Description
Port Hadden's funeral is over, but a daughter stays for the trawler no one else can run, or a coast agent's rotation lands the same wharf a week before a human-trafficking file points at the next movement of a hull everyone pretends is clean. A ghost net, a box that does not match the bill of lading, military-grade parts where the port took nothing in: the sea keeps receipts. The harbormaster nods. The family table shrinks. A fiancé, a deckhand, a parent newly in the ground—names overlap with the chain of custody. The town has been not-quite-dying for fifteen years; smuggling is the life support. You can scuttle the pipeline and the economy with it, feed a case to investigators whose budget ends when the headline ends, or run the proof somewhere it will not be traded away. The tide does not care which choice is clean.
