When I step back into the bedroom, the warmth hits my skin but doesn’t make it past the surface.
The room smells like linen spray and Daniel’s shampoo, faint citrus over the deeper salt tang that seeps in through the window seals. The harbor lights glow beyond the glass, a scattered constellation over the narrow tongue of water, and up on the hill the hospital throws off its own sterile halo. In here, the only light comes from the bedside lamp and the blinking green of the charger on his nightstand, the Mercer crest printed in tiny silver waves on the plastic.
Daniel pushes himself up on one elbow when the door clicks.
“Hey,” he says, voice raspy with sleep. “Where did you go? You were gone a while.”
I close the door carefully and lean my back against it for a second, steadying myself. The chill from the terrace clings to my robe. My toes are numb.
“Outside,” I say. “I needed air.”
His gaze flicks automatically to my shoulder, to the faint bruise peeking above the robe where the seat belt caught me earlier. His jaw tightens.
“After today?” He shakes his head, pushing hair off his forehead. “Maybe stay away from things involving physics and momentum for a minute.”
Joking. That’s his first instinct. I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping. My hands feel clumsy, so I knot my robe belt tighter.
“Someone called,” I tell him. “Blocked number again.”
That gets his full attention. He straightens, the joking gone.
“Just now?” he asks. “Same as before?”
“Yes.” My throat feels raw from the cold air and the rush of words I’m about to spill. “Only this time she didn’t hang up. She talked.”
His eyes sharpen.
“She,” he says slowly. “You talked to the person harassing my mother and you didn’t wake me up?”
“She isn’t harassing your mother,” I say. “She’s investigating your family’s hospital.”
For one suspended heartbeat I expect him to go pale, to feel the ground tilt with me, to ask the questions forming a knot at the base of my skull. Instead his mouth flattens into a hard line.
“Hannah,” he says, dragging my name out in a warning.
“Her name is Riley Shaw,” I say quickly, before his next word can hit. “She said she works with a child-advocacy nonprofit and she’s looking into irregular adoptions at Mercer Hospital. She knew about the trust. The second daughter one. She knew I went to the library. She knew about Mrs. Donnelly.”
The lines around his eyes deepen. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands, the floorboard near his side giving a soft creak.
“She ‘knew’?” he repeats. “How? Because you told her? Because she’s been reading your browser history? Listening in on your calls? That’s not reassuring, Hannah, that’s stalking.”
I stand too, because looking up at him like this from the bed makes me feel smaller than I already do.
“She knew the wording on the trust,” I say. “Mercer Family Trust II. Second Daughter Beneficiary. She knew the phrase ‘two minors unaccounted for’ was in the original incident report and then vanished in the scanned copy. She called the kids ‘paper orphans’—children wiped off documents so they’re easier to move around.”
His shoulders hunch, his hands bracing on his hips. He looks toward the window, toward the harbor and the hospital light, not at me.
“So she’s been digging up whatever scraps she can find, then feeding them back to you in a spooky voice,” he says. “Congratulations, she knows how to Google and she has a flair for branding.”
“Daniel.” I hear my own voice shake and hate it. “She knew about Mrs. Donnelly. She said the nurse is calling old coworkers and crying because I went to see her. That’s not in any database. That’s here, in this town.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” he snaps. “You think Harbor Glen doesn’t gossip? This place is a peninsula, not a city. The Foundation sponsors half the town’s Christmas decorations. You sneeze at the café and it hits the donor wall by tomorrow.”
He paces a tight line between the bed and the window, bare feet whispering over the rug. Outside, a horn bleats from the harbor, long and low.
“Daniel, listen,” I say. I move into his path so he has to stop. “She warned me. She said once your family decides someone’s a threat, they don’t argue, they build a story. ‘Unstable.’ ‘Overwhelmed.’ She said they line up therapists and lawyers and friendly cops so by the time you realize what’s happening, the narrative is already written.”
He laughs, sharp and disbelieving.
