the warehouse. Keep him comfortable until I decide what to do with him." She paused. "And someone clean this floor. The health inspector comes Thursday."

"Yes, ma'am."

She walked out of the freezer. The kitchen of Sori was in full dinner rush—chefs in white, sizzling meat, the smell of garlic and sesame. No one looked at her. They were paid not to.

Her second-in-command, Kang Tae-jin, fell into step beside her. He was sixty-three, had been her father's right hand, and had spent the last six months testing whether she was worthy of her father's throne. He hadn't decided yet.

"The books are compromised," he said. "We'll need to move the ledgers. Change the access codes."

"That's handled."

"The Jeons will try again. They know we're vulnerable."

"They know we're transitioning. There's a difference." Jin pushed through the back door and into the alley, where her car waited—a black sedan, unremarkable, clean. "Which is why I'm meeting with our new security consultant tomorrow. The one Hyeon-woo recommended."

Tae-jin's expression flickered. "The outsider."

"The American."

"Your father wouldn't have trusted an outsider."

"My father is dead." Jin opened the car door. "And I'm not asking for his opinion. I'm asking for your report on the Jeon family's shipping routes. By tomorrow morning."

She got in the car. Drove away.

Tae-jin watched her go, his face unreadable, and did not say what he was thinking.

09/18/2026

"I have never betrayed you. And if you can't see that, then you never knew me at all."

"You can't be serious."

Elena's voice cut through the marble lobby of the Marchetti Development Group like a wire through soft clay. The security guard—mid-fifties, paunchy, with the resigned eyes of a man who'd seen too many people argue in this exact spot—didn't flinch.

"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to lower your voice or leave the premises."

"I have a meeting. With the licensing board. In this building. Which your boss scheduled." She held up her phone, the calendar invitation glowing accusingly. "Three o'clock. Conference room B. Or did he forget to tell his own security team he was hosting the woman he—"

She stopped herself. Not here. Not in front of a stranger who would report every word back to the man upstairs.

The guard's expression shifted—something flickering behind his professional blankness. Recognition, maybe. Or pity. She hated both.

"I'll call up," he said slowly. "Name?"

"Elena Reyes."

He turned to the desk phone, and Elena's fingers found the compass in her jacket pocket. Brass, worn smooth, her father's initials barely legible on the back. You always know which way is north, he'd told her, the year before the cancer took him. The trick is having the courage to walk that direction.

She'd walked north for seven years. Built a life from the rubble Dante Marchetti had left behind. A career. A home. A son who thought his father was a story she'd made up—a good man who died before Leo was born, because that was easier than the truth.

The guard hung up. His face had gone carefully blank again.

"Someone's coming down."

Elena straightened her blazer—charcoal, structured, the armor she wore to meetings where she needed to be taken seriously. She'd chosen it deliberately. She'd also chosen the four-inch heels that made her eye level with most men, and the lipstick the color of dried blood.

Seven years. She'd spent seven years making herself into someone who could walk into this building without flinching.

She was still working on the last part.

The elevator doors opened.

He stepped out alone—no entourage, no lawyers, no brothers. Just Dante Marchetti, in a suit that probably cost more than her monthly mortgage, his dark hair shot through with silver at the temples that hadn't been there before. He'd aged into something harder than the boy she'd married. Something sharper.

His eyes found her immediately. Held.

The lobby went quiet in her ears, sound collapsing into a dull roar that might have been her heartbeat or might have been the blood rushing past her temples. She was aware of the guard stepping back, of the distant click of someone's heels on marble, of the security camera in the corner recording all of it.

You always know which way is north.

"Elena."

Her name in his mouth was a match striking stone. She'd forgotten—deliberately, systematically—the way he could make two syllables sound like a verdict and a plea at the same time.

"Dante." She kept her voice level. Professional. "I'm here for the meeting."

"I know." He didn't move closer. Smart. The distance between them was exactly the width of the lobby, and she needed every inch of it. "The board's running late. They sent word—thirty minutes, maybe forty."

"I'll wait in the conference room."

"I'll wait with you."

"That's not necessary."

"It's my building."

"It's your father's building." The words came out before she could stop them, sharp as broken glass. "Or did the paperwork finally change?"

Something flickered across his face—there and gone too fast to name. Pain, maybe. Or anger. She'd stopped being able to read him the night he'd told her she was nothing to him. The night she'd found the photographs planted in his desk drawer. The night he'd looked at her with those same dark eyes and said, You think I wouldn't find out?

Let me be clear, she'd said then, her voice steady even as the floor dropped out from under her. I have never betrayed you. And if you can't see that, then you never knew me at all.

