The Wrong Kind of Right

Chapter 4 – The Site Visit

The site was louder in the afternoon than Mia remembered — gulls wheeling over the half-finished retaining wall, machinery idling somewhere past the fence line, the low percussion of waves against wet concrete. She pulled her hard hat down against the wind and followed Daniel across the gravel lot toward the seawall, trying to look like a woman who hadn't spent all morning replaying the word *reassessing* in her own head and regretting it.

"Contractor's running behind," Daniel said, checking his phone. "Just us for now."

"Fine by me. Fewer people to disagree with."

"You disagree with me plenty on your own."

"Someone has to."

He huffed something close to a laugh and led her down toward the water, past caution tape that had come loose on one side and was flapping uselessly in the wind. The old seawall ran along the edge of the property, decades older than anything else on site, and up close Mia could see what the survey had missed — sections where the concrete had spalled away entirely, exposing rebar rusted the color of dried blood.

"This is what worries me," Daniel said, crouching at the edge, running a gloved hand along a crumbling section. "It's not in the original assessment. Someone either missed it or didn't want to flag it, because it blows the budget wide open."

Mia crouched beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. "If we don't reinforce this—"

"The whole east pavilion sits on borrowed time." He looked at her, and there was none of Monday's edge in it, just tired honesty. "This is the real problem. It was never your design."

Her throat tightened, unexpectedly. "You could've said that on Monday."

"Would you have believed me?"

She didn't get the chance to answer.

The section of wall beneath Daniel's hand gave way without warning — a soft, sickening crumble of old concrete, and the ground under his boot shifted with it, gravel sliding toward the drop where the wall fell six feet to the rocks and churning water below. He pitched sideways, one arm pinwheeling for balance, and for a single frozen second Mia watched him tip toward the edge with nothing beneath him but air.

She didn't think. She grabbed the back of his jacket with both hands and threw her weight backward, boots skidding in the loose gravel, and for a horrible half-second it felt like the wall would take them both. Then his hand closed hard around her forearm, and between them they found solid ground again, stumbling back from the edge together, breathing hard.

Neither of them let go right away.

"You okay?" Mia managed, still gripping his jacket like it might save him a second time.

"Yeah." Daniel's voice was rougher than usual. He looked down at the crumbled section of wall, then at her hands still fisted in his sleeve, then, finally, at her face. "Yeah. I'm okay. That was—" He exhaled, shaky in a way she'd never seen from him. "That was closer than I want to think about."

"You almost went in."

"I know."

"The current out there—" Her voice cracked slightly, and she hated it, hated that her hands were still trembling against him. "Daniel, if I hadn't been standing there—"

"You were standing there." He said it quietly, steadily, like he needed her to hear it as much as she needed to say it. "That's what matters."

They stood like that a moment longer than either of them could probably justify, close enough that Mia could feel his heartbeat still hammering where her hand rested against his chest, close enough to see the shakiness he was trying to smooth out of his own expression and not quite managing.

"We should back away from the edge," she said finally, not moving.

"Probably."

Neither of them moved.

It was Daniel who broke it, stepping back first, dragging a hand through his hair, putting a careful two feet of distance between them that felt more deliberate than casual. "We need to get engineering out here today. Full assessment. If that section goes, it's not just a design problem anymore."

"I'll call Wale." Mia's voice came out steadier than she felt. "We should flag it to Robert too. If the whole seawall's compromised, this isn't just about the pavilion anymore."

"Agreed." Daniel glanced back at the water, jaw tight, something working behind his eyes that wasn't just about structural loads. "For what it's worth — thank you. I mean that."

"You'd have done the same."

"Doesn't make it less true."

They walked the rest of the perimeter in near silence after that, close enough now that their arms brushed more than once and neither of them moved away from it. The adrenaline faded slowly, replaced by something quieter and harder to name — the particular kind of closeness that comes from nearly losing someone you hadn't realized you'd started counting on.

By the time they reached the cars, the sun was dropping gold across the water, and Mia found herself slowing her pace without deciding to, unwilling to end the afternoon just yet.

"Same time tomorrow?" Daniel asked, keys in hand, watching her with an expression she couldn't quite name.

"Try and stop me," Mia said.

Neither of them was talking about the site visit anymore, and they both knew it.