Between Oceans

Crooks, Creeps, and Crazies on the Isthmus

Between Oceans: Crooks; Creeps, and Crazies on the Isthmus
Expats on the Isthmus — Book Two

“I thought escaping was enough.
I didn’t realize I would spend years turning my life into a manuscript and my mistakes into currency.”

Paradise is easier to survive once you stop pretending it’s perfect.
Three years after leaving Malpaís, Maya Warwick lives alone in a stone farmhouse outside Aix-en-Provence, surrounded by lavender fields, Mediterranean light, and a past she prefers to keep carefully edited. Her husband Lucien is dead. Officially, there was no body, only a fragment of bone recovered from the sea. For Maya, that was sufficient.
She tells herself she merely left at the right moment. That erasing a warning and its traces was self-preservation, not participation. Most days, she’s content with that distinction. On others, her conscience resurfaces -- persistent and impossible to silence, demanding she decide whether what she feels is guilt, regret… or relief.
Her cultivated exile fractures with the arrival of William Balthazar Hastings, a man who knows names he shouldn’t, speaks in half-truths, and carries the quiet authority of intelligence services. He wants Maya back in Malpaís. She refuses, until he reveals that Lucien’s missing cell phone has been recovered, and its history reconstructed, exposing her secret.
The leverage is exact. And devastating.

Forced back to the Isthmus, Maya returns to a world of expats, fugitives, and covert agendas, and eventually to Hastings himself, whose interest proves as calculated as it is temporary. When he ghosts her after getting what he needed, Maya is left with familiar wreckage and an old, reliable instinct.
She writes.
Because in Malpaís, experience is never wasted.
Secrets don’t stay buried.
And stories, once told, have a way of becoming weapons.
A continuation of Between Volcanoes — Love and Revenge on the Isthmus.