The Shadow Court's Possession

Gulls screaming overhead, their cries sharp as glass against the morning fog. Ruby Haven steps off the ferry onto Blackwood Island's weathered dock with a soil sample kit swinging from one hand and a satchel of maps and elevation data against her hip. Three months of work is in that bag. Every contour line, every native species recommendation, every drainage calculation checked three times. She drove out to the Olympic Peninsula to study comparable ecosystems. She called in favours from old professors. The grant application called the gardens a tragedy of neglect, and she underlined the phrase three times. The man who comes out of the fog toward her has storm-grey eyes and a silver scar running from jaw to temple, and he is holding her proposal with red marks bleeding through the pages. *"Save yourself the trouble. Turn around, catch the noon ferry back to Port Angeles."* His mother's will allocated the funds. The council approved the bid. Declan Blackwood signed the contract himself, as executor. *"My mother is dead. She doesn't get a vote anymore."* What Ruby does not tell him on that dock is why she took a job on an island with one ferry and a hostile client. Her brother Jasper needs a kidney transplant, and the bonus on this restoration would cover it. What she also does not tell him is that she worked fourteen months at a conservancy in Portland, that a rare slipper orchid worth forty thousand dollars went missing during her final week, and that she was never charged and never cleared either. Miriam Chen finds it in an afternoon. Miriam has gold-rimmed glasses, a seat on the island council, a grudge, and a phone. Ethan Barrett chairs that council in a captain's hat he wears indoors, with a missing pinky resting conspicuously on the table, and he has read about her situation in Portland and would like to discuss it. And behind a wall on Blackwood land there is a courtyard where a woman once knelt in the exact centre with a beach rose, roots wrapped in burlap, bought with the pearl necklace her own mother left behind, and asked her husband to help her dig the hole. A small-island second-chance romance about a restoration nobody local wants, a grieving executor who stopped going into the gardens, a council with its own arrangements, and two people each carrying a thing they have decided not to say out loud. The romance is closed-door.