The phone buzzes in my hand again, the screen glowing in the dark like an accusation.
Blocked caller.
I lie there on top of the covers, Daniel’s warmth radiating beside me, his back turned, his breathing slow and even. The bruise across my shoulder throbs with every pulse beat, a dull reminder of the guardrail and the drop. The second buzz rattles against the wood of the nightstand, vibrating beside the Mercer-issued charging dock with its discreet wave crest.
I don’t trust the walls here. I don’t trust the Wi-Fi. I don’t trust whatever system Evelyn pays for that lets her know which guests stream what after midnight.
I slide the phone into my palm and swing my legs over the edge of the bed.
“Bathroom,” I whisper toward Daniel’s shoulder, just in case he’s half awake.
He makes a sleepy noncommittal sound, never opening his eyes.
The floor is cold under my bare feet. I grab my robe from the chair, knotting it one-handed while the phone buzzes a third time, insistently, like it knows this is my last chance. Instead of heading for the en suite, I pad down the hallway, past the muted family portraits and the faint smell of furniture polish, toward the back stair that leads to the terrace.
The house creaks the way big old houses do at night, heat groaning through vents, distant pipes ticking. Somewhere below, a grandfather clock counts out the late hour with slow, measured chimes. I keep my breathing shallow and my steps soft, phone tight in my fingers.
At the terrace door, I thumb the handle carefully, easing it open just wide enough to slip through.
The cold hits me like a thrown bucket.
Air knifes down my throat and makes my eyes water; my breath blooms out in pale clouds that drift toward the glass. The stone under my feet bites straight through my thin socks. The harbor spreads out below the cliff, a dark curve threaded with pinpricks of light from boats and the town center. Smoke from distant chimneys carries a faint, comforting burn of wood and something chemical from the hospital up on its hill.
I shut the door behind me until it clicks, sealing the warm house air away, and answer the call.
“Hello?”
There’s a second of silence, then a breath near the speaker, not mine.
“Mrs. Mercer?” a woman’s voice says. The last word comes out tight, like she has to force it past her teeth.
My fingers squeeze around the phone. I glance back at the glass, checking for any movement behind the sheer curtains. Nothing. Just my reflection: pale, tired, bandage at my hairline like a crooked headband.
“Who is this?” I ask.
“The one who keeps hitting your number by mistake,” she says. The dry edge in her tone doesn’t match the tremor underneath. “Only I think it’s not a mistake anymore, is it?”
Wind whips around the corner of the house and slips under my robe. Goosebumps pebble my arms.
“You called before,” I say. “You asked for ‘Mrs. Mercer’ and hung up.”
“You kept the name,” she replies. “That answers one question.”
I bite back a dozen responses. Instead, I anchor myself in something solid.
“I’m hanging up unless you tell me who you are,” I say. My voice comes out stronger than I feel. “And why you’re calling from a blocked number in the middle of the night.”
There’s another breath. When she speaks again, the sarcasm is gone.
“My name is Riley Shaw,” she says. “I work with an advocacy nonprofit. Off the clock I investigate irregular adoptions. Right now, I’m looking at Mercer Hospital and the Mercer Foundation.”
The name drops into my chest and sinks, heavy and unfamiliar. Riley. Shaw. Not a last name I recognize from donor plaques or country club gossip, which makes me trust it more.
“Mercer Hospital,” I repeat, because I need the extra second to think. “There are plenty of adoptions connected to that place. They talk about them constantly. ‘Saving children.’ That’s the line.”
“I know the press releases,” she says. “I’m interested in the ones that never make it into the glossy brochures.”
My throat goes dry. I taste copper, phantom blood from where I bit my tongue during the skid.
“Why me?” I ask. “Why this number? You don’t know who I am.”
“I know enough,” she answers. “I know you married Daniel Mercer. I know you’ve been asking about Lydia’s accident. I know you requested the original incident report from the police archive yesterday and printed it at the Harbor Glen library terminal. I know you went to see a nurse who used to work in the maternity ward, and that she’s scared enough now to call old coworkers and cry.”
The stone railing presses into the small of my back when I lean against it, needing something to hold me up.
“How do you know that?” My voice drops to a whisper.
“Because Harbor Glen is a narrow peninsula and nothing stays quiet,” she says. “Because the Mercers built a hospital and a foundation instead of a church, and everyone in town tithes with information. And because I’ve been here longer than you think.”
