PART 2: THE NOTEBOOK, THE DRONE, AND THE SECRET MY FATHER BURIED

By morning, the world had decided I belonged to Nolan Campbell.

Reporters crowded beyond the iron gate before breakfast. News vans lined the private road. Camera lenses pointed toward Campbell House as if the windows themselves might confess.

I walked downstairs still wearing the champagne engagement gown because I had packed nothing else. It felt wrong on my body now, like a costume from a play whose ending had been canceled.

Nolan stood in the living room with his back to me, looking out over the grounds.

“Have you decided?” he asked.

I stopped in the doorway.

“Have you?”

He turned.

The gray morning light made him look colder, but also more human. There was a faint shadow beneath his eyes. He had not slept. Neither had I.

“How long do you intend to protect me?” I asked. “And why? You must be getting something from this. That’s how your world works.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

“You’re a smart woman, Mara.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“No,” he said. “It is a compliment before the answer.”

He told me Grant had married his sister years ago. Grant stayed inside Campbell Industries because family had weight, and Nolan, for all his power, had not yet found a replacement for blood. Preston was useful in public, reckless in private, and protected by a father who mistook entitlement for inheritance.

“My father?” I asked.

“Richard Whitmore wants proximity to Campbell power. From what I saw last night, he has wanted it longer than he has wanted anything for you.”

The words landed without mercy.

I did not flinch.

“And why did you stop the ring?”

Nolan moved closer.

“I saw you in the garden. The way you stood. The way you kept your face.”

He had not heard my father threaten me.

He had seen me.

There was a difference.

Michael entered to say the journalists had been admitted to the outer grounds. Nolan offered his hand. I looked at it for one second too long, then placed mine in it.

Outside, the cold struck my bare shoulders.

Questions flew from every direction.

“Mr. Campbell, why did you stop your nephew’s engagement?”

“Miss Whitmore, did you spend the night here?”

“Is this a scandal or a romance?”

Nolan raised one hand.

The crowd quieted.

“Miss Whitmore and my nephew Preston Atkins have no relationship,” he said. “The engagement between them was a misunderstanding that has been corrected.”

Whispers moved like water.

“I would like to announce my engagement to Miss Whitmore.”

The flashes exploded.

Beside me, his right hand trembled.

Not enough for the cameras.

Enough for me.

I did not look at it.

I simply moved my hand and covered his.

His fingers went still.

Nolan turned to me.

For one breath, the cameras probably caught something that looked tender.

Maybe it was.

Inside, after the doors closed, Nolan staggered.

Only slightly.

But I saw it.

“Are you all right?”

“No problem.”

That was my first clear proof that Nolan Campbell lied too.

I went to Whitmore Group that afternoon.

George, Nolan’s driver, took me. He was older, steady, watchful, with the kind of face that had been weathered into patience. He told me Mr. Campbell wanted the morning to be comfortable and safe.

I translated that easily.

Nolan wanted to know where I was.

Still, I got in the car.

At Whitmore Group, my father was waiting near my office.

“Mara,” he said with carefully warmed concern. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I know.”

“Is it true? The engagement?”

“Yes.”

His face flickered.

Not relief for me.

Opportunity.

“Do you understand what this means?” he asked, following me into my office. “Not for the engagement. For the company. For us.”

“There’s that word again,” I said. “Doors. You used it last night too.”

His warmth thinned.

“It is not wrong for a father to want opportunities for his daughter.”

“You want opportunities for yourself,” I said. “That’s different.”

“Mara—”

“Nolan Campbell doesn’t know me. He’s protecting me from a situation I didn’t choose. And you are standing in my office, not asking if I’m all right, not asking what I need, telling me how to leverage it.”

For the first time, my father looked at me like I was not behaving according to the file he had written.

“When you are Mrs. Campbell,” he said, “you will want for nothing.”

I laughed.

It came out sharp enough to hurt.

“I spent twenty-five years trying to matter to you,” I said. “And I never once considered that mattering to you might look exactly like this.”

I walked out before he could answer.

At my desk, I searched Nolan Campbell.

Five years ago, Evelyn Campbell died in a car explosion at the front gate of Campbell House. The news called it a suspected organized crime retaliation tied to a weapons deal Nolan had canceled. The article named Russian syndicate interest, disputed export channels, classified prototypes, and sources who refused to go on record.

