It took me a moment to realize one of the girls in the group was passed out, her head tipped back against the wall, and that her friends had remained with her, here. A large salad bowl rested beside her, and I realized it was in case she vomited. Ellie placed a wet washcloth on the girl’s forehead, and I looked away.
There was Greg Randolph sitting on the couch, his arm behind a girl who appeared to be on the cusp of eighteen, her gaze turned up to his, like he was everything worth knowing.
And there was Connor crossing the room, heading for the door, his phone out in his hand.
“Connor,” I called before I could think better of it. When he turned, I saw him as Sadie might, without the layers and years that had come between us. I saw him as a girl looking out over the balcony of Harbor Club, watching a man step off his boat, self-assured and perfectly himself. A man who would act exactly the same whether someone was watching or not. The rarest thing.
He didn’t care who Sadie was, who any of them were. He was someone, she knew, who once was mine. The only thing left here that still belonged to me, and me alone. And I knew she had to have him.
I pushed off from the wall, met him in the foyer. “Don’t go yet,” I said.
His head tipped to the side, but he didn’t say no. For all our history, I knew his weakness as well as he knew mine. Connor believed in a linear life. He’d known what he would do from the time he was a kid: He would finish school, he would work summers for his dad and for any fisherman looking for a second deckhand. He would fall in love with a girl he’d known his entire life, and she with him, just as his parents had done before.
He was unprepared when his life veered off track.
I smiled as I had once before, when he tipped me backward at the bonfire, kissed me in front of our friends—his mouth, a grin.
I knew, same as he did then: Things like this required a bold move. Me, in a crowd of people—in front of Parker Loman and everyone in their world—whispering in his ear, asking him to follow me down the hall.
My hand trailed down his arm until my fingers linked with his, and he did not resist. I walked slowly, in case anyone wanted to see. In case Greg Randolph would turn from the couch, raise an eyebrow, say, That’s the guy I saw Sadie with. But no one did, and I didn’t even care. I was high on the knowledge that he wanted me still, even after all this time.
It was dark in the downstairs bedroom, and I turned the lock. Didn’t say anything, for fear it might break the trance.
I pulled his face down to mine, but the feel of his kiss was still a surprise. I could taste the liquor on him. Feel the looseness of his limbs as I pushed his shirt over his head. The malleable quality of him, where I could slide myself into his life. The power I held—that I could alter the course of everything to follow.
But he was the one who guided me toward the bed. Who whispered in my ear—hi—like he’d been waiting all this time just to say it.
In the dark, I wasn’t sure whether he was imagining me or Sadie, but it didn’t matter. His fingers just below my hips, brushing over a tattoo he couldn’t see.
Nothing lasts forever. Everything is temporary. You and me and this.
Connor was no longer the Connor I knew—and neither was I. Six years had passed, and we had become something new. Six years of new experiences, life lived and learned. Six years to sharpen into the person you would become. But there were shadows of the person I knew: In the arm around my waist, holding me to him. And his fingers faintly drumming against my skin after, before his hand went still.
Neither of us spoke then. We lay there, side my side, until a noise from out in the hall jarred us both. A hand at the locked doorknob. I bolted upright.
“Avery—” he said, but I got up first, scooping up my clothes, so I wouldn’t have to hear the excuse. I walked straight for the attached bathroom, so I wouldn’t have to see the regret on his face. Stood in the bathroom that was still damp from when I’d cleaned the mess of towels and water earlier in the night with Parker.
I waited until Connor had enough time to get changed, to leave. He knocked once on the bathroom door, but I didn’t respond. I turned on the shower, pretending I hadn’t heard. Kept staring into the mirror, trying to see beneath the fog to the person I had become.
When I finally stepped outside, he was gone. I didn’t know where he went after that. Couldn’t find him in the sea of faces all blurring together in the living room.
I imagined him driving back to see Sadie, telling her. I imagined her finding out what I had done. What I would say: You never told me you were with him. Sorry, a shrug, didn’t know. Or: I was drunk—absolving myself. He didn’t complain—to hurt her. Or the truth: Connor Harlow is not for you. What I should’ve said long ago: Don’t.
Don’t forget that I once burned my own life to the ground piece by piece. Don’t think I won’t do it again.
Everything’s easier the second time around.
It was then, as I was running this conversation through my mind—all the things I would say to her, my resolve tightening, strengthening—that Parker caught my gaze over the crowd, tipping his head toward the front door. Warning me.
Two men in the open doorway, hats in their hands.
The police were here after all.
SUMMER
2018
CHAPTER 21
I paced a circle in the living room of the Sea Rose, phone held to my ear. All the information fighting for space. My grandmother’s account. The way Sadie and I had met, even. Everything was shifting.
Connor’s line kept ringing, and I hung up just as the call went to voicemail. He’d be working now, even though it was Sunday. People need to eat. What he’d always say when we were younger, when I was annoyed by his hours and his commitment to them.
The ocean was an addiction for him—a shudder rolling through him, like that first sip of alcohol coursing through the bloodstream.
