The stairs up to Riley’s office smell like fried fish and old coffee.
The wooden steps creak under my boots, each one stiff with salt ground into the grain, and cold air snakes up from the door I just pushed through. Down below, the Harbor Glen docks stretch toward the Sound, boards slick with a thin film of ice where the sun hasn’t reached yet. A gull shrieks somewhere out over the water, sharp and impatient.
At the top of the stairs, a handmade sign hangs crooked over a glass door: SUITE 2B in peeling black letters. Someone added a sticky note underneath with a small drawn wave and a smiley face. The wave echoes the Mercer crest that used to stare down from every hallway in my life, but the lines here are rough, uneven, defiant.
I knock with my knuckles, then push the door open before Riley can answer.
“You’re late,” she says from inside, not looking up yet. “The board of directors will remember this.”
“You don’t have a board of directors,” I say, shutting the door behind me. “You have one folding table and a heater that rattles.”
“Vision,” she replies. “I have vision.”
The heater in question wheezes in the corner, exhaling dry warmth that smells faintly metallic. The office is one large room, white walls, scuffed floorboards, two mismatched desks facing each other, a leaning bookcase with binders and a printer that has seen better decades. Through the single big window, I can see the hospital up on the hill and, lower down, the peninsula’s curve of houses. The Mercer estate’s cliffside roofline cuts into the pale sky like a memory that refused to move out.
On the far wall, sheets of paper are taped in a loose grid: printed draft logos, phrases crossed out in red, a timeline drawn in blue marker. In the center of it all, one page sits higher than the rest, framed by painter’s tape.
“Is that it?” I ask. “The famous Mission Statement Wall?”
Riley swivels her chair toward me, legs tucked under her in broken-in jeans, hoodie sleeves shoved to her elbows.
“Approach with reverence,” she says. “And possibly a red pen. But no glitter pens, I have standards.”
I walk closer. The heater’s hum blends with the distant slap of water against pilings outside. At the top of the central page, in bold, sits the name she texted me last week.
SECOND TIDE PROJECT
Underneath, in smaller print, the mission statement:
To support and advocate for people whose identities were manipulated by medical, legal, or philanthropic systems, by restoring records, reclaiming stories, and forcing institutions to face what they rewrote.
My chest tightens, but not in the panicked way I’m used to. More like a string pulled taut between past and future.
“You went with the tide thing,” I say.
“Of course I did,” Riley says. “You’re the one who gave me the metaphor about the tide bringing things back in whether people want it to or not.”
I trace the words “restoring records” with my eyes. “This part is good,” I say. “Clear, not too jargon-y.”
“I tried ‘ending injustice globally and forever,’” she says, standing to join me, “but my pro bono lawyer said I should pick something we could measure without divine intervention.”
I laugh, then glance at the image next to the text. The logo is a wave, but fractured: three thick lines curling left, broken at the center where a blank gap slices through before they pick up again.
“You stole their crest,” I say.
“I borrowed from the Mercers,” she corrects. “And then I cut out the part where they pretended nothing was missing.”
She taps the blank gap with her nail.
“This is the space where people’s lives disappeared on paper,” she says. “We’re not smoothing it over. We’re naming it.”
My throat goes tight. I remember the crest embossed on hospital stationery, etched into donor walls, printed on the trust document that never meant to reach me. I remember Evelyn on the gala stage, that same abstract wave glinting on the screen behind her while she spoke about healing children.
“Good deeds on top of a sinkhole,” I say quietly.
Riley leans her shoulder into mine, a brief, solid press.
“Now it’s a warning label,” she says. “And a map.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding and nod.
“It’s perfect,” I say. “Terrifying, but perfect.”
“I prefer ‘appropriately unsettling,’” she says. “Put that on the brochure.”
We stand there for a moment, taking in the page together. The heater rattles. Someone shouts at the docks below, the words lost under the glass. The world outside keeps moving while our tiny nonprofit claim stakes its corner on a cracked wall.
I clear my throat.
“So,” I say. “What’s first on Second Tide’s mighty agenda today?”
Riley’s mouth twitches.
“Funny you should ask,” she says. “Because we have our first official intake, and I need your social-work brain before I drown in my own rage.”
She pulls up an email on her laptop, the old plastic keys clicking under her fingers. I sit on the edge of the second desk, the one we dragged in yesterday and declared mine whenever I’m here, and wrap my hands around the paper cup of coffee she shoved at me when I came in. It’s lukewarm now, but the cardboard still warms my palms.
The subject line on the email reads: Looking for any help you can give.
Riley scrolls, then stops halfway down.
“She’s twenty-four,” Riley says. “Grew up in Connecticut. Adopted from a hospital in the Mercer network the year after me. She started digging when she realized her amended birth certificate has different handwriting on the date and the hospital line.”
“Where did she hear about you?” I ask.
“Article about the gala blew up again last week,” she says. “Some reporter did one of those ‘Where are they now’ pieces and mentioned I’m consulting for the foundation and starting this. My inbox turned into a confession booth.”
The email’s paragraphs are short, thank God. No one should have to write an essay to prove their own confusion to a stranger.