She'd walked out. He hadn't followed.

Now, seven years later, he inclined his head toward the elevator like a man offering a truce she had no intention of accepting.

"Conference room's this way."

The elevator ride took eleven seconds. Elena counted them.

Dante stood on the opposite side of the car, back to the mirrored wall, arms crossed. The position put his face in shadow and his shoulders in sharp relief—a deliberate choice, she realized. He was hiding from the cameras. Hiding from her.

"I read your proposal," he said, breaking the silence. "The Bell Street Church restoration. Impressive work."

"I didn't submit it to you."

"You submitted it to the city. My company holds the contract on the adjacent property. Your proposal crossed my desk six weeks ago."

Her stomach dropped. She'd spent four months on that bid. Four months of evenings and weekends, working around Leo's school schedule, building the kind of portfolio piece that could launch her firm from respected-small-shop to serious-contender.

"You're on the Bell Street project?"

"Marchetti Development owns the land to the west. We'll be coordinating with whoever wins the restoration contract." He paused. "I didn't know it was you until two weeks ago."

"And you didn't think to recuse yourself?"

"From what? I don't vote on the licensing board. I have no say in the selection process."

"You're Dante Marchetti. You have a say in everything."

The elevator doors opened on the fifth floor. Dante gestured for her to exit first—a courtesy that felt more like a power play. She walked past him without making eye contact, her heels clicking a staccato rhythm on the hardwood.

The conference room was glass-walled, modern, the kind of space designed to make visitors feel either impressed or inadequate depending on the visitor. Elena pulled out a chair at the far end of the table, positioning herself with a view of both doors. Old habit from years of site visits with contractors who didn't think women belonged in hard hats.

Dante took a seat across from her. Not at the head of the table—across. A choice that surprised her.

"The board will be here in twenty minutes," he said. "I wanted a moment first."

"To say what?"

"To apologize."

The word landed between them like a stone dropped in still water. Elena kept her expression flat, her hands folded on the table, her spine straight.

"For which part?" she asked.

Dante's jaw tightened. "For the meeting being scheduled this way. I should have warned you I'd be here."

"You should have recused yourself from anything involving my work."

"I'm not involved in the selection. I'm informing you that our paths may cross professionally." He leaned back, the leather chair creaking softly. "I thought you'd prefer to know in advance."

"After seven years of silence, you thought I'd prefer to know in advance that you might accidentally appear in my life?"

"I didn't know how to reach you."

"You didn't try."

"I did." The words came out rough. "For the first year. Every number you'd ever given me. Every address. Your mother hung up on me. Your sister called me a—" He stopped. "She was creative."

Elena's hands stayed folded. Her heart didn't. "And then?"

"And then I stopped." He met her eyes. "I told myself you'd made your choice. That whatever I'd done, you'd decided I wasn't worth explaining it to."

"You know what you did."

"I know what I believed." His voice dropped. "I was wrong."

The conference room felt smaller suddenly. The glass walls offered no escape, just the hallway beyond and the security desk and the long drop to the lobby below. Elena's fingers found her compass through the fabric of her jacket.

The trick is having the courage to walk that direction.

"I don't need your apology," she said quietly. "I need this meeting to be about the project. Nothing else."

"Agreed."

"And after today, we interact only as required by the contract. No personal calls. No unexpected appearances. No—" She gestured vaguely at the space between them. "This."

Dante studied her for a long moment. "You've changed."

"So have you."

"I'd like to think so." He paused. "I'd like to prove it."

"Don't." The word came out harder than she intended. "Whatever you're about to say—don't. I didn't come here for closure. I came here for a contract."

"Understood."

"Do you? Because you're looking at me like I'm a problem to solve, and I need you to understand that I'm not a problem. I'm a colleague. For the duration of this project, that's all I am."

"I understand."

She didn't believe him. But the conference room door was opening, and three members of the licensing board were filing in with coffee cups and folders, and the meeting was starting, and for the next hour and twenty minutes Elena could pretend that Dante Marchetti was just another obstacle to navigate.

She almost believed it herself.

Until she caught him watching her during the presentation—not her slides, not her credentials, but her. The way she gestured when she talked about load-bearing walls. The way she paused to let questions land before answering. The way she said Let me be clear three times, each one a little firmer than the last.

He watched her like a man memorizing a language he thought he'd forgotten.

The meeting ended at 4:47. Elena gathered her materials in deliberate silence, shaking hands with each board member, promising to send follow-up documentation by Friday. She didn't look at Dante. She didn't need to. She could feel him in her peripheral vision, a dark shape that didn't move from his chair.

