Undertow

She's paid to say the riverbank will hold. He has forty-four steel rods in the ground that say it won't.

Beckett Ellison has spent his whole life reading the Coosawee River — and twelve years not talking about the one time he read a person wrong. He runs boats. He fixes what's broken. He does not get involved.

Then a four-hundred-million-dollar resort stakes out the most unstable bank in the county, and the state asks a river guide to prove it.

Nora Chen is the corporate attorney sent to make him go away.

Brilliant. Immaculate. Eleven years of writing the documents that let things happen — and the first person in Beckett's life who looks straight at him and says the true thing out loud. She's supposed to be the enemy. She's supposed to be leaving in sixty days.

She's also the only one who reads his findings and asks the question nobody else has ever asked: what if you're right?

But there's a twelve-day gap in the project record. A buried geotechnical study. A charming, generous, genuinely decent man at the top of the company who did something at thirty-four that eleven hundred people in Georgia are still drinking. And a rule the two of them wrote themselves, on a torn page, in pencil: if this ever becomes about them instead of the river, they lose.

They have a hearing in four weeks, a flood coming, and everything to lose on both sides of the table.

Because the undertow is never the part you can see.