“And you just believed her,” he says. “This random woman who calls from a blocked number and feeds you paranoid garbage about my family? You took her word over mine. Over my mother’s.”
The words land like slaps.
“You nearly died on that road today,” I say. “Your mother called those back roads ‘treacherous for the unprepared’ days before you ‘recommended’ one to me and it turned into a skid right toward an embankment. Maybe I’m allowed to consider the possibility that someone is steering the narrative.”
His head snaps back to me.
“Do you hear yourself?” he demands. “A patch of black ice and now you’re implying my mother tried to kill you?”
“I didn’t say that,” I answer, though the image of the guardrail’s scraped paint flashes bright in my mind. “I’m saying too many things cluster around your family for me to trust coincidence anymore. A secret trust. An erased line in a police report. Mrs. Donnelly terrified. Now an investigator who knows more about my life than she should.”
“A nutcase,” he says flatly. “That’s what she is. A nutcase with a theory who latched onto my mother years ago and won’t let go because she needs a villain for her little hero narrative.”
The word nutcase stings, not because he uses it, but because he throws it over both our heads, trying to cover everything.
“You don’t even know her,” I say.
“I know the type,” he shoots back. “People who hate power on principle. They see a foundation that literally funds the hospital’s NICU and they spin that into some evil scheme because real good is too boring for them. They don’t care about the babies my mother helped save, the families whose bills she paid, the Light the Harbor parade she started so the whole community could—”
“So the whole community could watch who rides on which yacht,” I cut in. “So everyone knows who owes who. So your crest can glow on the side of every boat like a brand.”
His face flushes, color rising up his neck into his cheeks.
“There it is,” he says softly. “You don’t just think she did something wrong. You think everything she’s ever done is a lie.”
“I think good deeds don’t cancel out stolen lives,” I say. My heart pounds so hard I feel it in my teeth. “Riley’s work isn’t about one woman. It’s about kids turned into paperwork. If your mother’s clean, why are records missing? Why are nurses scared? Why does someone like Riley need a blocked number to warn me?”
Silence stretches in the space between us. In the distance, I hear the faint rumble of a truck on the road that snakes along the cliffs, the one residents use when they want to slip around town without being seen on Main Street.
Daniel drags both hands through his hair, palms scraping along his scalp.
“You are trying to prove she’s a monster,” he says quietly. “That’s what this is. You started with a weird line on a trust document and now every single thing my family does, you twist into proof. Boat parades, donor walls, even weather.”
“I’m trying to prove I’m not crazy,” I answer. My voice comes out hoarse. “That’s what this is for me. My reality keeps getting rewritten in this house. Riley is the first person who has ever said out loud that maybe the story is wrong.”
“By telling you my mother is building a conspiracy out of therapists and cops?” His eyes glitter. “Do you understand what that sounds like?”
“Like she’s seen it before,” I say.
He throws his hands up and turns his back on me, facing the window. His reflection looks thin and stretched in the glass, harbor lights scattered across his chest.
“You know what this sounds like to me?” he says. “It sounds like my wife is getting groomed by someone who hates my family and is using her to get access. She feeds you just enough truth to hook you—old reports, scared nurses—and then she gets you to do the risky parts. Sneaking into offices. Digging into sealed files. Turning your marriage into collateral damage.”
The word groomed lands in my gut with a sick weight.
“She asked to meet me in town,” I admit. The words are barely more than breath. “At the public docks, near the mercer accident plaque. She wanted to show me things in person.”
He whirls.
“She what?”
“She said she wouldn’t send documents over email,” I go on. “She doesn’t trust our Wi-Fi. She wanted to stand where she could point at the hospital and the foundation and explain.”
His laugh this time is high and thin.
“Of course she did,” he says. “That’s how this works. She scares you with half-truths, then isolates you from anyone who might talk you down—me, my mom, any lawyer with a functioning brain—and then she gets you alone in some dark corner of the docks. Have you walked down there at night? Half those working boats don’t even have security cameras. If she pushed you into the water, people would put a wreath on that plaque and say the peninsula claimed another one.”