"Ms. Reyes."

She turned. The eldest board member—a woman in her sixties with silver hair and sharp eyes—had lingered at the door.

"The committee will be in touch within two weeks. But between us?" She smiled slightly. "That was the strongest proposal we've seen this quarter. Whatever happens with the adjacent property, you've earned your spot."

"Thank you."

The woman's eyes flicked to Dante, still seated, then back. "I've known the Marchetti family for thirty years. Dante is many things, but he's not stupid." A pause. "He knows talent when he sees it."

Elena didn't respond. She waited until the woman left, until the door clicked shut, until she and Dante were alone again with the afternoon light slanting through the glass.

"I should go," she said. "My son's school lets out at 5:30."

She hadn't meant to say it. The words slipped out—a reflex, a boundary, a reminder to herself that she had somewhere else to be.

Dante went very still.

"Your son."

"Yes."

"Elena—"

"Goodbye, Dante."

She walked out before he could finish the sentence. Her heels clicked down the hallway, past the security desk, into the elevator. The doors closed on his face—that same unreadable expression, the one she'd never been able to decipher, the one that had once made her think she was losing her mind.

The elevator descended. Elena leaned against the wall, her compass in her hand, her breath coming too fast.

That doesn't make sense.

Leo's voice in her head. Leo, who asked why the sky was blue and why adults lied and why he didn't have a dad like the other kids. Leo, who kept a notebook of important questions he was saving for someday.

Leo, who had Dante's eyes. Dante's stubborn jaw. Dante's way of going absolutely still when something mattered.

The elevator doors opened. The lobby was empty. Elena walked out into the Boston afternoon, her phone already in her hand, already texting her sister: Need you to pick up Leo. Something came up.

Something. As if the last hour could be reduced to something.

She was halfway to the parking garage when she heard footsteps behind her—fast, purposeful, too close.

She turned.

Dante stood five feet away, his suit jacket abandoned somewhere upstairs, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, his tie loosened. He looked like a man who'd run down six flights rather than wait for the elevator.

"A son," he said. His voice was rough. "How old?"

Elena's mouth went dry. "That's none of your business."

"How old, Elena?"

She could lie. She'd been lying for seven years, telling herself it was protection, telling herself he didn't deserve to know, telling herself she'd made the right choice.

You always know which way is north.

"Seven," she said. "He's seven."

Dante's face didn't change. But something behind his eyes—something vast and dark and barely contained—shifted.

"That's what I thought," he said quietly. "Seven years."

Elena didn't move. Didn't speak. The parking garage gaped behind her, shadows stretching long across the concrete, and somewhere above them a security camera was recording all of it—the man, the woman, the truth about to break open.

"His name," Dante said. Not a question.

"Leo."

"Leonardo."

"I didn't—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I didn't name him after your father."

"No." Dante's voice was strange. Hollow. "You wouldn't."

The silence stretched between them, wire-taut, ready to snap. Elena's fingers found her compass, held it so tight the metal bit into her palm.

"I have to go," she said.

"Elena—"

"I have to go."

She turned and walked into the garage, her heels echoing off the concrete, her heart a war drum in her chest. She didn't look back. She couldn't.

But she felt him watching her the whole way to her car. Felt his gaze like a hand between her shoulder blades, like a brand, like the weight of seven years of secrets finally cracking open.

She got in the car. Locked the doors. Sat with her hands on the steering wheel and her breath coming in short, sharp gasps.

That doesn't make sense.

Leo's voice again. Leo, who would ask why she was crying when she picked him up. Leo, who would want to know why his mother's hands were shaking.

Leo, who had a father now.

Whether Elena wanted him to or not.

She was three blocks from Leo's school when her phone buzzed. Unknown number. She ignored it.

It buzzed again. Same number.

She pulled over, heart pounding, and opened the message.

This is Dante. I need to see him. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon. We can discuss terms through our lawyers if you prefer. But I need to see him.

Elena stared at the screen. The compass was cold in her hand now, the brass leached of warmth, her father's initials invisible in the fading light.

She typed: No.

She hit send.

She drove to Leo's school. She hugged him too tight. She listened to him talk about the volcano project he was building with his best friend Marcus, about the spelling test he'd aced, about the question he'd written in his notebook that morning: Why do some kids have dads who live with them and some don't?

"Depends on the family," she said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that.

"That doesn't make sense," Leo said. "Either you have a dad or you don't."

"Some dads can't be with their kids. For lots of reasons."

"What reasons?"

"Grown-up reasons."

