Signed in Blood

The blood oath happens first, on a dock in Harbor's Edge, late August, when Margot Hearn and Callum Shaw are eleven years old. She cuts her palm on a broken quahog shell and makes him cut his thumb. *"I, Margot Hearn, swear by the blood of the sea and the traps my father built that I will protect the Hearn co-op with my whole life. I will never sell it. I will never let it fail."* He says the words back. Then he adds one more promise, because she makes him: that he will always be her partner. Twenty years later, Margot is running the co-op and the envelope on her desk is cream-colored, heavy stock, with Shaw Sustainable Fisheries embossed in tasteful seafoam green. A generous offer. A lump sum that clears the debts. A line about allowing the Hearn family *to transition with dignity.* Callum's boats are all over the harbor now, sleek and quiet, making the rust-streaked Hearn's Pride look like what she is. Margot crumples it. Then Callum walks through her office door without knocking. The co-op has three debts falling due, and one of them is the worst kind: a high-interest personal loan with no paperwork, taken out quietly by Clara Tolland, who has been making chowder in that kitchen since before Margot was born and who bankrolled a whole season without telling anyone. Her mother doesn't know. Her brother Finn doesn't know. Callum knows, because he had someone find out. Finn wants the co-op sold. He has been talking to a real estate agent and asking questions around town, and when a document turns up that could finish the place off, the original is in his hands and Margot has to decide whether her brother is a liar or whether the man she is falling for is the better one. There is also the thing Margot has never told anybody. A notebook under her bed in the apartment over the co-op office. Poems, since she was fifteen. She has never shown a single person. *"I've been ready since I was eleven years old and you made me swear on a bottle of sea glass."* A small-town coastal romance set in a Maine lobster co-op, about a promise cut into two palms, a family business going under in slow motion, and a woman who has to choose between keeping a childhood vow and keeping the people it was made for. The romance is closed-door.