The air in the sheriff’s office was too cold, scrubbed clean and smelling of industrial cleaner and stale coffee. It felt like a deliberate attempt to erase any trace of the man who’d sat behind this desk before Ben—his father.
Callie’s hand, slick with nervous sweat, tightened around the folded piece of paper in her pocket. It was a transcript of the decoded entry from Hannah’s journal, the words seared into her memory.
Ben looked up from a stack of paperwork as she entered, his face breaking into a warm, unguarded smile that sent a pang of preemptive grief through her chest.
He was in his uniform, the star pinned to his crisp khaki shirt a heavy, gleaming weight.
For a moment, he was just Ben—the man who’d held her, who’d made her believe in second chances, in a future in this town she’d once sworn to escape.
“Hey,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Wasn’t expecting you. Everything okay?” He stood, rounding the heavy oak desk to meet her.
The hope she’d been clinging to—a desperate, foolish belief that she was wrong, that there was an explanation—flickered. “We need to talk.”
His smile faltered, replaced by the familiar caution of his profession. He gestured to one of the stiff chairs opposite his desk, but she shook her head, remaining standing.
Putting space between them felt essential.
“Nash and I… we found something else in Hannah’s journal,” she began, her voice thinner than she’d intended. She pulled the paper from her pocket. Her fingers trembled as she unfolded it.
“A coded entry. It took us hours, but we broke it.”
Ben’s eyes were fixed on her face, his expression unreadable. He didn’t look at the paper. “Callie, I told you to let me handle this.”
“You weren’t handling it, Ben. You were managing it,” she countered, a new edge to her tone.
“There’s a difference.” She held the paper out to him. “Just read it.”
He hesitated for a long beat, his jaw tight, before taking the sheet from her. His gaze scanned the neat, handwritten lines.
Callie watched every muscle in his face, searching for shock, for outrage, for the same cold horror that had seized her.
Log 44. D. met me at the landing. Said the boat had to disappear. Said the talk was getting too loud. Too much heat for B. He made the call. Said it was for the best. To protect him.
She saw it. A flicker of recognition, a shadow of something that looked sickeningly like resignation, and then—nothing.
A mask slammed down, hard and impenetrable. The warm, open man she loved vanished, replaced by Sheriff Monroe.
His gaze lifted from the page, his blue eyes as cold and flat as a winter lake. “Where did you get this?”
“I told you, from the journal. We deciphered it.”
“Give me the journal, Callie.” It wasn’t a request.
Her blood ran cold. “What? Why?”
“It’s evidence in an active investigation.” He refolded the paper with methodical precision and placed it squarely in the center of his desk, claiming it.
“You and Nash have been tampering with it. You’re civilians. You have no idea how dangerous this is.”
The condescension in his voice was a slap.
“Dangerous? Ben, this says your father covered up a key piece of evidence in a murder investigation. The boat Hannah was on the night she died—he made it disappear. It says so right there. Sheriff D. It has to be him.”
“You don’t know that,” he snapped, his voice dropping to a low, authoritative growl. “This is a dead girl’s cryptic diary entry. It could mean anything. It’s not proof.”
“Then investigate it!” she cried, her voice cracking. “Find out what it means! Isn’t that your job? To find the truth, no matter where it leads?”
He moved around the desk, his presence suddenly overwhelming in the sterile room. He reached for her, his hands landing on her shoulders, his grip firm.
“My job,” he said, his voice dangerously soft, “is to protect this town. That includes protecting it from old wounds being ripped open based on half-baked theories. This could destroy people, Callie. It could tear families apart.”
“You mean your family,” she whispered, the awful truth finally solidifying in her heart. It was a jagged stone in her throat. “This isn’t about the town. It’s about him. About his legacy.”
He flinched as if she’d struck him. His grip tightened almost painfully. “My father was a good man. He dedicated his life to this place.”
“Good men don’t make evidence disappear,” she said, pulling back, forcing his hands to drop from her shoulders. The loss of his touch was an immediate, aching void.
“Hannah is dead. She was my friend. And you’re standing here defending the man who might have helped her killer get away with it.”
“You don’t know that!” he repeated, his face flushed with anger. “You’re emotional. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“Oh, I’m thinking with perfect clarity, Ben,” she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper, laced with a bitterness that tasted like bile.
