Page 3 of The Shield
Owen came jogging back, drone case in hand. “Overwash in two places,” he said, breath a little short. “Backside slough looks active. I flagged coordinates.”
“Let’s wrap the scarp and then walk it,” I said, tapping my watch. “I want community meetings on the calendar before we send the report. If people are going to hear hard truth, I want them hearing it from a person and not a PDF.”
“Good plan,” he said fondly. “I’ll email Huck the prelim summary.”
“Make it clean enough to leak without hurting us.”
“Always.”
We moved like we always did when the ocean had decided to remind us who it was—quick, competent, a little reverent.
Owen and I weren’t just colleagues. We were business partners.
Kennedy & Neilson had started three years earlier, born out of a contract the city never expected us to win. Most people assumed we were a boutique outfit, too small to handle serious coastal work. But Owen had the kind of technical mind that made even federal engineers shut up and listen, and I had the maps and the mouth. His wife, Kimmy, kept us alive—partbookkeeper, part receptionist, all backbone—running invoices, scheduling site visits, and guarding the phone so we could stay in the field. Together, we’d built a reputation for telling hard truths with enough polish that even politicians couldn’t look away.
We weren’t rich. We weren’t flashy. But we had influence. And in Charleston, influence mattered.
“Community meetings,” Owen muttered, shaking his head. “You’d stand in front of a firing squad if you thought it would get someone to listen.”
“Sometimes, it feels like the same thing,” I said, brushing sand from my palms.
We packed the drone back in its case and made our way toward the busier stretch of beach where the day-trippers clustered.
The Soundline’s music carried faintly over the wind, laughter and bass spilling out like the tide itself had a sense of humor. Umbrellas dotted the sand in uneven constellations, children dragging boogie boards, teenagers holding phones high to capture a backdrop of waves that wanted nothing more than to eat their stage.
If you wanted the pulse of Charleston, you didn’t find it in council chambers or old men’s parlors. You found it here—in families arguing over sunscreen, in couples sipping canned cocktails from plastic cups, in neighbors whispering about whether their houses would still be here in twenty years.
“Let’s keep talking to people,” I said to Owen. “See what they’re worried about.”
He gave me a look. “You mean, let’s hand out cards until someone yells at us.”
“That, too.”
We stopped near a family hauling coolers and beach chairs closer to the dune line. The mother’s eyes flicked nervously to the water lapping higher than she’d expected, and I recognizedthat look—half denial, half dread. I explained what the king tide meant, how the wind forced water farther inland, how it wasn’t panic time, but it was proof of what we’d been saying.
She listened with her mouth tight, then nodded and thanked me, her husband hovering behind her with the wary expression of a man who didn’t like bad news.
A group of college kids nearby interrupted our path, one of them sloshing beer onto his own chest as he asked if this was “the big flood everyone kept whining about.” I gave him a quick primer, firm but polite, and when he realized I wasn’t backing down, he muttered something about tree-huggers and flopped back onto his towel.
Owen smirked. “I love public engagement days.”
“Shut up,” I said, but I was smiling, too.
Every conversation mattered, even the ones that went nowhere. Every word seeded the ground for what was coming. And whether or not I admitted it out loud, part of me knew that what we were doing today wasn’t just work. It was laying the foundation for something bigger—for me, for this city, for the Kennedy name I’d spent my life trying to both honor and escape.
The sun was slipping into that harsh, silver angle it always found at midday, reflecting off the water. My boots were gritty with salt, my hair stiff from the spray, but I kept moving down the line of umbrellas and coolers, talking, listening, explaining.
Somewhere up ahead, past the flags and the volleyball court still drowning in tidewater, the crowd thickened.
And that was where I was headed.
Because the people who came here every weekend—the mothers with restless toddlers, the retirees with their folding chairs, the tourists with their sunburns—they were the ones I needed to reach. The ones who would decide whether my maps became policy, whether my warnings became headlines, whether my future stayed behind a drafting table.
I adjusted the strap of my field bag, squinting into the wind as Owen caught up beside me. The day wasn’t done, not by a long shot.
2
ETHAN