Evelyn had been thirty-four.

Finance director of Campbell Defense.

Nolan’s wife.

She had died at the gate.

He had been twenty feet away.

The scar on his arm made sense then.

So did the tremor.

So did the house.

That evening, I brought wine to dinner because walking into a man’s house empty-handed felt wrong.

Nolan noticed.

“You brought wine.”

“I don’t go empty-handed where I’m a guest.”

“You’re thoughtful, Mara.”

Dinner was a cheeseburger.

Not steak. Not caviar. Not some formal meal meant to show me what Campbell wealth could buy.

A cheeseburger.

Short rib, mushroom sauce, brioche bun, exactly like the one from a tiny place near Stanford I had loved and never mentioned to anyone in Seattle.

I looked at him.

“This is my favorite burger.”

“Funny coincidence.”

“You researched me.”

“Yes.”

He did not pretend otherwise.

That honesty annoyed me because it left me no clean place to put my anger.

“You were arrested at Stanford,” he said. “November 2018. Protest outside a defense recruitment fair.”

I set my fork down.

“I had the record cleared.”

“I cleared the remaining trace this morning before reporters could find it.”

“Powerful of you.”

“I am,” he said simply.

Then he leaned back.

“But you are not as agreeable as you look. Your father missed it. Preston missed it. Everyone who thinks your silence is surrender has missed it.”

I stared at him.

“There is fire in you,” he said. “You just learned to hide it better than most people learn to hide anything.”

“I have ideals. That isn’t the same thing.”

Something lit in his eyes.

“Say my name.”

“No.”

“Nolan,” he corrected. “We’re engaged. Calling me Mr. Campbell in public will look wrong.”

“And in private?”

His mouth almost smiled.

“I would rather hear my name.”

I should not have given it to him.

I did anyway.

“Nolan.”

His jaw tightened once.

A tiny crack in the control.

“Better.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“I already have.”

That night, Preston came into my room.

I woke with his hand over my mouth.

“Don’t scream,” he whispered. “I just came to talk.”

The balcony door stood open behind him. Cold air moved the curtains. City light cut his face into planes of silver and shadow.

He sat on the edge of my bed like he had a right to be there.

“You looked beautiful sleeping,” he said.

I pushed myself upright, knees to my chest.

“What are you doing in my room?”

“I grew up in this house,” he said. “I know where the cameras aren’t.”

The word stayed in my mind.

Cameras.

He told me Nolan’s wife had died because Nolan backed out of a weapons deal that powerful people wanted completed. “They don’t come for the man directly,” Preston said. “They come for what he loves.”

Then he reached for my leg.

I slapped him before I thought.

He grabbed both my wrists.

“I’ve decided I actually want you, Mara.”

“Get off me.”

The door opened.

Nolan stood in the frame, white shirt, dark trousers, the hour of three in the morning written in the hard lines of his face.

“Take your hands off her,” he said, “unless you want me to kill you right here.”

Preston released me.

Nolan crossed the room and hit him once across the nose. Clean. Controlled. Brutal enough to end discussion.

Michael dragged Preston out.

The door closed.

Nolan sat on the edge of the bed and touched two fingers to the side of my throat, checking my pulse.

His hand was warm.

My pulse betrayed me.

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “I couldn’t keep you safe in my own house.”

“How did you know he was here?”

“I don’t sleep well.”

He turned toward the balcony.

I watched his back.

That was not an answer.

Later, I searched every corner of the room for cameras.

I found nothing.

That did not comfort me.

Downstairs, I found Nolan in his study. The house was dark, but the study lamp burned near the window. He stood looking at the iron gate with a glass in his hand.

“Can you not go outside?” I asked.

He did not answer immediately.

“Five years ago,” he said, “my wife died in front of those gates. I was twenty feet away.”

His voice stayed level.

That made it worse.

“Close enough to run toward her. Too far to do anything that mattered when I got there.”

“The scar?”

“I tried to pull her out.”

The room felt colder.

“You developed agoraphobia,” I said softly. “The body remembers the threat.”

His jaw hardened.

“I am not a lot of people.”

“You’re still a person.”

“I don’t need your pity.”

