The Tide-Glass Archive
A timber framing carpenter clearing his late sister's coastal workshop is drawn into a high-stakes struggle when unexpected visitors arrive with a brass cylinder containing evidence of toxic dumping.
Fictional story. Contains mild themes of familial loss, corporate crime, and evasive confrontation. All characters and events are fictitious.Chapter 1: The Sanctuary at Blackwood Cove
Arthur Miller wiped rain from the brass trim of the workshop door as the gale off Penobscot Bay rattled the iron roof. For four years, the coastal timber shop had stood as a monument to work left unfinished. It had belonged to his elder sister, Grace, a marine ecologist whose life was cut short by sudden illness before she could complete her survey of the shoreline marshlands.
Arthur had returned to Blackwood Cove with a tape measure, a legal pad, and the heavy intention of liquidating the parcel by the end of November. The estate lawyers had been patient, but property taxes on three acres of salt meadow did not pause for grief. Arthur was thirty-six, built sturdy from a decade in structural timber framing, with hands calloused by cedar beams and a mind trained to measure tolerances down to the millimeter. Yet standing inside Grace's old drafting room—smelling dried kelp, beeswax, and damp pine—he felt his usual composure falter.