“That’s the spirit,” she said, linking her arm through mine as we stood.
We walked out of the café together into a morning so beautiful it almost felt staged, sunlight spilling over the cobblestones, the bay glittering beyond the palms, the whole island dressed up like it had something to prove. Whitney tucked herself against my side with such easy affection that for a moment the unease quieted. For a moment, I let myself believe what she wanted meto believe: that maybe we had survived enough to deserve this. That maybe luxury was not a lie, just a reward that had finally arrived. That maybe paradise, if you held it carefully enough, could stay clean.
But even then, with Whitney laughing beside me and the sun warm on our skin, I felt it.
The shadow of unease creeping back in, reminding me that even in paradise, there are always secrets lurking just beneath the surface.
Chapter Forty-Four
I’m sitting at our usual table at La Madeleine, half-listening to the soft clink of champagne flutes and silverware while the women around me drift in and out of the sort of conversation that passes for intimacy in Tigertail Beach Estates. The café is full in that elegant, curated way it always is, sunlight pouring through the front windows and turning everything golden: the polished glassware, the white plates, the buttery layers of croissants stacked in baskets no one really touches. Tara is to my left, Lisa across from me, Julia and Stephanie beside her, all of them dressed too beautifully for a weekday lunch, all of them drinking Veuve Clicquot as though it were sparkling water and not a hundred and fifty dollars a bottle. It should feel normal. Familiar. Instead it all feels slightly out of focus, as though I’ve slipped half a step outside my own life and can no longer quite find my way back in.
Today, as it has been for the last month, the subject is Phillip. His death has become the social event of the season in the cruelest possible way, something whispered over cappuccinos and picked apart over pastry, his gunshot wound elevated into neighborhood mythology because no one has anythingbetter to do than turn other people’s tragedies into table talk. A month has passed since he was found dead in his front yard, blood seeping into the same immaculate lawn he used to pay men to manicure twice a week, and still the police haven’t named a suspect, haven’t announced an arrest, haven’t done much of anything beyond letting the speculation bloom. Here, in this beautiful little pocket of privilege, uncertainty is its own kind of entertainment.
“I heard it was a business deal gone wrong,” Lisa says, lowering her voice as though secrecy gives her more credibility. Her nails tap lightly against the rim of her flute, pink and gleaming and absurdly delicate for the kind of conversation she’s trying to have. “Phillip made a lot of enemies. Everyone knows that. He wasn’t exactly ethical.”
Stephanie makes a face and takes another measured sip of champagne. “Please. Ethical has nothing to do with men like Phillip. He was smart, that’s all. Men like that know how to move money, how to make it grow, how to keep themselves protected. If he was killed over a business deal, it was probably someone outside the Estates. You know how these things happen.”
Julia leans in, her eyes lighting with the kind of conspiratorial pleasure she always takes in anything sordid. “Honestly, it was probably The Seminoles. Who else rolls through a neighborhood like that and makes a point of being seen? They were basically announcing it.”
The Seminoles.
The word moves through me like something cold. My brother’s club. My brother, whom I haven’t spoken to since Phillip died, not because I don’t want to, but because every time I think about calling him I’m hit with the sickening possibility that whatever he tells me will only make things worse. I tell myself his silence is protective, that if he knows anything he’s keepingme away from it for my own good. But another part of me wonders if that’s too generous. Another part of me wonders what he knows, what he’s heard, whether he’s closer to this than I can bear to imagine. The thought leaves a metallic taste in my mouth.
“They say it might’ve been a drifter,” Lisa says, dropping her voice even further, as if speaking nonsense softly somehow makes it less ridiculous. “Or maybe a robbery gone wrong. Tigertail isn’t as safe as it used to be.”
“That’s absurd,” Stephanie says immediately. “Nothing was taken. The house wasn’t touched. If it was robbery, they forgot the robbery part.”
I let them talk. Their voices wash over me in soft, expensive waves while I swirl my champagne and don’t drink it. They’re doing what women like this always do, dressing instinct up as intelligence and gossip up as concern, but none of them know anything. None of them even seem to care beyond how thrilling it is to live in a neighborhood now touched by not one mysterious death, but two. No one says Whitney’s name. No one even tries.
That’s the part that hurts more than I expect.
Phillip’s death has swallowed hers whole.
A man shot in his front yard is dramatic in a way a yacht explosion is not, at least not to people like this. There’s something cleaner, more cinematic, about a bullet wound than a body lost to water and flame. And so the story has shifted, as stories always do, away from the woman who disappeared into the bay and toward the man who bled into his own lawn. Whitney, my best friend, the person who knew me better than anyone has ever known me, has become a footnote in the saga of Phillip Winthrop’s violent end.
I miss her so badly some days it feels like physical weakness, like my body is missing an organ and no one else has noticed theblood loss. She was the only one who really understood me, the only one who knew what it meant to live in the space between two lives and belong fully to neither. She knew my secrets. She knew my shame. She knew the parts of me even Bennett has never touched. And now she’s gone, and I’m sitting here at a table full of women in Dior and Cartier pretending not to scream.
“I heard they’re trying to pin it on Chrissy,” Stephanie says, and the words bring my attention back sharply.
Chrissy.
Even now, the thought of her as Phillip’s killer feels wrong, not impossible exactly, but incomplete. I’ve heard the whispers too, of course I have. She was living in the house. She had access. She had motive if you squint hard enough and let misogyny do the rest. But I haven’t said a word to anyone. I haven’t told these women what I know, and I certainly haven’t told Bennett everything I suspect.
Not that I could talk to him if I wanted to.
Not now.
Not after the folder in his office. Not after the contracts. Not after the ugly little revelation that my husband, for all his warmth and kindness and pressed Oxford shirts, knows exactly how to structure a deal so that someone else gets destroyed while he walks away untouched. Not after realizing I’ve been sleeping beside a loaded gun for ten years without ever knowing it was there. His composure through all of this, the steady nonchalance, the careful way he keeps suggesting grief counseling as though my problem is sorrow and not suspicion, unsettles me more than I want to admit.
No, Bennett is not someone I can go to with this anymore.
I look around the table instead, at the women with their perfect blowouts and curated concern, and it occurs to me that Tigertail Beach has become something else entirely. It used tofeel like a fantasy, a luxury paradise built from money and landscaping and social ambition. Now it feels like a gilded prison. Everyone here is hiding something. Everyone has a version of themselves they perform and another they keep tucked carefully out of sight. Secrets move through this neighborhood as easily as sea air.
The thought turns my stomach.
I push my champagne glass away and let the women’s conversation blur into nonsense. Tara is talking now about a shopping trip in Paris, something about a trunk show and a custom bag, but the words don’t stick. My mind is elsewhere, moving back and forth between Whitney and Phillip, between the noose and the jar and the blood on the pearls, between my husband’s hidden contracts and my brother’s careful silences.
Then my phone buzzes against the table.
