Page 82 of Everything You Hate
“Of course.” He nods. Once. Sharp. “And you’ll verify before you publish? Malcolm is quite invested in the series. As am I. The production company has greenlit significant resources. I’d hate to see that commitment jeopardized by... unsubstantiated claims.”
The threat is so thinly veiled it’s practically naked. I hold his gaze. Don’t blink. Don’t flinch. The skills I learned in five years of morning television are good for exactly one thing: looking like you’re not scared when you are.
“I always verify, Mr. Merrick. It’s why they hired me.”
“Good.” He touches my arm. His fingers are cold. “Be careful whose stories you’re telling, Ms. Crawford. History has a way of punishing those who get it wrong.”
He walks away. His loafers make no sound on the pavement. I watch him go, my heart hammering, and it takes three full breaths before I realize I’ve been holding the Windex bottle so tight my knuckles have gone white.
I stand on Main Street at nine seventeen on a Tuesday morning and watch Port Haven eat itself alive.
Tourists stream past. Phones out. Maps open. Voices carrying. A child points at the harbor and asks his mother if that’s where the treasure is buried. The mother checks her phone—my phone, my posts, my words—and says yes, honey, I think so.
Piper’s window is clean. You’d never know someone stood there at four in the morning and sprayed hate across the glass of a woman who builds rainbow displays and names her plants after romance heroes. You’d never know Fish Monroe stood in his own doorway and took abuse from a stranger over land that isn’t his to defend. You’d never know Dean lost four thousand dollars because a family decided the island felt like a circus, and the circus was my doing.
The guilt I’ve been carrying since the Rosen cancellation is not guilt anymore.
It’s resolve.
Clear. Cold. Certain in a way nothing in my life has been certain since the diagnosis.
This is not Malcolm’s story. It is not the production company’s series. It is not my comeback vehicle or my redemption arc or the thing that will put me back on television where I belong.
This is Piper Haven scrubbing hate off her windows at seven in the morning.
This is Dean’s canceled charter and empty dock.
This is a town being consumed by a story I started, and I will be goddamned if I don’t finish it the right way.
I pull out my phone. Open Instagram. My last post has fourteen thousand comments. People planning trips. People asking where to dig. People treating my speculation like gospel and Port Haven like a theme park.
I draft a new post. Delete it. Draft another. Delete that too.
The words aren’t there yet. The story isn’t finished. I need the box. I need what’s inside it. I need to stand on that rock with something in my hands that proves, once and for all, what really happened between Thomas Haven and Evangeline Merrick in 1893.
And then I need to tell it. Not for Malcolm. Not for the series. For the woman on the ladder with pink water running down her arm and a bookstore full of stories about people who get happy endings despite the odds.
I put my phone away and walk back to the Tidewater. The sun is full over the harbor now. The water is blue and indifferent. Somewhere out there is a boat with a man on it who kissed my scars and didn’t flinch, and a box in a chamber on a rock that’s waited a hundred and thirty years for someone to open it.
I have work to do.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Evangeline
24 March 1893
I have burned the dress.
Not the wedding dress. That is downstairs on its form in the sewing room where Mother left it, and it will be there in the morning, and I will not be.
The other one. The grey one, that I wore Thursday. I took it down to the kitchen at two o’clock this morning when the house was asleep and I put it in the stove a piece at a time and stood there until it was gone, and then I washed my hands and came back up here and I have been sitting at this desk since.
I have started this next part four times and put my pen through all of it. I am going to do it properly now, because if I do not write it down then it did not happen, and I have watched enough of this island’s business get settled that way to know better.
Thursday. The blue room. After my father went up.
Charles came in behind me and shut the door and turned the key in it. I heard him turn it. I said something — I do not knowwhat, I have tried to recover it and cannot — and he crossed the room and put his hand over my mouth and said that we would be married in eleven days and that I was being a child about it.