I locked the front door to the Sea Rose when I left, but I brought the flash drive with me, scared to have it out of my possession. It was the closest I’d felt to Sadie since her death. My footsteps tracing her path, my hands where hers had been. My mind struggling to keep up.
All the secrets she’d never shared with me—but she had been wrong about this one. If she’d asked, I would’ve told her: I was not a Loman.
I would’ve explained that I looked like my mother, yes, with the dark hair and the olive skin, but my eyes were my father’s. That my mother stopped here and put down roots not for that thing she was chasing, as she claimed, but because she met a guy, a teacher, and he was so earnest in his beliefs, so sure this was the place he belonged and that he was doing the thing he was meant to be doing. And his earnestness made her drop her guard, see the world through his eyes: that nothing would happen that hadn’t been planned—and then she ended up pregnant with me.
It was not a perfect marriage, not a perfect life. It was always there, in the unspoken places of every argument—the reason she had stayed. The life she was living and the one she seemed to be searching for still.
She had given the last fourteen years of her life to my father, and Littleport, and me. They did not have money, I knew, because it was in their arguments, voiced aloud. The line between art and commerce. The side hustle. My mom worked in the gallery where her paintings hung, made more behind the cash register than behind the easel.
I remembered my dad dropping me off once at the gallery in the summer when I was young, on his way to go tutor. My mom stood behind the counter, and she seemed surprised to see us there. You were supposed to be home by now, he’d said. Her face was pinched, confused. We could use the overtime, she’d said. Then, looking down at me, her face slipping, Sorry, I forgot.
There was no hush money coming in. There was no strain of a man in the shadows.
There was only me, running free in the woods behind our home, learning to swim against a cold current, with the buoy of salt water. Sledding headfirst down Harbor Drive before the plows ca
me through, believing this world was mine, mine, mine.
My way of seeing the world, to my mother’s disappointment, was always more like my father’s—pragmatic and unbending. It was why I was so sure she would’ve loved Sadie. Here was someone who could look at me and see something else, something new.
Only now I understood what Sadie believed she was seeing that very first time.
Six years, she must’ve thought she knew who I was. Parading me around her house, taunting her parents with it, claiming me as her own. A dig at her mother; a power move with her father. Six years, and she’d finally discovered the truth.
At the start of her last summer, she’d bought two of those commercial DNA test kits that report your genealogy while also screening for a bunch of preexisting diseases. Just to be sure, she’d said. We’ll feel so much better after. Who knows, maybe we have some long-lost relatives in common.
I was hesitant. As much as I liked to track things forward and backward step by step, I didn’t know if I wanted to see something like that coming. Something untreatable, an inevitability that I had no power to stop. But how did one say no to Sadie, sitting across from you on the bed of your house that was really her house, really her bed? Spitting into a test tube until my mouth was dry, my throat parched. Handing over the very core of my being.
It took over a month to get the results back, and by then I’d almost forgotten about it. Until she barged in and told me to check my email. Good news, I’m not dying. At least not of any of these eighteen conditions, she’d said. And surprise, I am very, very Irish. In case my sunburn led you to believe otherwise.
She watched over my shoulder as I checked, then showed me how she entered her info into a genealogy database. Maybe we’re distant cousins, she said. Waiting, holding her breath, while I did the same.
We weren’t.
I saw the reflection of her face in the screen of my laptop, the brow knitting together, the corners of her mouth turning down. But I was too preoccupied with the fact that my family tree branched outward suddenly. I was the only one left of the relatives I knew. My mother had cut off contact with her family before I was born, and they hadn’t even come to the funeral. But here, I saw something new stretched before me—the tie of blood, connecting me to a world of people out there whom I’d never known existed.
I didn’t realize then that Sadie had been expecting something different. That she wanted me to know the truth, and this was the way to do it. There would be no turning back then. No more secrets. Everything and everyone exposed.
But she’d been wrong.
I couldn’t reconcile the payment to my grandmother with anything that made sense. And there was a second payment to someone else who used the same bank.
The summer after her first year of college, Sadie had interned for her father—that was when I met her. She had been working in his office, in his accounts. Had she stumbled upon this and found me because of it?
What did she understand when she realized she was wrong after all?
* * *
HARBOR DRIVE WAS BUZZING with midmorning activity. It was the last Sunday before Labor Day weekend—and by the time I found a place to park, I probably could’ve walked from the Sea Rose.
Though the streets were crowded, everything felt vaguely unfamiliar. A sea of ever-changing faces, week by week, somehow shifting the backdrop with their presence. I wove through the crowd on the sidewalks, headed toward the docks, but saw a familiar figure standing still in the bustle of activity across the way. Dark pants and a button-down, sunglasses pulled over his eyes, feet shoulder width apart, head moving slowly back and forth—Detective Ben Collins was here.
I sucked in a breath, dipped into the first store on my right. The bell chimed overhead, and I found myself in the long, snaking line of Harbor Bean—the favorite coffee shop of locals and visitors alike. In the fall, the hours would shift and the prices would change. It was mostly a place for the visitors right now. None of us wanted to pay more than something was worth.