“I didn’t offer pity. I offered a name for the wound.”

He dismissed me.

But the next evening, when I stood in the garden and held out my hand, he crossed the threshold.

One step.

Then another.

His hand shook.

His face lost color.

“Look at me,” I said. “Nothing else.”

He looked at me.

Three steps into the garden.

Four.

For the first time in five years, Nolan Campbell stood outside his door.

Then the drone came.

Low over the waterline. Black, fast, humming like a mechanical wasp.

“What is that?” I asked.

Nolan’s voice sharpened.

“Mara, come here now.”

Small devices dropped into the grass.

Smoke.

Pressure bursts.

Sound like controlled thunder.

One landed four feet from me.

The blast hit my body before I understood it. My ears went white. The ground came up beneath my palms.

Then Nolan was there.

His arms locked around me. His body turned between me and the drone. His voice broke over my head.

“Michael, take it down now!”

He had run to me.

Outside.

Through his terror.

Through the memory of fire.

Inside, he cleaned the scrape on my knee with careful hands.

“You went outside,” I said. “You ran to me.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters.”

His face closed.

“I want you back at your apartment tomorrow. Security outside around the clock.”

“I want to stay.”

“We’re not having this conversation.”

Michael entered holding a phone.

The drone had a message painted underneath.

NO SECRET WEAPONS. NO SECRET VICTIMS. OVERSIGHT.

My stomach turned.

Oversight.

Elias.

My old life.

Elias Davis had been the boy I loved at Stanford. The activist who made me believe anger could become purpose. He called the next morning from a burner phone, asking me to look into Campbell Group’s Ravnik Republic facility. He said they believed Nolan planned illegal weapons testing on foreign soil.

“You’re inside Campbell’s world now,” he said. “Find out what it’s really for.”

I copied files from Nolan’s laptop that night while he was in a meeting.

I told myself it was conscience.

But conscience feels cleaner than that.

I found the Ravnik files.

They proved Nolan had suspended the facility pending independent civilian safety review. No live testing. No field trials. No activity involving civilian risk without written authorization from Nolan himself.

Elias had sent me looking for a monster.

I found a locked door.

Then, inside a hidden compartment in Nolan’s desk, I found Evelyn Campbell’s notebook.

I should have left it.

I did not.

Most of it was intimate in the quietest way.

Notes about meetings. Anniversaries. Her fear of never having a child. Nolan warming a scarf before placing it around her neck. Nolan kneeling to fix a shoe strap that hurt her ankle. Small proofs of a love that had not been performative.

One line near the end stopped me cold.

C47 destruction file doesn’t close on the Whitmore side.

Below it:

Missing Whitmore record. Ask Richard Whitmore directly.

My father’s name did not belong in a dead woman’s notebook.

But there it was.

The next morning, I asked him.

“Did Evelyn Campbell contact you before she died?”

My father’s face changed.

“Why are you asking me about Evelyn?”

“Because of C47.”

His hand moved on the desk.

Small.

Enough.

“What exactly have you seen?” he asked.

I left with the answer he did not mean to give me.

At Whitmore archives, Andy, the old records manager, pulled the file.

C47 had been marked for destruction. Campbell prototypes deemed too dangerous to exist. The destruction file should have closed.

It didn’t.

The prototypes had been delivered to Black River Holdings.

Registered contact: Grant Atkins.

Grant.

Nolan’s brother-in-law.

Evelyn’s killer had been eating dinner at the Campbell table for five years.

I texted Nolan.

I’m coming to you.

I never made it safely inside.

Michael found camera footage from the Whitmore garage: a hooded man reaching under George’s car. Nolan called. George slammed the brakes on the private road.

“Out of the car now,” George ordered.

I stepped onto the road and saw Nolan running toward me from the estate.

Running.

Past the front steps.

Toward the gate.

Toward the place Evelyn died.

“Mara!” he shouted.

I ran too.

Then came the click.

Nolan reached me as the car exploded.

Heat. Sound. Gravel. Smoke.

His arms closed around me and turned my body beneath his. We hit the road with his weight over me, his hand cupping the back of my head.

For one second, the world disappeared.

When I opened my eyes, Nolan’s face was above mine.

Blood ran from his temple.

Terror lived openly in his eyes.

