What do you do with a house full of ghosts once the ghosts finally leave?
Marin could have sold the estate and walked away from every memory it held. Nobody would have blamed her for it. But she was her father's daughter, and Silas Callaway had never once been a man who tore things down. He built.
So she rebuilt.
She kept the wide staircases and the tall windows the house had always had—the kind of craftsmanship that takes a lifetime of skilled, uncredited hands to produce—and she filled the rooms with something the house had never actually held before: purpose that belonged to people who had spent their lives working with their hands the way her father once had.
She turned the estate into a training academy and residence for the sons and daughters of dock workers, shipwrights, freight drivers, and warehouse crews: the people who kept an entire industry running and rarely got invited to stand inside the buildings their labor made possible. She named it Callaway House, after a man whose name had never once appeared on a single boat he'd helped design.
At the front entrance, inside a small glass case, she placed the brass compass her father had cleaned on a kitchen table decades earlier.
One afternoon, a young woman training in the maritime program stopped in front of that case, frowning slightly. "Ms. Ashford," she said, using the only name she knew, "why keep something so small in a building this size? You could put anything in that case."
Marin knelt beside her so they were closer to eye level, and there was an entire life folded into the smile she offered before answering.