I take the back road into town instead of the manicured main drag, my car humming along the narrow strip that locals use to dodge the country club traffic. The Sound flashes silver through bare trees to my right, and up on the hill the hospital’s glass wing catches the light, its Mercer crest glinting faintly like a watermark on the skyline. Salt rides the air even with the windows up, threaded with woodsmoke and that sharp, clean sting that always makes me think of sterilized instruments and polished donor walls.
Daniel’s address leads me to a squat brick building a few blocks from the docks, tucked behind a laundromat and a deli with a faded “Best Clam Chowder” sign. The building smells like dust, cooking oil, and cheap detergent when I step inside. No doorman. No heated marble lobby. Just chipped mailboxes and a corkboard with community notices curling at the corners.
His name is on a slip of paper shoved into a plastic slot: DANIEL MERCER, written in his own cramped handwriting. No engraved plate, no crest. I touch the edge of the paper, then climb the stairs, the sound of my boots echoing up the narrow stairwell.
He opens the door before I can knock twice.
“Hey,” he says.
He looks smaller without the estate around him, but not diminished. Just…contained. He’s wearing jeans and a navy sweatshirt with a nonprofit logo I don’t recognize, sleeves shoved up his forearms. There’s stubble on his jaw, and his hair is pushed back like he ran a hand through it five times and gave up on gel entirely.
“Hi,” I answer.
We stand in the doorway for a heartbeat too long, some old script between us rustling, looking for its place. Then he steps back.
“Come in,” he says. “Sorry about the smell. The guy downstairs fries everything.”
I walk in and my chest tightens for reasons that have nothing to do with grease.
The living room is small and bright, sun filtering through cheap blinds that rattle when I brush past them. A secondhand couch slumps against one wall, upholstery faded where someone else’s family sat for years before him. A coffee table with mismatched legs holds a neat stack of legal folders, a chipped mug ringed with tea, and a small potted plant making a brave effort in a plastic grocery store pot.
The rug is a thin woven thing from a discount store, the kind that doesn’t even pretend to be heirloom quality. The air smells like coffee, laundry soap, and faint tomato sauce, instead of lemon polish and beeswax and the ever-present, curated nothingness of the estate.
“You can sit,” he says, gesturing to the couch. “It’s sturdier than it looks.”
“That’s reassuring,” I say, easing down anyway.
The cushions sag, but they hold. A far cry from the antique settee where Evelyn once perched with a therapist’s card between two fingers like a lifeline and a leash. Here, my feet actually touch the floor without needing to calculate how much I’m creasing some priceless fabric.
“Do you want coffee?” he asks. “Or tea? I have…tea-like things.”
“Coffee’s good,” I say.
He disappears into the tiny kitchen. From the couch, I can see most of it: laminate countertops, a refrigerator plastered with a jumble of magnet letters and a flyer for a community legal clinic. No caterer schedules, no holiday menu plans, no staff roster. The mug cabinet door sticks when he opens it, emitting a squeak instead of a glide.
“Milk?” he calls.
“Black,” I answer.
While he pours, I let my eyes roam.
His world fits in this room: a stack of library books on nonprofit management and trauma-informed care; a printout of a budget tacked to the wall with tape, numbers scrawled in different colors; an overstuffed backpack leaning near a small desk with a cheap laptop. No Mercer crest in sight.
Above the desk hangs a framed photo I recognize: the three of us at some long-ago fundraiser, pre-scandal, me in a dress that cost more than three months’ rent on this place, Daniel in a suit that fit too easily, Riley off to the side, half-turned away from the camera, her eyes already scanning for exits even back then.
Daniel comes back with two mismatched mugs and sets one in front of me. Mine says “WORLD’S OKAYEST BOSS” in chipped blue letters.
“Let me guess,” I say. “Thrift store?”
“Clearing out the remains of a startup that didn’t make it,” he says. “I figured it fit my new job description.”
“You’re a boss?” I ask.
“Of two people and a very angry copier,” he says. “I’m working with Harbor Families Now, remember? The little nonprofit that kept trying to get meetings with the foundation.”
I remember the name; Evelyn used to refer to them as “that scrappy group that doesn’t understand scale.”
“They hired you?” I ask.
“Technically, I begged them to consider me,” he says. “Then they made me sit through a board grilling that made your cross-examination look like a tea party. They wanted to know every detail of what I knew and when I knew it.”
He drops onto the other end of the couch, giving me a safe amount of space. The cushion dips under his weight, tilting me toward him just a fraction.
“And they still brought you on,” I say.
“I told them I could talk donors down from the Mercer myth,” he says. “And that they should pay me less than I asked for, because frankly, restitution feels overdue.”
That hits harder than I expect. I wrap my hands around the mug, letting the heat seep into my skin.
“How low are we talking?” I ask.
