Backstory
Noa Tidesley spent a decade on the North Pacific, came back to Port Hadden to manage her father's disappearance and the estate it left behind, and found a crate she wasn't supposed to find. She approaches problems the way she approaches weather — as physical facts to be worked around rather than argued with — and this pragmatism kept her alive in places where help wasn't coming and now limits her instinct to ask for it in a town where help could. Her father left too many signs, too carefully placed, and she cannot decide whether he wanted her to find them or whether she has simply learned to read him too well. She came back intending to leave. Her niece had a school play. The boat needed a repair she actually understood. She is losing a battle with belonging on a schedule that frightens her, and she knows it.