“George?” I whispered.

“Alive,” Nolan said. “Michael has him.”

He carried me through the iron gates.

The gates he had not crossed in five years.

Behind us, George’s car burned where Evelyn’s had burned.

Inside, I gave him the file.

And Evelyn’s notebook.

His thumb stopped on her initials.

EJC.

I watched grief cross his face and bury itself before it could be witnessed fully.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I had to look. My family’s name was in it.”

He opened the marked page.

Read Evelyn’s note.

Then the file.

“Who owns Black River?” he asked.

“Grant Atkins.”

The stillness that settled over him was not control.

It was the soundless moment after a man finally finds the shape of his nightmare.

Grant had stolen the prototypes.

Whitmore Logistics had hidden the records.

Evelyn had found out.

Grant had killed her before she could tell Nolan.

And my father had helped destroy the file.

They had tried to marry me to Preston not because Preston loved me.

Not even because my father wanted influence.

Because if I discovered the Whitmore side of Evelyn’s investigation, I would be easier to control as Preston’s wife.

My father had not sold me for opportunity.

He had sold me for silence.

PART 3: THE TRIAL, THE OPEN GATE, AND THE WOMAN I BECAME

The trial took six months to begin.

During those months, the world tried to make our story simple.

The press called it a scandal.

A romance.

A power struggle.

A billionaire widower protecting a young heiress.

A forbidden affair born from a broken engagement.

The truth was stranger and sharper.

A dead woman’s notebook had survived because grief preserves what business tries to destroy. A daughter became dangerous when she stopped believing obedience was love. A man who had not crossed his own gate in five years ran toward fire because the past had tried to repeat itself with my name attached.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, Nolan and I stopped pretending.

Love did not arrive cleanly.

It came through smoke.

Through withheld truths.

Through his hands checking my injuries after the blast.

Through my fingers tracing the scar on his forearm.

Through the night he almost kissed me like hunger and then stepped back because he needed me to be certain.

“I want you,” I told him.

“I know,” he said.

“Then why are you stopping?”

“Because you have been in this house one week, and everything around you is burning.”

“I am not a child.”

“No,” he said, voice low. “You are the woman I want too much to take one second before you are sure.”

I hated him for that.

Then I loved him for it.

The first time he kissed me without stopping, it was not in the study or the garden or beneath a chandelier. It was in the kitchen at two in the morning after neither of us could sleep.

I had come downstairs for water.

He was there already, standing barefoot in dark trousers and a white shirt, one hand braced on the counter, staring at nothing.

“Does it ever stop?” I asked.

He looked up.

“What?”

“The moment before it happens again.”

He understood.

“No,” he said. “But it gets quieter.”

I stood beside him.

The kitchen smelled like coffee, rain, and lemon soap. The house was sleeping around us, or pretending to. Outside, the gates stood open with security posted at either side.

“I’m scared,” I admitted.

He turned fully toward me.

“Of Grant?”

“Of everything. Of my father. Of court. Of headlines. Of you.”

His jaw tightened.

“Of me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I could love you,” I said. “And I don’t know whether that makes me brave or stupid.”

For once, Nolan Campbell had no immediate answer.

Then he touched my face with the back of his fingers.

“Maybe both.”

I laughed.

It came out broken.

He kissed me then, slowly at first, like a question asked carefully. I answered by stepping closer. His hands found my waist, not claiming, holding. Mine rose to his shoulders.

No cameras.

No guests.

No contracts.

Only the sound of rain and two people who had survived different fires recognizing the heat in each other.

When we married, it was not for the press.

We signed papers quietly before the trial because I wanted my name beside his when we faced the room that had destroyed Evelyn and tried to destroy me. Edith cried. George stood stiffly with watery eyes and pretended the allergies were bad. Michael signed as witness and said, “About time,” which made Nolan threaten to fire him.

My dress was simple.

No champagne silk.

No diamonds chosen by men with invoices behind their smiles.

Just ivory, clean lines, long sleeves, my hair pinned back loosely.

Nolan wore black.

Of course he did.

After the ceremony, we stood in the garden where the drone had fallen and the grass had been replaced.

“Regret it yet?” I asked.

He looked at the open gate.

Then at me.

“Not once.”

“Give it time.”

His mouth curved.

