The Last Town Hall

When a $78 million deal to sell Tidehaven's public waterfront — its promenade, its pier, and its beloved fifty-year-old aquatic center — is quietly posted at 4:58 on a Friday before a holiday weekend, chief of staff Maria Velasquez has five days to decide whether to serve the mayor she helped elect or the town she grew up in. As she assembles an unlikely coalition — a law clerk who counts things, a burned-out data-center engineer who wrote the industry's playbook, a union boss repaying an eighteen-year-old debt, and a seventeen-year-old scholarship kid who goes off-script on live cameras — Maria discovers the agreement's fine print is engineered to kill the pool slowly, quietly, and deniably.
What she doesn't yet know is that the deal's architect, developer Lucinda Hyde — a woman who buried her hometown and her father and carries both in a sterling pill case — has been in an eight-year affair with Mayor Elliott, a man still trying to be the good guy in a story that no longer has one. When Maria wakes to find the aquatic center chained shut by an order no one will claim, the question that will burn through the season ignites: her oldest ally is either lying to her, or he's no longer the one holding the pen in his own city.
A civic drama about who owns a town — the people who love it, or the people who can afford it.