The Last Ferry to Halcyon House - A Found-Family Fantasy Novella About Secrets, Second Chances, and the One Rule Worth Breaking

SHE WAS SENT TO CLOSE THEIR FILE. SHE NEVER EXPECTED TO FIND HER OWN NAME BURIED INSIDE IT. Marigold Voss has exactly one rule she has never broken in nine years at the Bureau of Anomalous Minors: follow the file, not your feelings. So when she's handed an eleven-year-old case nobody else wants - an unlicensed guardian, four children with gifts dangerous enough to need watching, and a remote island reachable only by a once-a-week ferry - she packs her clipboard and intends to do exactly what she always does.
Observe. Document. Recommend a clean closure. Leave before any of it becomes personal. She does not intend to notice that this house runs better than anything she's ever audited. She does not intend to keep finding reasons to stay another day, and another, and another. And she absolutely does not intend to ask why a Bureau Director three pay grades above her own supervisor personally pulled this file out of eleven years of silence - and sealed half of it before anyone else could read what was inside.
The deadline she's given is one week. The team that actually shows up arrives early - and it isn't her supervisor who steps off that boat first. By the time Mari understands why one child in this house has been quietly disappearing a little more every night, and why a forty-year-old sealed file keeps circling closer to her own name than any case file ever should, there won't be time left to write anything careful at all.
She will have exactly one rule left to break - the one she swore at nine years old she would never touch again - and about ninety seconds to decide whether the thing she has spent her whole life calling dangerous is the only thing left that can save this family. What does Mari Voss become when the file finally opens - and the secret inside it turns out to be her own?