The morning after the blackout dawned unnervingly bright, as if the sun were trying to overcompensate for the night’s stolen light. A fragile sense of normalcy had returned to Whispering Pines.
The main power was back, the drone of the backup generator silenced. The aroma of coffee and bacon from the dining hall was a comforting balm, but an undercurrent of tension lingered in the air.
Guests spoke in hushed tones, recounting the previous night’s “adventure” with a forced cheerfulness that failed to mask their relief at leaving.
Cole, operating on three hours of sleep and four cups of Ben’s tar-black coffee, felt the exhaustion settle deep in his bones.
It was a good kind of tired, though—the satisfying ache that came from solving a tangible problem, from working with his hands and seeing an immediate result. It was a world away from the abstract fatigue of boardroom battles and shareholder reports.
Last night, working alongside Maya, he had felt a sense of purpose that had been missing from his life for years. In the flickering glow of lanterns, her face etched with worry but her voice calm and commanding, he’d seen the fierce, protective leader she was.
They had moved in a seamless, unspoken rhythm, a team forged in crisis. The memory of their hands brushing as they’d worked on the generator sent a warmth through him that had nothing to do with the coffee.
But with the morning light came the cold reality of his deception. He was Cal, the handyman. And Cal had a job to do.
He found Maya in her office, a small, cluttered space behind the front desk that smelled of old paper and lemon polish. She was on the phone, her voice tight with professional courtesy as she dealt with a cancellation.
“Yes, I understand completely. Of course. We hope you’ll consider us again in the future.” She hung up with a sigh, rubbing her temples.
She looked up as he knocked on the open doorframe, her eyes shadowed with fatigue.
“Morning,” he said, keeping his tone light. “Just wanted to let you know I’m going to walk the power line, from the main road to the junction box. Make sure no other branches are threatening it after last night.”
Her gaze sharpened, a flicker of the previous day’s suspicion returning. “Is that necessary? The power’s back on.”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “But it’s better to be thorough. An outage like that can put a strain on the whole system. I’d rather spot a potential problem now than deal with another blackout this weekend.” It was a plausible lie, rooted in the competence he’d already demonstrated.
She considered him for a long moment, the internal calculus visible on her face. Finally, she nodded. “Fine. Good idea. Let me know what you find.” The dismissal was clear, but as he turned to leave, she added, “And Cal? Thanks. For last night. You… you were a big help.”
The simple, sincere words landed like a lead weight in his stomach. “Just doing my job,” he mumbled, and escaped before the guilt could register on his face.
The air was crisp and clean as he followed the thick, insulated cable away from the lodge. The path was little more than a game trail, weaving through dense stands of pine and aspen.
The silence of the forest was a stark contrast to the thrum of the city he was used to, broken only by the chatter of a squirrel and the whisper of wind through the branches.
He walked for nearly a half-mile, his eyes tracing the line overhead. Everything looked secure.
He saw the spot where the large pine branch had fallen, the one they’d all assumed was the culprit. It lay on the forest floor, a good twenty feet from the line itself.
Close, but not a direct hit. He frowned. It was possible the force of the fall had shaken the wire enough to cause a short, but it felt unlikely.
He pushed onward, heading toward the main utility pole where the lodge’s private line connected to the grid. It was here, in a small clearing shielded from the main path, that he found it.
The cable wasn’t frayed or snapped from tension. It was cut.
Cole knelt, his heart hammering against his ribs. The evidence was irrefutable.
On both severed ends of the thick black casing, the slice was clean, unnaturally so. He ran a gloved finger over the edge.
It was the kind of cut made by industrial-grade bolt cutters, a tool with powerful jaws designed to shear through metal and cable with brutal efficiency. A few feet away, he saw deep impressions in the soft earth where the saboteur had braced a ladder against a tree.
This was no accident. This was deliberate.
A cold anger, sharp and unfamiliar, surged through him. He thought of Maya on the phone, her face pale with stress as she absorbed another financial hit.
He thought of Ben, his brow furrowed with worry. This wasn’t a prank. This was a calculated attack meant to cripple the lodge, to bleed it dry, guest by guest, dollar by dollar.
His mission, the one his father had sent him on, was to assess Whispering Pines as a potential acquisition. To look for weaknesses, for signs of mismanagement, for an opportunity to buy it cheap.
He was here to find the very vulnerabilities this person was exploiting. The irony was a bitter pill.