The image rushes up: the black water, the metal plaque, the cold closing over my head. My knees wobble for a second.
“She warned me about accidents,” I say. “She told me you don’t argue, you build a story.”
“We,” he corrects sharply. “We. You married me, remember? Or does that part get erased too when it’s inconvenient for your investigator friend?”
I flinch.
“Daniel, this isn’t me versus you,” I say. “This is about—”
“My mother,” he snaps. “It’s always about my mother. You think I don’t see that? You want to pick at Lydia’s death, at the hospital, at every mercy my parents ever extended to anyone who walked through those doors, and then you tell yourself it’s about ‘truth’ so you can still think you’re the good one.”
“I never said I was the good one,” I reply. “I said I can’t live on top of lies.”
His chest rises and falls in fast shallow bursts. For a second, I see something raw behind his eyes, a flash of the boy who lost his sister and clung to the story he was given because the alternative was falling apart.
“I am asking you,” he says, voice low and intense, “to cut contact with this woman. Delete her number. Block whatever strange app she’s calling you through. Tell me you’ll do that, and we can figure out the rest. I can talk to my parents about the trust. We can ask questions together, through channels that don’t involve unhinged strangers and trips to the docks.”
“Through channels your mother controls,” I say.
“Through channels that aren’t going to get you killed or locked in a psych ward,” he shoots back.
The word psych makes the air go thin. I picture Evelyn’s cool eyes, the therapist she could summon with one call, the way this town bows when the Mercers frown.
“If I say yes,” I ask quietly, “does that make me safe? Or just obedient?”
His mouth opens, then shuts again. He looks away, toward the framed photograph of last year’s Light the Harbor parade on the wall: boats lit up like floating mansions, the Mercer crest projected onto a sail in glowing white.
“I can’t do this,” he says finally. “Not like this. Not tonight.”
He moves to the closet, muscles stiff, and pulls out an extra pillow and a folded blanket. The sight hits me harder than any of his words.
“What are you doing?” I ask, even though my body already understands.
“I’m giving us space before we say something we can’t walk back,” he says. “I’m going to the other room down the hall.”
“The other room,” I repeat. The syllables taste like dust.
He pauses at the door, arms full of borrowed comfort, and looks back at me. For a moment, I think he might soften, might come back and sit on the edge of the bed and admit he’s scared too.
“Please don’t meet her,” he says instead. “For your sake. For mine. Don’t let some stranger turn you against the only family you have left.”
The only family I have left.
He leaves before I can answer, the door closing with a gentle, decisive click. His footsteps fade down the polished hallway, swallowed by the big, quiet house.
I stand there in the middle of the room, the imprint of his last sentence pressing into my skin. Outside, the harbor wind smears condensation across the glass. The air smells faintly of the hospital on the hill, disinfectant and boiled coffee drifting up the slope, mingling with woodsmoke from the town and the salt rising off the water.
Our bed looks bigger without him. I sit on the edge again and lay my phone beside me, screen dark. Riley’s blocked-number entry sits at the top of my recent list, a ghost record I can’t call back, can’t delete without feeling like I’m erasing something vital.
Somewhere down the hall, a door opens and shuts softly. A mattress creaks. The physical distance clicks into place, matching the fault line running through my chest.
In the morning, Daniel will wake up in another room, in another version of this marriage. He might decide to tell his mother about Riley, about the docks, about my refusal to accept the story as written. He might decide protecting his family means protecting them from me.
I slide under the covers and stare at the ceiling, tracing the faint shadows of the window mullions overhead. The hospital light glows stubbornly through the glass, a white glare on the edge of my vision.
Between one breath and the next, I realize the choice is no longer whether I trust Riley. It’s whether I go to meet her knowing my own husband might be working, consciously or not, to keep me from ever hearing what she has to say.