Candace set down her coffee. “Who is Hartwell?”
“I don’t know. Somebody from Detroit, apparently.”
“A Saturday?”
“The Parks calendar says it’s reserved.”
“By whom?”
“Parks. That’s what the calendar is for.”
Candace’s silence became sharp. She looked through the glass doors toward the water, where a family had spread a blanket on the public shore. A toddler was chasing gulls. Beyond them stood the pavilion, its roof visible between two trees.
“We’ve had Saturdays for twenty years,” she said.
“We’ve used Saturdays,” Lorna corrected gently.
“Same thing.”
“Not necessarily.”
Candace picked up her phone and called a town employee she knew. There was no answer. She called another. Nobody at Parks could be reached late on the holiday weekend. Each unanswered call confirmed her private suspicion that the town had become less respectful, less efficient, less hers.
“We’ll go down early,” she decided. “We’ll set the tables out. If there’s a misunderstanding, the visitors can use the lawn.”
“The booking includes the lawn.”
“Lorna. Are we going to let strangers take the place we’ve maintained for twenty years?”
Lorna wanted to say that the town maintained the shelter. She remembered Hiram Tisdale climbing its ladder every spring while Candace instructed him where to place her chairs. She remembered carrying a tray of lemonade to him once, and how he had thanked her as if she had done something generous instead of ordinary. But the memory passed before she could turn it into speech.
“I’ll bring the cooler,” she said.
Candace smiled. The room softened. Order had been restored.
That evening Candace opened the new livestream page she called Shoreline Watch. She had created it to show neighbors small problems before officials could ignore them: a vehicle parked badly, a picnic blanket too close to the path, a broken trash can, a stranger walking a dog without a visible tag. Her viewers rewarded suspicion with engagement. Every complaint was a little performance, and every approving comment made the next performance easier.
She prepared a short introduction for the following day. Something lighthearted, she thought. Something that would tell the people on the hill that their Saturday tradition was under attack.
She did not know that her phone would preserve far more than she intended, or that the longest friendship of her adult life would be tested by the things she chose to say in front of it.
Chapter 5: The Promise
On the night before her wedding, Bethany could not sleep.
She lay beside Rowan in the small guest room at her mother’s house, listening to the refrigerator cycle on and off down the hall. It was the same house where she had learned multiplication at the kitchen table, argued with Quentin about chores, and listened to Hiram come home after late repairs at the park. The walls had been repainted, the carpet replaced, and the kitchen sink no longer dripped, but the night sounds remained familiar.
Her phone buzzed at eleven-thirty. A routine update from the desk. Nothing that required her. She read it anyway.
Rowan rolled over. “You promised.”
“I didn’t answer.”
“You looked.”
“There’s a difference.”
“For a lawyer, maybe.”
He sat up and held out his hand. Bethany gave him the phone reluctantly. He switched it to silent and placed it on the dresser across the room.
“It’s our wedding tomorrow,” he said. “Let Radford run the world for twelve hours.”
“That man would reorganize the moon if it had a chain of command.”
“Exactly. We’re safe.”
She laughed, but the knot in her chest stayed. She had been the new officer once, uncertain of where to stand when a senior colleague cut a corner. She had been the supervisor asked to sign off on a report with too many convenient gaps. She knew how small a choice could begin a large mistake. She also knew that not every call required her presence.