“For the first time in weeks, I see everything exactly as it is. I thought we were on the same side. I thought you wanted justice for Hannah. But you don’t. You want peace. You want the past to stay buried, no matter who it hurts.”
A chasm had opened between them, wide and uncrossable. On one side was the truth—ugly and painful and necessary.
On the other was Ben, standing guard over his father’s secrets, his star a shield not for the people, but for his family’s name.
“That’s not true,” he said, but there was no conviction in it. He looked torn, his face a canvas of anguish. “Callie, please. Let me handle this my way.”
“Your way is to file this paper away in a locked drawer and forget it exists, isn’t it?” She gestured at the damning transcript on his desk.
“You just confiscated the one piece of real evidence I’ve found. You didn’t ask for my help; you took it. You didn’t ask me to trust you; you demanded I obey you.”
She took a shaky step back, then another. The sight of him, so resolute in his betrayal, was physically painful.
“I can’t do this. I can’t be with someone who would choose a comfortable lie over a difficult truth.”
“Callie…” He took a step toward her, his hand outstretched, his expression finally breaking with desperation.
But it was too late. The trust she’d placed in him, so fragile and new, had been shattered.
“Don’t,” she warned, the single word hanging in the air between them, sharp as glass. “I have to go.”
She turned and walked out, not looking back. The heavy office door clicked shut behind her, a sound of absolute finality.
She didn’t know where she was going, only that she was utterly and completely alone.
***
The amber whiskey swirled in the glass, catching the dim light of the Bayou Bar. Ben stared into its depths as if it held an answer, but all he saw was his own wrecked reflection.
The bar was nearly empty, the air thick with the smell of damp wood and regret.
Lena polished a glass behind the bar, her movements slow and deliberate.
She hadn’t said a word since he’d slumped onto the stool twenty minutes ago, just set a bottle of his preferred bourbon and a single glass in front of him.
“She walked out,” he finally said, the words rusty in his throat. He tossed back the rest of his drink, the burn a welcome distraction. “Just looked at me like I was a stranger and walked out.”
Lena set the clean glass down and leaned against the back counter, her arms crossed. Her expression was patient, neutral. “What did you do?”
“I did what I had to do!” He slammed the empty glass down on the bar, making the bottles behind her rattle.
“She came in with this… this theory. This page from the journal. Accusing my father of… of obstruction. A cover-up.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face, the fatigue a leaden weight in his bones. “She wanted me to just blow it all up. The whole town. My father’s reputation. Everything he built.”
“And what did you want?” Lena asked, her voice calm and even.
“I wanted to protect her! This isn’t a game. The Devereaux family… they don’t just go away quietly. If what she found is true, and my father was involved… people get hurt when secrets like that come out. Badly.”
He poured another two fingers of whiskey. “I took the paper. I told her it was official evidence, that she needed to stay out of it. I was trying to keep her safe.”
“I’m sure you were,” Lena said softly. “But what do you think she heard?”
He scowled into his glass. “She heard that I was choosing him over her. Over the truth.”
“Were you?”
The question hit him like a punch to the gut. He looked up at her, his eyes pleading for an absolution she wouldn’t give.
“It’s not that simple, Lena. He was my father. He was the sheriff here for thirty years. He kept this town from tearing itself apart more times than I can count. Maybe he did something… questionable. Maybe he did it for a reason we can’t understand. A reason he thought was right.”
“To protect you?” Lena prompted, her gaze unwavering. “The journal said, ‘to protect him.’ Was it talking about you, Ben?”
He flinched.
The thought had been a poisonous whisper in the back of his mind since he’d first read the words.
Had his father buried a murder investigation to protect him? To keep him from the fallout, from the Devereaux family’s wrath?
The idea was monstrous.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, the words tasting like ash. “And I don’t know if I want to. All I know is that I just lost the one person who made me feel like I could be more than just my father’s son.”
He let out a harsh, bitter laugh. “And I lost her by doing exactly what he would have done. By choosing the town, the legacy, the ‘greater good,’ over the person right in front of me.”
He stared at his hands on the worn surface of the bar.
They were his father’s hands. Strong, capable, and now, stained by the same impossible choices.
He had done what he believed was right, what a sheriff was supposed to do.
But in the echoing silence of the bar, with Callie’s heartbroken expression burned into his mind, it felt devastatingly, irrevocably wrong.