The phone won’t stop buzzing. It skitters across the table like a living thing and knocks into a mug that still smells of lemon rind and stale coffee. I lunge to stop the slide, thumb the screen to life, and watch a red tide of notifications pour in.
HarborWatch: Hidden granddaughter in Graypoint?
DockTalk: Bell-ringers say legacy has a heartbeat.
Anonymous DM: You’re a liar or a hero—pick one.
I set the phone down and it vibrates against my palm anyway, a trapped fish fighting air. The window rattles with rain and the harbor beyond it curves into the dark, a crescent scar funnelling the weather toward Widow’s Teeth. Even from here I hear the far-off rush where the shoal chews water to foam. The smell in my apartment is kelp and printer toner—cut sheets cooling on the desk—and the faint lemon oil I can’t scrub out of the Sea Ledger key fob.
“Mute,” I say, uselessly, because muting a town is not a feature. I turn on Do Not Disturb and the phone ignores it for calls marked Emergency Bypass. My name trends—my name, not the foundation’s—and a montage of old photos scrolls past that I never gave the internet: gala shoulders, a laughing profile at Harborlight, a blurry, younger me ringing the brass ship’s bell at Sea Ledger for a capital campaign. Donations and deaths, one tone. Online, strangers argue about which it should be.
I pace. I count steps and breathing like stacking briefs—four in, six out—until the next buzz jaws through my pocket. A text from an unknown number flashes and then deletes itself: You can’t keep her safe. My throat tightens; my tongue tastes tin. I lock the screen and wedge the phone under a legal pad like weight alone can smother it.
Knuckles rap the door in a rhythm that pretends to be polite. I stop mid-breath. The rap repeats, followed by a doorbell press that hangs a single note in the air. I slide the chain aside but not the deadbolt, and look through the peephole at rain-blurred navy wool and an umbrella shiny as a beetle shell. The man holds a white envelope the thickness of a paperback, the edges ribboned with those little plastic bindings courts love.
“Ms. Ellison,” he says through the door, voice flattened by wood. “Service of process. Ex parte motion and temporary restraining order.”
I open just enough to take the envelope. The paper is cold and damp at the corners; ink bleeds a little and leaves the smell of toner alive on my fingers. The heading stares up with immaculate serif certainty: Vivienne Ellison, Movant, v. Mara Ellison, Respondent. Emergency Motion to Seal and for a Gag Order Pending Hearing. Attached affidavits stack like an opinion already written.
“You’re quick,” I say.
“We’re thorough,” he says. He doesn’t meet my eyes. He doesn’t need to.
“On whose clock?” I ask, because I can’t help myself.
“The court’s,” he says, and he is gone, umbrella rattling off into the rain, footsteps absorbed by the hallway carpet like secrets into money.
I slide down the door until my back hits the wood. The envelope is heavy on my knees. The apartment’s heat clicks on and carries the smell of wet wool deeper into the room, mixing with kelp and paper. Widow’s Teeth roars a little louder in my head.
I didn’t start the rumor. I know the math: gossip fills any vacuum and we left one where a granddaughter could live or choke. Protecting family can mean holding back, or it can mean laying out the ledger page by page so the bloodstains make a pattern. Both destroy something. My fingers worry the corner of the envelope until the plastic ring bites.
The phone vibrates against the legal pad again, then again, a stubborn heartbeat. I yank it free and answer the only name that matters right now besides Tamsin’s.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Outside,” Jonah says. “Don’t open until you see me.”
I crack the curtain. He stands on the stoop, hat brim dripping, jacket dark with rain. He has that look he gets when the water is messy and the truth is messier, a radio-station calm thrown over a riptide.
I let him in and deadbolt behind us. He shakes rain off the hat over the mat and the smell of wet canvas hits anecdotal memories: fishermen hired off-season to guard old-line estates; Jonah carrying a mic and a promise up those same steps when we were twenty and stupid and thought stories behaved.
“You’ve seen it,” I say.
“I’ve seen it, I’ve heard it, I’ve turned off three notifications and two source pings,” he says. He looks at the envelope. “They filed.”
“They filed while the thread still warmed up,” I say. “Vivienne moves faster than grief.”
He peels off one glove with his teeth, then the other, drops both into his hat. “I need to say something before we triage the filing.”
“Say it.”
He puts both hands on the back of a chair and stares at the wood grain—not at me, not at the glass, at a safe geography. “I have a tipster who watches the donors’ kids. She’s good, she’s not reckless, and she’s angry at the way money makes everything look like weather. I didn’t give her names; I gave her systems. I said bereavement grant on background months ago, and I said the heir is safer unclaimed last week like a thesis problem with no variables. She might have tied a knot.”
The apartment hums with the heater and the harbor and a new frequency that lives in my teeth. I place the envelope on the table very carefully because I want to throw it.
“You seeded a rumor,” I say, keeping my voice level enough to cut.
“I seeded a question,” he says. “It grew teeth.”
“Teeth live in water,” I say. “We live on the shore. We pretend those are different countries.”
He flinches once, then sets his jaw. “Tell me how to fix it.”
“You can’t unpost a coastline.” I tap the envelope. “But you can help me answer this without swallowing the girl the rumor wants to eat.”
I unpick the binding and lay the motion open. The paper rasp sounds like sand under a door. Vivienne’s affidavit is surgical, all dignity and protection of minors and donors chilled. She quotes my court filing out of context: “an unnamed juvenile,” “alleged bracelet irregularities,” “public speculation fostered by Respondent’s cohort.” She requests a gag to “prevent irreparable reputational harm and ensure a fair process.” She attaches comments from DockTalk and HarborWatch like they are my mouth.
“She’s building a wall and asking the court to bless the mortar,” I say.