“There she is.”

The courtroom was full the day Evelyn’s notebook entered evidence.

Grant Atkins looked impeccable. Dark suit. Silver tie. Face composed in the way men look when they still believe dignity can outlast documents.

Preston sat behind him, trying to look bored. The bruising from Nolan’s punch had faded, but his eyes had not recovered their arrogance completely.

My father sat at the defense table with his attorney, hands folded, face gray.

He had aged ten years in six months.

Not from remorse.

From exposure.

The prosecutor began with the prototypes.

C47.

A set of advanced weapons components ordered destroyed after internal safety reviews warned they could be modified for unauthorized field use. Nolan had signed the destruction order himself. Evelyn, as finance director, tracked the invoice discrepancies and noticed that the destruction file did not close through Whitmore Logistics.

The prototypes had not been destroyed.

They had been moved through Black River Holdings.

Grant’s shell company.

Evelyn wrote the note in her private book.

Three days later, she died at the front gate.

The courtroom screens displayed her handwriting.

Ask Richard Whitmore directly.

My father did not look at me.

I looked at him.

The prosecutor showed the altered Whitmore record. Deleted shipping entry. Backdated destruction stamp. Internal memo signed by my father authorizing “archive correction.”

Archive correction.

Such a clean phrase for helping bury a woman.

Then came the money.

Black River payments routed through shell accounts. Grant’s private communications. Messages to Preston instructing him to keep “the Whitmore girl” close if Richard’s daughter ever started asking questions.

I felt Nolan’s hand find mine beneath the table.

Not to hold me down.

To remind me I was not alone.

Preston testified under plea agreement.

He wore humility badly.

He admitted Grant told him to marry me because I was “manageable.” He admitted my father knew I might eventually access Whitmore archives. He admitted entering my room at Campbell House to frighten me into dependence.

He tried to explain.

Of course he did.

Men like Preston always believe explanation can turn rot into complexity.

“I never meant to hurt her,” he said.

The prosecutor looked at him.

“You entered her bedroom through a balcony at night and grabbed her wrists.”

Preston swallowed.

“I was emotional.”

“You were useful,” the prosecutor said. “To your father.”

That landed.

Because Preston hated being reduced to the one thing he had tried to make me.

Then my father testified.

He had been offered a reduced sentence if he cooperated fully. He told the court Grant came to him after Evelyn’s death. Told him the file would destroy both Whitmore Logistics and Campbell Industries if it resurfaced. Told him the prototypes were already gone and nothing could bring Evelyn back.

“So you destroyed the record,” the prosecutor said.

“I corrected an archive.”

The prosecutor let the silence sit.

“Mr. Whitmore, did you know your daughter was being pressured to marry Preston Atkins partly to keep her from uncovering your role in that destroyed record?”

My father’s mouth tightened.

“I wanted what was best for her.”

For the first time that day, I laughed.

It was small.

But the entire courtroom heard.

My father looked at me then.

Not with guilt.

With irritation.

As if even now, even here, my reaction was the problem.

The prosecutor asked again.

“Did you know?”

My father’s answer came after five seconds.

“Yes.”

There it was.

The word that ended whatever remained of the old daughter inside me.

Not because I had believed he was innocent.

Because hearing him confess proved he had known exactly what he was doing.

He had walked me toward Preston under white roses not because he misunderstood love.

Because he understood control.

And chose it.

Grant did not testify.

Men like him rarely do when the documents speak too loudly.

The second car bomb sealed him.

Same vendor shell.

Same trigger style.

Same blast signature.

The bomb that killed Evelyn and the bomb meant for me were connected by arrogance. Grant had reused his own method because he believed grief, fear, and money could make people look elsewhere again.

He was wrong.

The verdict came after four days.

Guilty.

Murder of Evelyn Campbell.

Attempted murder of Mara Whitmore Campbell.

Conspiracy.

Weapons diversion.

Obstruction.

Financial fraud.

Grant received life without parole.

Preston received ten years.

My father received ten years for evidence destruction, conspiracy, and obstruction.

When they led him away, he looked back once.

I waited for apology.

For grief.

For one flicker of the father I had spent my life inventing out of scraps.

Instead, his eyes said only this:

How could you?

And I finally understood.