But standing here, looking at the evidence of this violation, his corporate objectives evaporated. All he felt was a raw, protective instinct.
This was Maya’s home. And someone was trying to destroy it.
He took out his phone, a sleek, top-of-the-line model he kept hidden, and snapped several high-resolution photos of the cut cable and the ladder marks. Then he pocketed it and headed back, his long strides eating up the ground.
The easy, satisfying tiredness was gone, replaced by a tense, focused energy.
He found Maya exactly where he’d left her, staring at a spreadsheet on her computer screen, her expression bleak. She looked up as he entered, her body language defensive.
“Find anything?” she asked, her tone daring him to give her more bad news.
Cole closed the office door behind him, the soft click echoing in the small room. He leaned against it, crossing his arms. “We have a bigger problem than a faulty wire.”
He watched her absorb his words, her posture stiffening. “What do you mean?”
Instead of explaining, he took out his phone and pulled up the photos, holding it out for her to see. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the first image.
She took the phone from him, her fingers brushing his, and zoomed in on the clean, precise slice in the cable.
He saw the wave of understanding—and horror—wash over her. Her face lost what little color it had.
“This…” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “This wasn’t a branch.”
“No,” Cole said, his voice low and steady. “It was cut. Deliberately. With professional-grade cutters.”
Maya sank back into her chair, the phone clutched in her hand. For a moment, she looked utterly defeated, the formidable manager replaced by a woman seeing her worst fears realized.
All the small, recent problems—the broken water heater, the plumbing issue in Cabin 3, the reservation system glitch last week—flashed through her mind, re-contextualized.
They weren’t isolated incidents. They were a pattern.
“The water heater,” she said, her eyes distant. “Ben said the pressure valve looked like it had been tampered with. I told myself he was just being paranoid.” She looked up at Cole, her gaze filled with a terrifying combination of fear and fury. “Someone is doing this to us. On purpose.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact, a confirmation of a deep-seated dread she’d been refusing to acknowledge.
Cole nodded grimly. “It seems that way.”
The primary conflict, which had been a nebulous cloud of “bad luck,” now had a name: sabotage. It was real, it was present, and it was aimed directly at the heart of her life.
Maya’s fear quickly hardened into a familiar, steely resolve. She stood up, pacing the small confines of her office like a caged lioness. “Who? Why? A disgruntled employee? A competitor?”
“I don’t know. But we can’t let them know we’re onto them,” Cole said, his mind already shifting into strategic mode. “And we can’t tell the staff. It would cause a panic, and word would get out. We can’t afford any more bad press.”
She stopped pacing and turned to face him, her dark eyes searching his. The skepticism was gone, replaced by a desperate need for an ally. In that moment, they weren’t manager and handyman. They were two people standing on the deck of a sinking ship, with a saboteur somewhere on board.
“So what do we do?” she asked, the “we” hanging in the air between them, a fragile thread of connection.
“We watch,” Cole said. “We pay attention to everything. Anyone who seems out of place, anyone who takes too keen an interest in the lodge’s problems. We look for a motive. And we do it quietly.”
A reluctant alliance was formed in the silence of that small office. It was an unspoken agreement born of mutual necessity. Maya, for all her strength, was in over her head. She needed someone she could trust, and the competent, level-headed handyman who had literally kept the lights on seemed like her only option.
For Cole, the stakes of his deception had just become terrifyingly high. He was asking for her trust while actively betraying it with his very presence.
As he looked at her—at the fierce determination in her eyes, the slight tremble in her hands she was trying so hard to hide—his carefully constructed emotional distance crumbled.
He saw how much was at stake for her. This wasn’t a line item on a balance sheet; it was her legacy, her home, her entire world.
The lie he was living felt like a coiled snake in his gut. He was here to evaluate her home for a hostile takeover, a corporate land grab not so different in motive from the sabotage they now faced.
He was part of the world of predators that was circling her.
By helping her, he was working against his own company’s interests. But by not helping her, by letting this unseen enemy win, he would be betraying something far more important: the man he wanted to be.
“Okay,” Maya said, her voice firm again. She took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. “Okay, Cal. We watch.”
She held out her hand. It wasn’t for a handshake; she was returning his phone.
But as he took it, their fingers touched again, longer this time. A current of shared purpose, of shared danger, passed between them.
It was a bond, but one built on a foundation of lies he had laid. And Cole had the sickening feeling that when the truth finally came out, it would cause more damage than any pair of bolt cutters ever could.