The Salt-Wife Pact

In the storm-lashed Emerald Archipelago, a disgraced public defender uncovers a billionaire’s private island where impoverished women are forced into surrogacy. After a botched birth kills a carrier, the subsequent trial—The Crown v. Aldric Vane—becomes a crucible for a conspiracy that stretches from sea-locked birthing chambers to the highest courts. Each survivor emerges with a wound in the soul that can never be sutured, an endless quest for a new beginning that always slips away like salt in water.