The sound is small, almost delicate, but it cuts through everything.
I pick it up absently at first, expecting a delivery notification, a promotional email, maybe something from Bennett. Instead, the screen glows with a message from an unknown number.
If you want answers, meet me in North Tampa at 6 p.m. Come alone.
For one long, suspended second, I just stare at it.
My heart doesn’t exactly stop, but it stumbles badly enough to feel like it has. Heat rushes up my spine, followed by a chill so immediate it leaves my fingers cold. The café recedes all at once, the sound around me flattening into a dull hum as adrenaline starts pushing through my system in hard, uneven pulses.
“McCullough?”
Tara’s voice reaches me from a distance that shouldn’t exist across such a small table. I look up too quickly and find all of them watching me, their expressions shifting from gossip-bright curiosity to polite concern.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say too fast, already rising, already gathering my bag. I force a smile onto my face, though I can feel how brittle it is. “Sorry. Bennett just got home early from his trip and he’s not feeling well. I should probably go.”
It’s a flimsy lie. Bennett isn’t due home for two more days, and under normal circumstances one of them would absolutely notice that. But maybe my face is pale enough to sell it, or maybe they’re too conditioned by manners to question a sick husband.
“Poor Bennett,” Stephanie says automatically. “Give him our love.”
“Of course,” I murmur, already stepping back from the table. “I’ll talk to you later.”
I don’t walk out of the café so much as flee it, aware of their eyes on my back until the front door swings shut behind me and the cool air hits my face. It feels like surfacing. I stop on the sidewalk for half a second and read the message again, as if the words might change if I stare long enough.
If you want answers.
It could be a trap. Of course it could. It probably is. It could be Phillip’s killer, Whitney’s killer, someone trying to frighten me, someone trying to lure me somewhere isolated and finish whatever game they’ve started. Every instinct I have tells me not to go.
But I’m already moving toward my car.
Because answers are the one thing I haven’t been able to deny myself.
My hands shake as I unlock the door and slide behind the wheel. The engine turns over, the air-conditioning blasts too cold against my skin, and before I’ve given myself time to reconsider, I’m pulling out into traffic, leaving the café and its harmless, venomous little world behind.
The drive out of Marco feels both immediate and endless. Streets I know by heart blur past, then widen into highway, then stretch into long miles of asphalt and sky. I don’t let myself think too hard about what I’m doing, because if I do I might turn around. Instead I focus on the road, on the clock, on the thin white line of my headlights as afternoon starts tipping toward evening.
My mind still does what minds do when they’re frightened. It wanders where I don’t want it to. To Whitney. To Phillip. To Chrissy’s bloodied nightgown. To Bennett’s unreadable calm. To the possibility that everyone in my life is keeping some version of the truth from me.
Three hours in a car gives a woman too much time to think, and by the time the outskirts of Tampa begin to rise around me, my nerves are humming so sharply I feel flayed open by them.
Then my phone buzzes again in the cupholder.
I glance down at a red light and see the second message.
Meet me at Honeymoon Island. On the point.
My stomach drops.
I know the place. Everyone local does. It’s the kind of quiet, desolate stretch people go to when they want to disappear into the scenery, far enough removed from the more crowded beaches that you can stand there at sunset and feel like the edge of the world belongs to you. It is not the sort of place you suggest if your intentions are good.
Still, I plug it into the navigation.
As I follow the directions west, the sky deepens from gold to bruised blue. The roads narrow. Traffic thins. My chest feels tight in a way I can’t stretch out of. Every rational thought in my head tells me to call someone, to send a location, to turn around. But I do none of those things. I keep driving because after everything, after months of half-truths and dead ends and useless sympathy, I cannot bear the idea of comingthis far and refusing the one person who claims to know something.
By the time I pull into the lot, the sun is sinking, staining the horizon in dim coral and purple. The beach is nearly empty. The only sounds are the low wash of water, the far-off cry of gulls, and the rattle of my own breathing as I step out of the car and lock it behind me.
The air out here is colder than I expect.