He blows out a breath.
“Let’s put it this way,” he says. “I know what rent costs now. And I know there’s a difference between a safety net and a whiteout.”
“A whiteout?” I ask.
“When you have so much money you can erase consequences,” he says. “Write over them. Start again without ever apologizing.”
The words hang between us, heavier than the steam from our coffee.
“There are lawsuits,” I say quietly. “The donors. Staff. Former patients.”
He nods.
“My inbox is a war zone,” he says. “Class actions, personal suits, deposition requests. Some people are furious that I didn’t blow the whistle sooner. Others think I’m on their side now and want me to testify against everyone I ever loved. Both groups have a point.”
A siren wails faintly outside, heading toward the hill. Somewhere beneath it, the steady hush of the Sound presses against Harbor Glen’s narrow edges, like water testing the seams of an old boat.
I take a sip of coffee. It’s too strong, slightly bitter, but it tastes real.
“I didn’t bring a settlement offer,” I say after a moment. “Or papers. My lawyer has drafts ready, but I told her I needed to see where you are before I decide if I’m signing anything.”
His shoulders tense, then drop again.
“That’s fair,” he says. “I should tell you where I am, then.”
He sets his mug down, aligning it carefully with the ring on the table.
“I’m in therapy,” he says. “For real this time. My therapist doesn’t work for anyone you’ve met. She doesn’t even live in Harbor Glen. She does sessions over video in a room with ugly curtains, and she interrupts me constantly.”
I blink.
“You chose this?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Nobody booked it for me. I made the call. I told her my last therapist once took direction from my mother about which topics were ‘productive.’ She swore at the screen and then asked me why I stayed.”
I let out a short breath that might be a laugh.
“What did you say?” I ask.
He rubs a hand over his face, thumb pressing into the corner of one eye.
“I said loyalties are easier than grief,” he answers. “That if I kept defending my mother, I didn’t have to look at who Lydia really was or what she lost. Or what Riley did. Or you.”
My throat tightens.
“Your therapist sounds…intense,” I say.
“She keeps calling what I did ‘complicity wrapped in filial duty,’” he says dryly. “Her words, not mine. She also uses the phrase ‘moral hangover’ a lot.”
I roll the phrase around in my mind. It fits too well.
“What do you do in therapy?” I ask quietly.
“Mostly, I talk,” he says. “About Lydia. About growing up on that cliff thinking the water only took what it wanted and that my job was to keep my mother from falling apart. About how I listened to you and still chose her, because the story she told made my world feel stable.”
He looks up, meets my eyes, and doesn’t look away.
“And we talk about how I hurt you,” he adds. “Not in vague terms. In specific scenes. The hot chocolate fight. The staircase. The night I showed up at the motel and asked you to keep it private. She won’t let me skip past any of it.”
My fingers clench on the mug until my knuckles ache. The room hums with refrigerator noise and the faint thud of someone’s music through the wall.
“Does it help?” I ask.
“It hurts,” he says. “In a way that feels…right. Like I’ve been doing numbing shots for years and now the feeling is coming back, and it’s not pleasant, but at least it belongs to me.”
A stubborn part of me wants to say, Where was this version of you when I was begging for help? Another part is just tired enough to be grateful he’s saying it at all.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he says. “I know that’s not how this works. I just needed you to know I’m not pretending it was all Evelyn anymore.”
“She didn’t loosen the carpet by herself,” I say.
“No,” he agrees quietly. “She didn’t.”
We sit with that.
A gull calls outside, the sound cutting through the muffled traffic. The apartment doesn’t smell like disinfectant at all now, only coffee and the faint tang of tomato sauce from whatever he had for lunch.
“Do you miss it?” I ask suddenly. “The estate. The staff. The illusion that you could fix everything with a donation and a speech.”
He leans back, head thumping against the wall.
“I miss parts,” he says. “The ocean right outside the glass. Having my family in one place, even under glass. I miss not checking my bank balance before I buy groceries. But when I walk past those donor walls now, all I see are names built on stories like Riley’s.”
“And mine,” I say.
“And yours,” he echoes.
We are both quiet for a long moment.
“My lawyer keeps asking about the divorce,” I say. “She wants to know what I want. I keep telling her I don’t know yet, and she keeps reminding me that not knowing is its own decision.”
“Mine told me that too,” he says. “That if I loved you, I should let you go. That staying married might feel like staying tied to the worst parts of your life.”
“What do you think?” I ask.
He drags his gaze back to me.
“I think I still love you,” he says. “And I think love isn’t the only ingredient we need anymore. We would have to build an entirely different marriage than the one we had. No Mercer money. No default to my comfort. No pretending the past didn’t happen every time we sit across from each other.”
My heart knocks against my ribs. The couch feels smaller, the distance between us suddenly crowded with everything unsaid.
