Page 47 of Everything You Hate
He steps closer. Lowers his voice. The anger in it is precise, calibrated, the kind that comes from having rehearsed the speech on the walk over. “Your Instagram posts. The treasure hunt hashtag. Do you have any idea what’s happening at the marina right now?”
“I haven’t posted anything about the treasure since?—”
“Your followers have. Sixty comments planning trips. Metal detectors. Drone flights over private property.” His jaw works. “Bodhi got a security alert this morning. Somebody flew a drone over the north pasture yesterday. Colter’s land. My brother’s land. From the water, because they knew the gate was locked.”
The woman in the romance section turns a page very slowly.
“I didn’t tell anyone to fly a drone.”
“You didn’t have to.” He steps closer. We’re three feet apart now, and the air between us has the charged quality of something about to short out. “Eight million people saw #PortHavenTreasure and made their own decisions. That’s how this works, Scarlett. You know exactly how this works. You built a career on it.”
It lands. Hard. The worst part is he’s right—I do know how it works. I’ve spent ten years understanding the relationship between a hashtag and a crowd, between a story and the people who show up for it. I’ve built segments around it. I’ve pitched advertisers on it. I know the math.
And he knows I know. That’s what cuts. Not the accusation—the accuracy of it. Being read this well by a man I’d spent a week telling myself was just a grumpy ferry captain with a bad attitude and a good dog is so much worse than being wrong.
“I’m trying to contain it,” I say. “That’s why I’m here. Research. Context. Getting the story right before?—”
“Before what? Before the next wave of tourists shows up with shovels? Because they’re already here. The ten-thirty ferry was standing room. Half of them asked me where to start digging.”
Piper clears her throat. “Maybe we could?—”
“Not now, Pipe.” Dean doesn’t take his eyes off me. “The north pasture is where we graze sheep, Scarlett. It’s where Hazel plays. It’s not a dig site because a hundred and thirty years ago somebody decided a woman jumped off a cliff with a box of jewelry.”
My best counterargument is in the bag at my feet. Evangeline’s journal. A woman who was so thoroughly contained by the people around her that the only place she could be honest was in a book she never meant anyone to read. Containment produces this. This is what happens when you decide which parts of a person are allowed to exist.
I don’t reach for it. Handing him the journal means handing him Evangeline, and something in me balks at the idea of Dean Kinsella holding that particular wound. He doesn’t get to have both—the anger and the understanding. Not yet.
So I go at his week instead.
“Where were you Tuesday morning?” I ask.
His eyebrows go up. “What?”
“Tuesday. Ten-thirty. You were at the historical society looking at tidal maps that are available online. Then you were at the Driftwood three booths over from mine for forty minutes reading the same chart. Then you were on Harbor Street in the rain with no dog and no cargo, and you just happened to bedriving past when I needed a ride.” I take a step toward him. “You’ve been three feet behind me since I got off the ferry, Dean. Every conversation I have, every person I talk to, there you are with a reason neither of us believes. So don’t stand in your niece’s bookstore and lecture me about containment when you’ve been containing me since day one.”
He goes still. The anger doesn’t leave his face, but something shifts behind it—recognition, maybe, or the particular discomfort of being accurately described by someone you were sure hadn’t been paying attention.
Piper has given up all pretense of reshelving. She’s leaning on the counter with her hands clasped, watching us like we’re the best show she’s seen all year.
“You don’t get to do that,” Dean says. His voice has dropped. “You don’t get to turn this into a thing about me following you.”
“It’s not about you following me. It’s about you deciding which parts of this story get told and which ones stay buried, and whether you’ve noticed that’s Malcolm’s whole method.” I’m closer now. Close enough to see the scar through his eyebrow, the thick stubble edging toward a beard, the pulse in his throat. “He gave me a curated archive. He left out every document that didn’t fit the narrative. Every name that complicated the story. He contained the truth until it looked the way he wanted it to look, and you’re standing here doing the exact same thing with different paperwork.”
“I’m trying to protect my family.”
“I know.” My voice cracks on it. “I know that’s what you’re doing. But protection and control look the same from where I’m standing, and I’ve spent enough time in rooms with men who confused the two to know the difference.”
We’re close enough now that I can smell the diesel on his jacket, the coffee on his breath, the salt air caught in the fabric of his shirt. His eyes are gray-blue and full of something thatisn’t anger anymore. It’s raw, and it’s honest, and it’s aimed at me with the same intensity as everything else about him, and my body responds to it before my brain can catch up. My chest tightens. My skin prickles. The space between us has nothing to do with the argument and everything to do with the fact that we’ve been here before, on a porch in the dark, and I remember exactly how his mouth felt against mine.
He remembers too. I can see it in his face. The same calculation happening behind his eyes—distance, risk, the store around us, Piper pretending very hard to be interested in a dust jacket.
He’s going to kiss me. I am certain of it. His hand moves, stops, moves again toward my face, and every cell in my body is leaning into the expectation of it.
He steps back instead.
“I have a parts run,” he says. The lie is so transparent I almost laugh. “Bodhi needs a fuel filter for the south dock generator.”
“Sure.”
