The Name Below the Tide
Sweet
But the wharf is no longer only a building problem. It is evidence.
Human remains beneath the oldest cribwork have turned every rotten board into a question the town would rather leave underwater. Mara's father, Alden, is under pressure from Pike Bait & Fuel and the debts he kept hidden. The municipal record is tightening. Tessa Barstow's old photographs point to danger no one admitted in time. And Finn Deveraux, the lobsterman who has become Mara's closest ally, carries a family history that may be far more tangled with the Barstows than either of them understood.
As Mara and Finn fight to preserve the wharf without destroying the truth beneath it, a sealed envelope, a missing payment, and the careful records of women long dismissed as background begin to surface. The closer Mara gets to the name below the tide, the more she sees that Mercy Gale was never held together by timber alone.
Some families inherit property. Some inherit debt. At Mercy Gale Wharf, the deepest inheritance is the story someone paid to bury.
