Chapter 56: A Day Off
The notebook stayed on Liam’s desk all night. He opened it twice. Added nothing. By morning, the only thing that had changed was his decision the mystery could wait one day.
He was still holding onto that decision loosely, half-listening to the machine hiss behind him, restocking the drink fridge and only half paying attention to the mismatched rows of bottles in front of him, when his phone buzzed against the counter.
I have a rare thing happening today. A free Saturday. Come to the beach with me If you are less busy.
He read it twice before he let himself smile.
What beach?Crescent Point. I’ll send the address. Wear something that isn’t a suit I already know you own at least one.*
He typed back a single word Deal and slid the phone into his pocket, aware of Ethan watching him from across the counter with the particular grin he reserved for exactly this kind of moment.Who is it this time?"Don’t start."
"I’m not starting anything." Ethan held both hands up, entirely unconvincing. "I’m just saying, a man doesn’t smile at his phone like that.
Liam didn’t dignify it with an answer, which Ethan seemed to take as answer enough. He was still shaking his head, laughing to himself, as Liam headed for the door grateful.
Crescent Point turned out to be quieter than he expected for a weekend a long crescent of pale sand tucked behind a row of dunes, far enough from the city that the crowd thinned to families and a handful of surfers rather than the packed rows closer to downtown.
Evelyn was already there when he arrived, sitting on a spread blanket in sunglasses and a loose linen shirt over a swimsuit, looking so entirely unlike a judge that it took him a second to be sure it was her.
"You made it," she said, shading her eyes as he dropped down beside her. Of course I had to.
She handed him a bottle of water from the cooler without being asked, then glanced at her own wrist for the second time in as many minutes.
"You keep checking the time," he said. "For someone with the phone locked in the car."
She laughed, a little sheepishly, and let her wrist drop. "Old habit. Court trains you to watch the clock whether you want to or not recesses, filing deadlines, how long you can let a lawyer talk before you have to cut him off."
She said it lightly, but there was something underneath it that didn’t quite match the tone. "I almost cancelled this morning. Told myself I had emails to catch up on."
"What changed your mind?"I realized I’ve said that same sentence to myself every Saturday for about two years."
She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms loosely around them, looking out at the water rather than at him.
"It stops being a coincidence eventually. Starts being a pattern you built for yourself without noticing."
He didn’t say anything to that either just let it sit, the way she’d taught him to let things sit, and after a moment she seemed to shake it off, reaching for the sunscreen instead. "Anyway. That’s more self-reflection than anyone deserves before noon."
They spent the next hour wading out until the water hit their knees, Evelyn insisting she wasn’t competitive before proving, decisively, that she was the moment he suggested racing to a buoy about thirty yards out.
She won by a body length and didn’t let him forget it for the better part of twenty minutes, narrating an increasingly elaborate account of the victory to no one in particular as they waded back to shore.
"You let me win," she said later, wringing out her hair on the blanket."I really didn’t."
"You’re being generous. It’s a very attractive quality, but I can tell when someone’s being generous."
Further down the sand, a family was setting up a cluster of umbrellas and folding chairs, a father wrangling a cooler while two kids argued over a bucket. Evelyn watched them for a moment, something unreadable crossing her face.
My husband always hated beaches," she said, quiet, almost to herself. "Said the sand got into everything and ruined the whole point of relaxing."
Liam said nothing right away. There was a version of this moment where he asked the obvious follow-up how long since they’d come to one together, whether that had been true from the start or something that had crept in later but he’d learned, weeks ago, that the doors she opened on her own were worth more than any he tried to pry open, and pushing now would only close this one faster than it had opened.
So he just watched the same family she was watching, let the silence hold for a moment longer than was entirely comfortable, and waited to see which way she’d carry it.
She seemed to catch herself a few seconds later, waving a hand as if to clear the comment from the air, her voice brightening deliberately. "Anyway. I’m glad you don’t."
"Don’t hate beaches?"Don’t ruin the point of relaxing.He laughed, and it struck him, not for the first time, how easy this had become no calculation behind it, no next move quietly assembling itself in the back of his mind.
Just an afternoon, and a woman who argued about a thirty-yard swim like it mattered.It was somewhere in the late afternoon, the sun starting its slow slide toward the dunes, that Liam felt it.
Nothing dramatic. No single obvious thing he could have pointed to. Just a prickle at the edge of awareness, the kind of instinct that had kept him alive in another life long before it ever had reason to matter in this one the sense of a gaze lingering a beat too long, somewhere behind him, off to the left, near the boardwalk that ran along the top of the dunes.
He didn’t turn immediately. Instead he reached for his water bottle, using the motion to let his eyes sweep the boardwalk in passing.
A woman stood near the railing, sunglasses on, a paperback held loosely in one hand. She wasn’t looking at the water.
She was angled just slightly toward the section of beach where he and Evelyn sat, and as Liam watched, she closed the book without marking her page unhurried, deliberate the cover turning toward him for just a moment before she tucked it under her arm.
*Corporate Governance and Financial Crime.*
Not beach reading. Not by accident. Everything alright? Evelyn asked, catching something in his expression before he’d managed to smooth it away.
"Fine." He smiled, easy, practiced. "Just thinking I should probably reapply sunscreen before I regret it tomorrow."
She laughed and tossed him the bottle from her bag, and the moment passed the way he needed it to. When he glanced back toward the boardwalk a few minutes later, under the cover of stretching, the woman was gone.
He didn’t say anything to Evelyn. A stranger reading a book on a public boardwalk wasn’t evidence of anything on its own but the title wasn’t the kind of thing you carried to the beach unless the beach wasn’t really why you’d come.
The feeling didn’t leave him for the rest of the afternoon, sitting quietly under the good parts of the day like a stone at the bottom of an otherwise calm river.
By the time they packed up as the light went gold and low, Liam found an excuse to walk the last few yards up toward the boardwalk himself, ostensibly to toss their empty bottles in a bin near the railing.
Evelyn stayed behind, folding the blanket, calling out something about parking that he barely registered.The bench where the woman had been sitting was empty.
On the armrest, though, sat a paper coffee cup, lid still on, a thin curl of steam still rising off the small gap where the straw would have gone.Still warm.She had left seconds before he looked.