My eyes catch on certain phrases: “doctor said I was lucky”; “files got lost when the hospital merged”; “my parents were told there was no way to contact anyone from before.”
My thumb presses into the coffee cup hard enough to bend the cardboard.
“Does she think there was a crime?” I ask.
Riley shrugs one shoulder.
“She thinks something doesn’t line up,” she says. “She’s not using words like ‘illegal’ yet. She just wants to know if she’s looking at a clerical error or the start of a rabbit hole.”
“Where would you start?” I ask.
“Records access,” she says. “Now that the foundation’s under independent oversight, we can request internal audits without Evelyn shredding everything in the dead of night. She signed those consent decrees in front of God and the state Attorney General.”
A short, grim satisfaction flares through me at that. I picture Evelyn on the witness stand, every muscle in her jaw working, forced to say “yes” when asked whether she authorized sealed files she had no right to bury.
“So we get her to sign our own consent,” I say, leaning forward, “then we request everything from the hospital and the agency. We cross-reference with state vital records, check for missing numbers, duplicated IDs.”
“And we keep our own copies of every response,” Riley adds. “No trusting that they’ll keep their logs clean.”
She points at a stack of blank forms on her desk.
“I wrote these with our lawyer,” she says. “Client intake, record release, safety planning. You want to tear them apart?”
I take the top sheet and skim it. Here is where the work lives now: not just in exposing one family, but in a template that can hold other people’s stories without swallowing them.
“This part,” I say, tapping a paragraph. “’Describe your concern about your identity in your own words.’ That might freeze some people. Too open.”
“So what do we ask instead?” she says.
“Offer options,” I say. “’Check all that apply: missing or sealed records, inconsistent dates, pressure or threats, unanswered questions from adoptive family.’ Then a box for anything else.”
Riley reaches for a pen, already scribbling revisions.
“This is why you’re here,” she says. “I default to ‘tell me everything.’ You remember that vulnerability is a skill, not a reflex.”
The compliment lands heavier than I expect. For a long time, my tendency to pry under polite surfaces felt like a defect, the thing that got me punished at the estate, the thing therapists in Mercer pockets labeled “hypervigilance.” In this room, it’s a job description.
“What about safety?” I ask. “We learned that lesson the hard way.”
Riley’s pen pauses.
“I added a section,” she says, and flips to the second page.
It’s there in plain print: Do you have concerns about retaliation from any individual or institution involved in your case?
Underneath, checkboxes, lines for details, a note: We believe you. We will help you create a safety plan before you contact anyone who hurt you.
My throat works around a lump.
“We didn’t have that sentence,” I say.
“No,” Riley agrees. “We had anonymous blocked calls and me kicking in my own front door to check for intruders.”
Our eyes meet. There is no nostalgia there, just a shared understanding of the price we already paid.
“This is better,” I say.
“That’s the idea,” she says. “Use everything they did wrong as a blueprint for what not to repeat.”
Outside, a siren wails briefly on the main road before fading toward the hospital. The air in here holds dust and toner and the faint acid tang of cheap coffee. No designer diffusers, no curated holiday scent. Just work.
“Do you want to call her together?” I ask.
Riley glances at the clock above the door.
“She said evenings are better,” she says. “She still lives with her parents, and she doesn’t want to scare them with random ‘identity crisis’ phone calls in the middle of the day.”
“Fair,” I say.
“But I thought we could draft an email now,” she adds. “Set expectations, let her know she’s not alone, give her a name and a number that aren’t just some faceless ‘care team.’”
“Riley Shaw, Second Daughter from the Scary Articles, at your service,” I say.
She snorts.
“You joke,” she says, “but people read those pieces and write, ‘I thought I was the only one who noticed the paperwork didn’t make sense.’”
She turns back to the laptop, fingers hovering over the keys.
“You want to dictate?” she asks. “You have a way of sounding calm without lying.”
I pull my chair closer, wheels squeaking, and we lean in over the screen together.
“Start with her name,” I say. “And then: ‘Thank you for trusting us with this. You’re not overreacting.’”
Riley types, the words appearing in neat black lines. Not “I,” not “me”—“us.” The room feels larger for it.
We keep going, line by line, building a bridge from our own past into her uncertainty.
When our coffee cups are empty and the first draft of the email sits in the outbox, ready for both of us to reread later with fresher eyes, Riley stretches her arms over her head.
“My brain is done,” she says. “Field trip?”
“Where?” I ask.
“Outside,” she says. “To confirm that the world didn’t end while we were arguing about checkbox wording.”
She shrugs into her coat and tosses mine at me. The zipper sticks halfway up, and I fumble with cold-stiffened fingers.
“Need help?” she says.
“I survived the Mercer estate,” I say. “I can handle outerwear.”
She grins and holds the door open. Cold air slaps my face as we step into the stairwell, the smell of the docks punching through the building’s stale hallway: salt, engine oil, dead leaves, and a trace of smoke from a chimney further up the hill. That ever-present note of hospital disinfectant rides the wind too, thinner down here but still there, a reminder.
