Elias looked toward the sleeping yachts and finally understood that begging would not save him. Neither would anger, not the kind that broke windows or cut lines. He needed something colder than anger. He needed something legal, precise, and impossible to ignore.
That afternoon, he went to see Mara Bell, the only lawyer in town who still kept rubber boots beside her office door. She had grown up two houses from him and had once stolen bait from his father to catch crabs off the public pier.