“She thinks secrecy is a car seat,” he says. “Straps tight, and if you scream, that’s proof it works.”
I pull my notepad toward me and write the only heading that matters: Protect the Child; Preserve the Record. My pen scratches; the scratch steadies me. I list what the court can hold without releasing: Beatrice’s logs (under seal), the sediment report (public; it names water, not people), courier slips (public; no minors named), the existence—not the identity—of a dependent beneficiary. I underline: narrow redactions, not blackout tar.
The phone buzzes again, a sheaf of messages stacking: Board Member’s Wife (we’re not friends; she calls when storms break to ask if she should perform empathy), Ethan (no text, just three dots that vanish), Nora (a skull emoji, then: I can babysit boxes). I reply to Nora: You never babysit; you audit. She sends back a bee, the fluorescent hum in glyph form.
Jonah leans in. “We need a sentence,” he says. “One sentence we can say that doesn’t feed the beast.”
“Try this,” I say. “We will protect minors’ privacy while presenting evidence of systemic misconduct to the court in the manner the law permits.”
He repeats it and the line fits his mouth like a key. “Good. Legal spine, human face.” He reaches for my pen. “Add: We ask our neighbors to hold their conjectures the way they’d hold a door in a storm: tight, and with care.”
I nod once. I want to be angry longer. The anger burns clean and gives me energy. But the room needs arithmetic now, not fire.
“Call your tipster,” I say. “Tell her this rumor endangers a minor and a case and my life expectancy if I run into Vivienne without coffee.”
He grimaces. “She’s not answering me tonight. Biggest accounts never do when a thread is hot; they like the tailwind.”
“Text her anyway.” I toss him my phone and he catches it by reflex. “Use mine. She’ll read a number she thinks is a lawyer’s daughter before she reads a journalist’s.”
He swallows, nods, and starts to type. His fingers move fast, sure. I listen to the soft clicking and let my own hands find the filing calendar, the judge’s standing order, the cases where gag orders wore masks as guardians. Mercy and justice both talk in citations; only outcomes tell me which was which.
The heater kicks off. Quiet pours in and, with it, the faint ring from the harbor—a buoy or the brass bell from Sea Ledger in my head, I can’t tell which. Donations and deaths. Words and gags. I close my eyes and picture the boxes in Foundation Storage labeled Bereavement Kits and the courier slips tucked under blue bands. Institutionalized hush isn’t an allegation; it’s inventory.
“You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Jonah says without looking up.
“That the rumor is oxygen and the motion is a lid,” I say. “That if we let Vivienne clamp the pot, the steam cooks the only witness who already bled to speak.”
He nods once, then holds up my phone. “Sent.”
“What did you say?”
“I said: You’re putting a kid on a cutting board to carve a bigger story. Back off. Then I added your sentence. Lawyers like sentences more than threats.”
I half-smile because I can’t quite stop being furious, and I can’t quite stop loving the way he makes the worst thing survivable with a joke that knows it’s not funny. I pull the motion back toward me and start drafting an opposition in the margins: We consent to protective measures narrowly tailored to privacy interests; we oppose prior restraint that shields adult misconduct from scrutiny.
“What’s the move with Vivienne?” he asks.
“Beat her to the judge with a proposed order that redacts the child and anonymizes dates without muzzling the machine,” I say. “Then call it guardian ad litem and watch her choke on the optics.”
He whistles under his breath. “You’ve gone from overwhelmed to weaponized in forty minutes.”
“Angry is a lousy steersman,” I say. “Calculating keeps the boat off the shoal.”
The rain thickens. I picture Widow’s Teeth bright with spume under the streetlights, the way storms funnel all narratives to that one treacherous edge. The yacht club will be buzzing by morning, sextants on velvet and venture mentors drafted into crisis PR. Fishermen will guard the empty estates and shake their heads when asked what they saw. The town will keep smelling of kelp and lemon and toner because even rumors need office supplies.
My phone lights with an unknown number again, a preview of a text that makes the air thinner: If you really cared about the girl, you’d stop. We will. The sender’s avatar is a lighthouse in silhouette. Jonah sees it over my shoulder, and his mouth flattens.
“They think you’re the match,” he says.
“I’m the bucket,” I say. “Buckets look like weapons to people who love fire.”
I set the phone down with the screen facedown and square the motion packets like I’m back in archives, making order out of harm. I write one more line on my pad—Request in camera review of youth-related exhibits—and circle it hard enough that the paper shines.
“I’m going to text her,” I say. “Not through you. Not through any public anything. Direct.”
He doesn’t say Is that safe? because he knows the difference between danger and damage. He says, “What do you say?”
“I say: The town is talking. I won’t unless you want me to. Can we meet where bells are honest?”
“Sea Ledger’s bell is never honest,” he says, soft, a flicker of humor because we need it. “But low tide tells the truth.”
I type: The harbor is loud. I can be quiet. If you want decide-your-story, meet me at the bell, low tide. No press. No Vivienne. No anyone. I don’t press send. Not yet. Timing matters.
“One more thing,” Jonah says. He looks older when he says it. “If my tipster won’t stand down, the thread will pull names. I’ll burn that bridge, Mara.”
“Burn it if it reaches her,” I say. “Don’t martyr a rumor for pride.”
He nods, thumbs moving on his own phone now, a second front in the same storm. I stack the motion, the affidavit, the exhibits, and lay my opposition draft on top. The paper warmth transfers to my skin. The heater clicks back on. The harbor hushes and then surges again.
I press Send on the message to Tamsin and watch the bubble travel until the word Delivered appears. It sits there, small and gray and unbearable.
“Now what?” Jonah asks.
“Now I wait to see whether a girl answers me or a rumor does,” I say, and I turn the bell tone on for one contact only.