The wind shifts, bringing the distant tang of disinfectant from the hospital and the salt from the water up to the terrace. I pull my robe tighter with my free hand.
“Why block your number?” I ask. “You said you investigate. Isn’t this your job?”
“My job is official,” she says. “This is…adjacent. I call plenty of people from my actual phone. Not ones whose Wi-Fi is monitored by a family that donates cell repeaters and security systems to half the county.”
I glance up toward the eaves, suddenly hyper-aware of the discreet black domes tucked into the corners of the roofline, pointing toward the long drive and the cliff path. Mercer crest stickers glint faintly near the terrace door handle, a brand on the security keypad.
“I walked outside,” I say. “Off the Wi-Fi. No one’s here.”
“You have no idea who’s there,” she answers sharply. “That’s why I called. You think you’re poking at a family secret. You’re standing in the mouth of an entire machine.”
The harbor below throws back a smear of light from the hospital’s glass façade. The sign over its entrance carries the wave crest, stylized and serene, pretending to be a promise instead of a warning.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“Nothing you don’t already want,” she says. “Information. Confirmation you’re not losing your mind. A way out before you end up another accident at the bottom of a cliff or on some intake form with ‘stress-related episode’ scribbled in the margins.”
My heart stutters, replaying the spin, the tow driver’s “too many times,” Evelyn’s hand on my face.
“You don’t even know what I’ve found,” I say. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”
Her laugh is short and humorless.
“You found the trust,” she says. “Mercer Family Trust II. Second Daughter Beneficiary. You photographed it off her desk while they watched something sentimental downstairs. You dug through the police report where ‘two minors unaccounted for’ got obliterated in the scanned copy. You’ve started using the word ‘erased’ in your head and you’re trying not to say it out loud.”
My fingers go numb.
“How—”
“Because that’s where everyone in this story starts,” she cuts in. “With that trust and that accident. And because your search history is cleaner now than it was three days ago.”
I think of the hospital articles disappearing mid-click, the odd lag on the guest network, the way Daniel mentioned monitoring like it was nothing.
“You’re watching my searches?” I ask.
“Relax,” she says. “I don’t have Evelyn’s toys. I have patterns. Timestamps. An old friend who reboots library servers for fun and sends me interesting log anomalies.” She pauses. “You Googled ‘Mercer second daughter’ enough times to trip a few wires. The first time, it gets logged. The third time, it gets noticed.”
The idea that every keystroke might land in someone’s inbox makes my stomach twist.
“You said ‘second daughter,’” I say. “Do you know who she is?”
“I know there was a girl whose name belonged on that trust,” Riley answers. Her tone softens for the first time. “I know she went through that hospital. I know paperwork changed around her, then vanished. I call kids like that ‘paper orphans’—children made parentless by signatures and deletions instead of actual deaths.”
The phrase slices right through me.
“Paper orphans,” I repeat.
“When you change enough records, the state believes a child never existed, or that she belongs to someone else entirely,” Riley says. “Death certificates, amended birth records, sealed adoption files, transfer agreements disguised as charity. On paper, they’re nobody’s. That makes them easy to give away to the ‘right’ people.”
I stare down at my hand, knuckles white where they clutch the phone.
“And you think the Mercers did that,” I say.
“I know the hospital they control processed adoptions where timelines don’t match, blood types are wrong, mothers’ signatures look like they were taken under sedation,” she replies. “I know their foundation parades ‘success stories’ at the Light the Harbor boat parade every year—cute kids on yachts waving at donors—without matching state adoption records. And I know people who tried to ask questions stopped getting invited to things. A few had worse luck than that.”
Her words hang between us with the weight of things she’s not saying. Images rise: the memorial plaque near the docks, the harborside accidents the tow driver mentioned, the way Harbor Glen ranks people by which yacht they ride on and where their name falls on donor walls.
“Why now?” I ask quietly. “Why reach out to me?”
“Because you’re inside,” she says. “Because they trust you enough to leave you alone with their paperwork sometimes. Because you haven’t hit the point of no return yet.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means once they decide you’re a threat, they don’t argue,” she says. “They build a story. ‘Unstable.’ ‘Grieving.’ ‘Overwhelmed.’ They line up therapists and lawyers and friendly cops who owe favors. By the time you realize what’s happening, you’re fighting a narrative they wrote three months earlier.”