At the bottom of the stairs, the dock planks gleam damp under the washed-out sky. The “Light the Harbor” parade is weeks past now, but a few boats still trail leftover string lights, bulbs unlit and rattling. The yacht slips that once served as Harbor Glen’s social seating chart look emptier this winter. Some of the biggest boats sit dark, their owners keeping low while lawsuits wind through the courts.
Up on the hill, the hospital and Mercer Foundation wing catch the pale sun. The abstract wave crest still crowns the main entrance, but next to it, a new banner hangs: a list of principles the oversight board insisted on, including “Adoptee Access” in letters big enough to read from here.
“We did that,” Riley says quietly.
“You did that,” I correct.
She shakes her head.
“We,” she repeats. “You held the microphone with me, even when it turned into a weapon.”
Wind gusts off the water, knifing through my jeans. I tuck my hands into my pockets, then pull one back out and offer it to her instead.
“So we keep going,” I say.
She looks at my hand for a beat, then slips her fingers into mine. Her palm is cold, grip firm.
“You sure?” she asks. “This isn’t exactly a low-stress hobby. We’re going to hear things that make what happened to us look almost merciful.”
The word hangs there, heavy. I swallow.
“I’m sure I don’t want to go back to pretending the story ended with the gala,” I say. “The Mercers spent decades rewriting people’s lives and calling it philanthropy. If we walk away now, that’s just a different kind of silence.”
“Your therapist would be proud,” she says.
“My therapist says I’m allowed to rest,” I reply. “She also says choosing to keep going is different from being trapped.”
Riley studies my face, then nods.
“We’ll have boundaries,” she says. “We’ll take days off. We’ll eat things that aren’t vending machine chips. We’ll remember we’re not responsible for saving every person the system hurt.”
“We’ll try,” I say.
“We’ll try,” she echoes.
A car edges down the back road that snakes along the water, bypassing the manicured main street above. That’s the route I took the night I first met Riley, back when Harbor Glen terrified me in ways I didn’t have language for. Now the road looks like what it actually is: one of many ways through this place.
“What about you?” I ask. “Second Daughter of the Mercer Trust. Are you okay with your name being attached to this forever?”
She exhales through her nose, watching her breath cloud white.
“I was going to spend my whole life digging into this kind of thing anyway,” she says. “At least now I get to do it in the open. And in my own name, not the one Evelyn tried to bury me with.”
“Do you ever wish you hadn’t found out?” I ask.
She considers, gaze shifting to the hospital crest on the hill, then back to the water.
“Sometimes I wish the people who raised me had lived,” she says. “I wish Janie’s mom from that foster house had been the one to put my name on a birth certificate. But do I wish I’d stayed in the dark about them, about you, about what the Mercers did?” She shakes her head. “No. I’d rather live with stitches than with a story missing its center.”
My fingers tighten around hers.
“Stitches hold things together,” I say. “Scars prove they healed.”
“Look at you, turning into a motivational poster,” she teases.
“I’ll embroider it on a throw pillow for the waiting room,” I say.
“Joke’s on you,” she replies. “We can’t afford a waiting room yet.”
We fall into step along the dock, our joined hands swinging between us. Gulls wheel overhead, crying out, their bodies bright against the gray sky. The wind cuts through my coat, but underneath the cold there’s a quiet steadiness. I know where my body ends and the air begins. I know which stories belong to me.
Behind us, the office window glows faintly with the light we forgot to switch off. Second Tide Project. The words on the wall are still wet in the world, but they exist. They’re not a secret.
Up the hill, the hospital looms, full of lives that started and ended under that crest. Court dates and consent decrees will keep grinding forward. Evelyn’s lawyers will keep appealing. Donors will keep recalculating their tax strategies. None of that stops the tide from rolling in and out, carrying records and memories and brave, shaky emails to our inbox.
“So,” Riley says, lifting her chin into the wind. “What does Hannah Cole-Mercer do next, now that the big bad has been publicly declawed?”
I taste the name on my tongue. Cole-Mercer. No longer a question mark, not quite a hyphen I’m ready to sand down.
“She goes back to work at the clinic,” I say. “She pays her rent. She keeps an eye on the kids whose parents think the hospital is the only place to turn. And on weekends, she walks down to a shabby office above the docks to help her stubborn, brilliant friend reinvent accountability.”
“Friend,” Riley repeats, a small smile curving her mouth. “Not sister?”
I let that hang between us for a moment.
“I think ‘friend’ is the bigger word, in our case,” I say. “We didn’t inherit this. We chose it.”
Her smile widens.
“Good answer,” she says. “Though I reserve the right to call you my sister when it annoys people.”
“Deal,” I say.
The wind gusts again, shoving us forward along the dock. We don’t stop. We don’t turn back to check the office lock or the hospital silhouette. We keep walking, hand in hand, along the edge of the water that watched everything and swallowed nothing permanently.
The second daughter’s future is not a secret trust clause anymore, or a name inked over on a faded file. It’s a path on a narrow peninsula, two sets of footprints on wet boards, moving away from a house on a cliff and toward a story we write in our own handwriting, one record release and one reclaimed life at a time.