Road to Ruin

*"That's my boat."* Brynn Callahan says it flat, from the companionway, to a stranger who turns around slowly like he has been expecting her. He says his name is Gage Hartley. He says he is a private investigator out of Portland. He says the missing person he is looking for had Megan Callahan's old phone number as a last known contact. Megan was Brynn's sister. Megan has been dead for three years, and Brynn has been living aboard her boat ever since, in slip seventeen at Stonehaven Marina, with a corkboard by the settee where her sister's last letter is pinned: *I'm close. I think I've got something real.* Brynn calls the sheriff's office. Gage tells her he already left a message for Deputy Vargas. Leo Vargas has known Brynn since high school, since he pulled her out of the surf the day Megan's body was found, and if Leo knows this man is in town, then this man has done his homework. What Leo says the next morning is *Gage is not what he seems.* He is right, but not in the direction Brynn assumes. Gage is not a P.I. at all. He is a contractor for the Marshals Service, working witness protection logistics under a cover identity, sent to a fishing town to find a federal witness who has gone quiet. Megan was that witness's sister-in-law. Megan was offered a way out and said no, because she trusted the wrong person. And now Declan is in it. Brynn's kid brother, the one she raised after their parents died, the one who still leaves his wet towel on the bathroom floor, has been running errands for Silas Corbin. What follows is not a puzzle box. It is a canvas backpack under cannery floorboards, a terrified deckhand named Hector with a daughter in Portland, a burner phone, a warehouse on Tide Road, and a trade where the arithmetic is honest and the cost is a person. The story does not end at the verdict. It ends at a lighthouse three miles north of town, in a lantern room with cracked glass, with a manila envelope weighted under a stone and a photograph of a two-year-old girl who has Brynn's eyes and Megan's smile. A romantic suspense about a woman who never got to bury her questions, a man whose whole introduction was a lie, and a brother worth the risk. The romance is closed-door, and the last page opens a door of its own.