A wave slaps the rocks far below with a hollow boom. I can almost smell the spray.
“You think I’m not already there?” I murmur.
“You had a spin-out on a road that doesn’t get salted,” she says. “You walked away. That buys you time. Use it.”
My pulse roars in my ears.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask. “You said you don’t want anything I don’t already want, but you keep saying ‘use it’ like there’s a plan.”
“Meet me,” she says immediately. “Off that rock. Somewhere their staff isn’t paid to watch the door. I can’t send you documents over email and I won’t talk details over a line they might be recording.”
I glance back at the terrace door again, at my ghosted reflection and the faint glow of the hallway beyond.
“Where?” I ask. “When?”
There’s a small rustling on her end, like she’s moving, maybe ducking into a doorway.
“There’s a public dock near the town center,” she says. “Not the yacht slips. The rough side where the working boats tie up. You’ll see a memorial plaque for the Mercer accident on the railing and a bench with peeling blue paint. Tomorrow night, late. We can stand there and pretend we’re watching them test lights for the parade.”
My heart stutters at the thought of leaving the estate again so soon, but something unclenches in my chest at the idea of a physical place with her in it.
“What time?” I ask. “Nine? Ten?”
“Texting is risky,” she says. “So we don’t use it. You walk down the back road, not the manicured center, so you don’t get counted on half the town’s Ring cameras. You keep your head down when you pass the hospital so their crest on the lobby glass doesn’t feel like it’s staring back. You—”
Her voice cuts off mid-sentence.
Not fades. Stops.
For a second I think it’s the wind swallowing the sound, but then the line fills with a flat, electric hiss. No background noise, no breathing.
“Riley?” I say. “Hello?”
Nothing.
I pull the phone back and stare at the screen. The call timer freezes for a beat, still ticking at twenty-three minutes, then the display flashes and drops back to the home screen all at once.
Call failed.
I inhale sharply, lungs stinging in the cold.
I hit “recent” and tap the top entry, the generic PRIVATE CALLER label. My thumb presses the screen harder than it needs to. The phone thinks for a beat, then throws up an error message: Call cannot be completed.
I try again. Same thing.
I flip off Wi-Fi, watching the icon vanish, and try a third time on pure cell. The signal bars hold steady, four out of five, but the call never even attempts to connect. It just dies in my hand, like someone cut the cord on the other end and sealed it off.
I turn in a slow circle on the terrace, robe flapping around my calves, scanning for anything—a blinking router, a motion-activated camera light, a shadow in an upstairs window. The estate looms at my back, all glass and shingle, its lit windows reflecting my own thin figure and the phone at my ear. The security company’s plate gleams by the door handle, Mercer crest stamped neatly at the corner.
Maybe her battery died. Maybe she dropped her phone. Maybe she just panicked and hung up.
Or maybe lines get severed here when the conversation turns inconvenient.
I press the phone to my chest for a second, feeling the faint thrumming behind the plastic that matches my own racing heart.
“Riley Shaw,” I whisper into the dark, trying the name on my tongue.
The harbor wind steals the words and carries them down toward the docks where the memorial plaque waits, where lights for the boat parade string across masts like a glittering census of who matters in this town. The hospital crown on the hill glows, its glass skin throwing back the donor-funded shine. Somewhere inside, files sit sealed and screens scroll, lives reduced to numbers and letters and blank spaces.
My screen stays empty.
I tuck the phone into my robe pocket and stand there until the cold turns my fingers into stiff, aching sticks. The urge to run back inside and search “Riley Shaw Mercer Hospital” on the guest network surges up like a wave, then crashes against the memory of Riley’s voice saying, They notice what you type.
Inside, Evelyn sleeps under thick duvets and monogrammed pillowcases, dreaming whatever story she tells herself to sleep at night. Daniel lies in our bed, trusting the house around him. Out here, breath ghosting in front of my face, I hold a name, a half-plan, and a cut line.
I finally turn toward the door.
Tomorrow, I will have to decide whether to tell Daniel any of this, whether to risk searching for Riley on a device they might already be watching, whether to walk down to that blue bench alone and hope she’s real.
For now, I slide back into the warmth of the Mercer house with the chill still lodged in my bones, the echo of that abrupt click loud in my ears, and the lingering question gnawing at me: in a town where the Mercers own the wires, how do I reach the one person willing to tell me what they’ve buried in the dark?