He had never seen me as the daughter he betrayed.

Only as the asset that failed to remain loyal.

Outside the courthouse, cameras waited.

“Mara, do you forgive your father?”

I stopped.

Nolan stood beside me.

Not in front of me.

That mattered more than anyone knew.

“No,” I said. “Some people confuse forgiveness with giving them another chance to use you. I’m done being useful to men who never loved me.”

The clip went everywhere.

But the moment that mattered happened later, quietly, at home.

Nolan stood in the living room looking at Evelyn’s framed photograph on the buffet. I had moved it there myself from the study.

He turned to me.

“You brought her out.”

“She was part of you.”

His eyes searched mine.

“You’re not jealous?”

I looked at the woman in the photograph, laughing in sunlight.

“No. She loved you before I knew you existed. And maybe she saved us both.”

His face changed.

I stepped closer.

“Great love doesn’t disappear because another one arrives. It teaches the heart how to recognize the real thing when it comes again.”

Nolan pulled me to him and kissed me like a man who had finally forgiven himself for living.

Outside, the gates stayed open.

Not unlocked.

Open.

The house changed after that.

Not all at once. Houses, like people, do not heal because someone declares the danger gone. The hallway outside the study still carried old silence. Nolan still woke some nights reaching for a past he could not change. I still flinched when my phone lit with unknown numbers.

But morning by morning, the walls remembered different things.

Coffee in the kitchen.

Edith humming under her breath.

George recovering and pretending his limp was “weather-related.”

Michael teaching me how to spot a surveillance tail and looking offended when I learned too quickly.

Nolan walking the garden.

At first with me.

Then sometimes alone.

The first time he reached the gate and placed his hand on the iron, I stood three steps behind him. Close enough to come if he asked. Far enough to let the moment belong to him.

He closed his eyes.

I saw his fingers tremble.

Then still.

“I thought crossing it meant leaving her behind,” he said.

“You’re not.”

“I know that now.”

He opened his eyes and looked back at me.

“You taught me that.”

“No,” I said. “Evelyn did. I just reminded you.”

He smiled then.

Small.

Real.

The gate opened wider.

A year after the verdict, our daughter was born on a stormy night that made the nurses joke she had inherited both my timing and Nolan’s taste for drama.

We named her Evelyn Grace Campbell.

Nolan held her like she was made of breath and light.

“She has your eyes,” he whispered.

“She has your stubbornness.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“She screamed at three doctors before breakfast.”

He looked down at our daughter with awe so naked it broke something open in me.

“Then she’s definitely yours.”

I laughed, and the sound filled the hospital room.

My father wrote from prison once.

I did not read past the first line.

Preston wrote too.

I burned his letter in the fireplace unopened.

Grant never wrote.

Men like Grant do not apologize to people they failed to destroy.

As for Elias and Oversight, I sent the Ravnik documents legally through counsel after Nolan approved independent public monitoring of the facility. The plant opened under civilian oversight and international audit. Elias never called again.

Good.

Some people belong to your past because they only loved the version of you that served their cause.

I had served enough.

Sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet and Evelyn Grace slept in the nursery, I stood by the window overlooking the gates.

They no longer looked like a boundary.

They looked like proof.

Proof that a wound can become a doorway.

Proof that love does not erase the dead.

Proof that the girl who almost accepted a ring she never wanted had become a woman who chose her own name, her own house, her own family, her own future.

The world still called Nolan Campbell dangerous.

They were right.

He was dangerous to men who hid weapons behind contracts.

Dangerous to families who buried evidence under blood.

Dangerous to anyone who mistook grief for weakness.

But with me, he was gentle in the ways that mattered.

Careful with my silence.

Patient with my anger.

Never asking me to become smaller so he could feel powerful.

And me?

I stopped mistaking obedience for love.

I stopped confusing usefulness with worth.

I stopped lowering my hand just because a man expected a ring to fit.

The night Nolan stopped my engagement, everyone thought he saved me.

Maybe he did.

But the real rescue came later.

It came when I opened the notebook.

When I read the file.

When I looked my father’s lie in the face.

When I finally believed my life was not a contract to be signed by men who never asked what I wanted.

Some wounds never vanish.

They become gates.

And if you are lucky, one day you find someone brave enough to stand beside you while they open.