Chapter 4 - The Silver Crescent Moon
Sky turned away from the wheelchair, pivoting on the heels of her white shoes to face Grant.
The playful, silly energy that had made Nova laugh vanished from her small face, replaced by a sudden, solemn gravity that felt extraordinarily ancient for a child of five. She set the crinkled brown paper bag down onto the polished stone bench beside the balustrade.
With two small hands, moving with immense, reverent care, Sky reached deep inside the bag.
Her fingers emerged clutching an object wrapped in a faded square of cream-colored linen. She untied the simple hemp twine binding the cloth, pulling the fabric away to reveal a small, rectangular box crafted from dark, aged walnut. The timber had been polished by thousands of human touches, its corners smoothed by decades of handling.
Set into the center of the dark lid was an intricate, hand-cut inlay of solid sterling silver: a delicate crescent moon cradling three tiny, engraved stars.
The breath was ripped violently from Grant Hawthorne’s lungs.
The world stopped. The birds in the fir trees, the breeze off the lake, the hum of Nova’s chair—all of it ceased to exist.
Grant’s hand shot out involuntarily, his thick, calloused fingers closing around the cold wood of the box before he could even process the movement. His heart slammed against his ribs like a sledgehammer hitting iron. He knew every grain of that timber. He knew the microscopic slip of the chisel on the southern horn of the crescent moon, where his seventeen-year-old hands had slipped in his grandfather’s workshop on Orcas Island twenty-one years ago.
He had carved that box himself.
He had carved it as a sixteenth-birthday present for his younger sister, Claire. He had embedded the silver moon because Claire had been obsessed with the tides, because she had sworn she would one day captain her own research vessel through the San Juan Islands. Inside that box, Claire had kept her most sacred secrets—her college acceptance letters, her sea glass collection, and the silver locket their mother had given her before she died.
Seven years ago, Claire Hawthorne had vanished from the face of the earth.
She had walked out of her apartment in downtown Seattle on a rainy Tuesday evening, leaving her keys, her phone, and her credit cards on the kitchen counter. For three years, Grant had torn the Pacific Northwest apart. He had hired private intelligence firms, bribed federal agents, and dragged the waters of the sound until his grief had hardened into an impenetrable wall of cynical black ice. Claire was dead. The police had closed the file; the family attorneys had declared her legally deceased; and Grant had locked her bedroom in the east wing, refusing to ever speak her name aloud.
Now, her box was resting in his palm.
Grant’s hand tightened around the walnut casing so hard the wood groaned beneath his grip. His knuckles blanched bone-white, the black tattoos on his forearm pulling taut across corded muscle.
He stared at the silver moon, then snapped his gaze down to the little girl standing before him.
"Where did you get this?" Grant rasped.
His voice was terrifying—a ragged, choked growl that carried the desperate, volcanic agony of a dead man clawing his way out of a grave.
May you like
Sky looked up at him. She did not shrink from the fury in his eyes. She looked at his trembling hand on the wood, her slate-gray eyes wide, serious, and entirely unafraid.
"It was Mommy's," Sky answered simply.