“That’s a lot of work,” I say.
“Yeah,” he replies. “Which is why I don’t trust myself to promise it in one conversation. I’m barely competent at managing the copier right now.”
I huff out a laugh that turns into something softer.
“I don’t know what I want either,” I admit. “Some days I want to sign the papers and send you a polite text. Other days I imagine us in some tiny apartment like this, arguing over who forgot to buy toilet paper and then going to Riley’s thing together, whatever her ‘thing’ ends up being.”
His mouth curves.
“She’s going to have a thing,” he says. “Probably more than one. She scares me a little.”
“Good,” I say. “She scares me in the right direction.”
He nods, then looks at his hands.
“What if we don’t decide today?” he asks. “What if we give ourselves a season? Keep living separately. Keep doing our own work. See each other on purpose sometimes, not because a lawyer scheduled us. We can revisit the divorce papers after the next court milestone.”
“You’re suggesting a cooling-off period,” I say.
“I’m suggesting a period where we stop letting everyone else define our timeline,” he says. “For once, no Mercers, no donors, no judges. Just us, asking whether we have something worth rebuilding.”
It’s strange how radical that sounds. Ordinary, and radical.
“What does that look like?” I ask. “Practically.”
“You keep your place,” he says. “I keep mine. We meet for coffee like this, or dinner, or to tag-team with Riley when she asks. We don’t sleep together by default. We don’t make future plans we haven’t earned yet. Maybe we do some joint sessions with our therapists down the line, if that feels right.”
“And if, at the end of that, we decide to divorce?” I ask.
He swallows.
“Then we do it with our eyes open,” he says. “Not as a weapon. As a boundary. And I will sign anything you need to feel free.”
The word free pulses through me.
“And if we don’t?” I ask, quieter.
He looks at me like he’s afraid to breathe wrong.
“Then we start over,” he says. “Hannah Cole and Daniel Mercer, no crest, no estate, no automatic loyalty to anyone except the people actually in the room.”
A radiator clanks somewhere in the building, heat finally kicking on. Warm air trickles across my ankles.
“I can live with not deciding today,” I say slowly. “I can live with knowing I have an exit that isn’t a balcony railing or a back road in black ice.”
“You always should have,” he says.
We both stare at the coffee table, at the rings on the cheap wood, at the plant reaching for a sun that barely shows up this time of year.
“We should tell the lawyers,” I say. “Ask them to hold off. They’re going to hate the ambiguity.”
“They’ll survive,” he says. “People have survived worse.”
That lands with a weight that includes Riley, the other paper orphans, Lydia. The whole twisted line of lives that were rearranged so the Mercers could feel generous.
I set my mug down and stand. My legs tingle from sitting too long.
“I should go,” I say. “Riley and I have a meeting tomorrow about the new oversight board. She wants to practice not swearing at bureaucrats.”
“Brave goal,” he says, standing too.
We face each other, half a couch between us. We’ve hugged in this life a hundred times, kissed, slept tangled for hours. Now, my arms hang at my sides, heavy with choice.
“Thank you for coming,” he says. “You didn’t have to.”
“You didn’t have to be this honest,” I answer. “We’re both out of practice doing the harder thing.”
He smiles, small and crooked.
“Maybe that’s the new rule,” he says. “No more easy lies. Only hard truths, even when they wreck the mood.”
“That’s a terrible rule for romance,” I say.
“Maybe a good one for whatever we’re trying to be,” he replies.
I nod. He reaches for the door, then hesitates.
“Can I ask you one selfish question?” he says.
There’s the micro-hook; my pulse jumps.
“One,” I say.
“When you picture your life five years from now,” he asks, “do you ever see me in the frame? Not as a Mercer. Just…me.”
The honest answer rises before I can soften it.
“Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes you’re at my table, passing the potatoes. Sometimes you’re a name in my phone I scroll past fondly. I don’t know yet which version is kinder to either of us.”
He exhales, something like relief and sorrow braided together.
“That’s more than I deserve,” he says.
“Probably,” I reply. “But I’m done letting your mother decide what you deserve. Or what I do.”
I open the door. The hallway smells like detergent and somebody’s microwave dinner. The Sound’s distant hush slips in through the cracked stairwell window, reminding me that Harbor Glen is bigger than any crest welded to a donor wall.
“I’ll call you after the next hearing,” I say. “We can schedule coffee. Or a fight. Or both.”
“Looking forward to it,” he says, and I believe the part of him that means it.
I step into the hall and pull the door shut behind me, leaving Daniel in his small, honest apartment and carrying with me a future that is finally not preprinted on Mercer stationery. The staircase bends downward toward the street, toward the hospital on the hill and the restructured foundation waiting in the wings, and I start walking, not yet sure whether I’m heading toward a shared life or a clean break—only that this time, the decision will be mine to make.