I peered over my shoulder as the line shifted forward, but I had lost sight of the detective through the front glass windows. There were too many people passing back and forth, too many voices, too much commotion. “Next?”
“Coffee,” I answered, and the teenager behind the counter raised an eyebrow. He tipped his head to the chalkboard menu behind him, but the script all blurred together. “I don’t care,” I said. “Just pick something with caffeine.”
“Name?” he asked, pen poised over a Styrofoam cup.
“Avery.”
His hand hovered for a second before he resumed writing, and I wondered if he’d heard something. Knew something.
“Well, hey there.” A woman’s voice from a table against the brick wall. It was Ellie Arnold, smiling like we were friends. She was sitting across from Greg Randolph, who grinned like he was in on some joke. There was a third man hunched over the table with his back to me.
The teenager handed me my credit card, and the third man stood as I approached. And then I understood: It was Parker Loman, empty cup in hand.
“Avery,” he said, and then continued past. As if I were an old plot point. As if I were just someone caught living on his property when I shouldn’t have been there; as if I weren’t his sister’s best friend, hadn’t worked with him for years; as if he hadn’t kissed me two nights earlier.
It was a skill of the entire family, creating the story and owning it. Sadie herself, welcoming me to the Breakers. And now Parker, probably spreading this new story about me. I wondered if everyone at the table, behind the counter, out on the docks, knew that I had just, an hour ago, been fired.
Still, I almost felt bad for him, thinking about what his own father said of him. Parker had been robbed of the chance to want something badly.
Ambition wasn’t just in the work. Ambition, I believed, was tinged with a sort of desperation, something closer to panic. Like a dormant switch deep inside that could be forced only by necessity. Something to push up against until, finally, you caught.
“Here, have a seat.” Greg Randolph pushed Parker’s now empty chair with his foot, the metal scraping against concrete. I perched on the edge, waiting for my order. “How’ve you been?” he asked, grin firmly in place. “I mean, since Friday.”
The teenager behind the counter called my name, and I excused myself for my drink. It was something mixed with caramel, steaming hot, a spice I couldn’t place. When I sat down again, I ignored his last question.
Greg gestured toward Ellie. “We were just talking about the party coming up the week after next. Will you be joining us at Hawks Ridge?” He tilted his head to the side, and I took a sip. The Plus-One party must be at his place this year. Hawks Ridge. A group of exclusive estates set on a rise of land closer to the mountains, with a distant view of the sea.
“Probably not,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said, fake-sighing. I knew why I was wanted. For the drama, for the scene, so someone could say: Look, Avery Greer, can you believe she showed her face? So someone could corner me with a shot of liquor and say: I know a secret about you.
“It won’t be the same,” Greg went on, stuffing the last bite of a messy muffin into his mouth. “First Ellie, now you,” he added, even as he was chewing.
“You’re not going?” I turned to Ellie, surprised.
She shook her head, looking down at the table, then pressed her pointer finger to a crumb on the table, dropping it onto her plate. “Not after last year.”
Sadie, I thought. Finally, someone with the sense to know this was in bad taste. Another year, another party, as if nothing at all had changed.
No one else seemed to know the truth: that one of them had done something to Sadie.
“It was an accident, love,” Greg said to Ellie, voice low. “And I have a backup generator. The power’s not going to go out up there.”
“Wait. You don’t want to go this year because you fell in the pool?” I asked her.
She
cut her eyes to me, sharp and mean. “I didn’t fall. Someone pushed me.” Angry that it seemed I had forgotten her claim, and I had. Last year, I’d thought she was being overdramatic, wanting attention, like Sadie had warned. But nothing about that night was as it seemed.
“Sorry,” I said.
But even Greg Randolph wasn’t having it. He smirked as he raised the cup to his lips. “Probably bumped into you in the dark, by accident.” And then to me, in a fake whisper, “She had quite a bit to drink, I seem to recall.”
“Fuck you, Greg,” she said. “I remember just fine.”
Everything was shifting then. My memory of that night: The lights going out, the power grid tripped. A commotion. A scream.
Did someone leave in the chaos? Was someone coming back?
I pushed away from the table abruptly. “I have to go.” I had to talk to someone else who had been there, who had seen everything. Connor, maybe. Except he didn’t understand all the intricacies. The ins and outs of the Lomans’ world.
But there was someone else. Someone who was there. Who saw everything. Who was dangerous, I thought, in the things they had noticed.
And who, after all of that, did not come back.
CHAPTER 22
Sadie once said she never knew whom to trust. Whether someone wanted to be her friend because of what she stood for. Whether they were drawn to the girl or the name. That life I’d watched from outside Littleport. The promise of something.
She had loved a boy once, at boarding school. She told me about him that first summer, like she was whispering a fairy tale. But he lived overseas, and after graduation they had broken up; he did not come back for her. I heard other names over the years, during college. But never with that same fervent whisper, the gleam in her eye, the belief that she loved and was loved.
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