Leo frowned. He looked so much like Dante when he frowned—that same sharp focus, that same refusal to accept easy answers.

"I have a dad, right?" he asked. "You said he died. But I don't have a picture of him. And when I asked Grandma, she said—"

"Leo." Elena's voice cracked. "Can we talk about this later? I have a headache."

Leo studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded, slow and serious, and went back to his volcano.

Elena drove home. She made dinner. She read Leo three chapters of his book. She kissed his forehead and turned off the light and stood in the hallway outside his room, listening to him breathe.

Then she went to her bedroom, closed the door, and cried.

Her phone buzzed again.

I understand. I'll wait. But I won't wait forever.

She deleted the message.

She didn't sleep.

09/17/2026

"You've spent three years protecting yourself from me. You moved onto the boat. You stopped coming to dinner. You stopped calling. You let me think you didn't want us anymore."

The email from the bank arrived at 7:42 on a Monday morning, and Cori Delacroix read it three times before she let herself believe it.

Dear Ms. Delacroix,

We have received a request to change the payout account for Delacroix Marina slip rental income from the joint account ending in 4471 to a new account ending in 8832, held solely by Sullivan Delacroix. Per the marina's operating agreement, this change requires signatures from both listed owners. Please confirm whether you authorize this change.

Cori set her coffee down. She touched the brass ship's bell on her desk — her grandfather's, from his first boat — and rang it once.

Hard no.

She picked up her phone and called Sully.

He answered on the third ring. "Cori."

"Did you think I wouldn't find out?"

A pause. "Let me finish."

"No." She stood up. "You tried to redirect our marina's income into a private account. Right before the divorce filing. Did you think I wouldn't notice?"

"I wasn't trying to hide it."

"You weren't trying to tell me either." She grabbed her keys. "I'm coming over."

Sully's boat was docked at the end of the pier — a forty-two-foot sloop called Second Wind, which Cori had named before everything went wrong. She walked down the dock with her arms crossed and her jaw set, and she didn't knock when she reached the cabin.

He was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and a stack of papers. He looked up when she walked in, and she saw the chain around his neck — the one that held his wedding ring. It was visible, tucked over his shirt collar, and she hated that she noticed.

"You changed your mind about the divorce," she said.

"No."

"Then why are you trying to take my money?"

Sully set down his coffee. "I'm not trying to take anything. The marina's income is being audited. I wanted to separate the accounts so the auditor could see clean numbers."

"You could have told me that."

"I'm telling you now."

"That's not—" She stopped. Breathed. "That's not how this works. You don't get to make decisions about our business without me. You don't get to change accounts without my signature. You don't get to—"

"Cor."

"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't call me that."

Sully was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Let me finish."

"Finish what?"

"The reason I'm separating the accounts." He picked up the papers. "The marina's been losing money for two years. Slip rentals are down. The fuel dock is barely breaking even. I've been covering the shortfall out of my own pocket."

Cori stared at him. "What?"

"I didn't want to tell you because I knew you'd blame yourself. The marina was your grandfather's. You've been trying to keep it alive since he died. I didn't want to add to that."

"You've been covering the shortfall."

"For eighteen months."

"How much?"

"Forty-two thousand dollars."

Cori sat down. Not because she wanted to — because her legs wouldn't hold her. She touched the bell in her pocket, the one she'd grabbed off her desk, and she didn't ring it.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you left." Sully's voice was quiet. "You left three years ago, Cori. You took Wren and you moved into your mother's house and you stopped coming to the marina. You stopped coming to me."

"I left because you—"

"I know why you left." He set the papers down. "I know what you think I did. I know what you think happened."

"Then tell me I'm wrong."

He was quiet.

"That's what I thought." Cori stood up. "Fix the account. Put the money back. And then we're done."

She turned to leave.

"Wren called me yesterday," Sully said.

She stopped.

"She asked me why I don't live with you anymore. She asked me if it was because of her." He touched the chain around his neck. "I told her it wasn't. I told her it was because of me."

Cori's hand tightened on the bell. "You talked to Wren."

"She called me. She said she found my number in her mom's phone."

"I didn't know."

"I know." Sully stood up. "But she's asking questions, Cori. Hard ones. And I don't know how to answer them."

Cori turned. She looked at him — at the man she'd married, the man she'd left, the man who still wore his wedding ring around his neck. And for the first time in three years, she didn't know what to say.

"Fix the account," she said finally. "Then we'll talk."

She walked out of the boat and down the dock, and she didn't look back.

But she rang the bell once when she reached her car.

Decision made.

Address

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09/18/2026

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