Chapter 2 - The Knock at MidnightThree days passed.
I went back to my routine because routines are how men like me keep from asking stupid questions. I replaced a starboard shaft on a thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser. I flushed a clogged cooling line. I spent four hours crawling inside an engine bay that smelled of old oil and gasoline, trying to pretend I wasn't listening every time a car door slammed in the gravel lot outside.
Newport is a small city, but it has two distinct universes. There is the Newport where people work with hands, grease, and tide schedules, and there is the Newport where people own estates with names instead of numbers and buy yachts to keep their accountants happy. I lived in the first one. Clare Bowmont clearly lived in the second.
On Thursday night, a thunderstorm rolled in off the bay.
Lightning flashed blue against the harbor windows of my loft above the workshop. The wind was kicking up whitecaps out on the water, rattling the glass in my old wooden window frames. I had just turned off the shop lights downstairs, walked upstairs in my work clothes, and put a pot of black coffee on the stove when someone knocked on the street door.
It wasn't a casual knock. It was brief, sharp, and frantic.
I paused, a coffee mug in my hand. Most people who needed emergency boat repairs didn't show up at eleven o'clock on a stormy weeknight.
I walked down the dark wooden staircase, pulled back the deadbolt, and opened the door.
A woman was standing on my landing under the small tin overhang, wrapped in a dark trench coat that was drenched from the rain. She had no umbrella. She had no shoes on her feet—just wet, bare soles against the cold concrete step.
It was Clare.
She was pale, shivering, her dark blonde hair plastered to her shoulders by the rain. In the dim light of the alley streetlamp, I could see dark purple bruises forming around her left wrist, looking uncomfortably like the shape of fingers.
"Owen," she whispered, her voice barely carrying over the thunder. "Please. Don't ask me to explain right now. Just let me in."
I didn't hesitate. I stepped back, opened the door wide, and let her inside.
She slipped past me into the warmth of the lower workshop, smelling of rain, salt, and faint high-end perfume. Her breath came in shallow, ragged hitches, like someone who had been running for miles without stopping to look back.
"Are you followed?" I asked softly, locking the door behind her.
"No," she gasped, her hands trembling as she tried to pull her wet coat around herself. "I left my car three blocks away. I walked through the side alleys. He doesn't know where I am."
"Graham?"
Her eyes darted to mine, sharp and full of unspoken pain. "He thinks I'm at my sister's house in Providence. He thinks I'm docile. But I found... I found out what he did. And if he finds me tonight, I won't survive it."
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I looked at her—this wealthy, elegant heiress who had almost drowned in the harbor three nights ago, now standing barefoot in my dusty boat shop, shivering from cold and terror.
"Come upstairs," I said quietly. "It's warm. I have hot coffee."
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