—
It takes another twenty-four hours to get Beau out of jail. That’s enough time for Ardell to pull what little footage the McGinnises’ and the Schaeffers’ security cameras captured on either side of the neighborhood power outage—and for Ford to realize a Sig Sauer handgun is missing from his gun safe. The same weapon they found tucked into Simon’s designer slacks. But in the end, it’s all there.
Simon wasn’t bludgeoned over the head in some midnight struggle with Beau. He was caught in the storm, charging toward my house, his mind bent on retribution. Judging from his blood-alcohol level, he was staggering through the hedges on too much bourbon. We’ll never know who his intended target was—Beau or me—but by all accounts, Simon’s last few years were clouded by the humiliation of Redwood’s failure and the frustration of never quite being able to pin the hack on Beau.
Simon always did like getting the last word.
As he reached my pool, a flying stone killed him, a death as senseless and brutal as the weather itself.
The man who yearned for greatness in all things is extinguished by a mundane accident.
The cops never thought to look past the pool. Why would they? The storm had scattered debris from every yard across this neighborhood. To them the tiles were just more wreckage, not a weapon. They weren’t thinking about Tippy’s renovation or the way hurricane winds could lift a chunk of stone and send it flying to the wrong place at the wrong time. After all of the suspicion, of the whispers and lies that painted Beau as a killer.
But it wasn’t him. He didn’t kill Gemma. And he didn’t kill Simon.
By the next afternoon, I’m falling into Beau’s arms outside the Orange County jail, tears spilling too fast and hard for me to manage a breath.
This is the home we made. This is the life I want.
When I get him back to the house, I shadow him from room to room, starved for the reassurance that he’s really here. It borders on compulsive. He showers and changes into clean clothes, and I stare at him like he’s some kind of wonder of the universe.
Because to me, he might as well be.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says with a wink as I trail him from the bedroom to the kitchen.
“I know, but I need to be sure.”
He pours us each a glass of wine, and we decide to go down to the dock to watch the sunset.
The fallout from Simon’s death is playing out all over the country. If I turn on the national news tonight, he’ll be there. The beloved son, the failed CEO, all the spectacular hubris of his life.
But the version of him that haunted me is finally gone. When he fired me, he didn’t just end a job—he tore through my life in a way that echoed the same terror I felt when my parents died. He reminded me how swiftly everything I built could come apart—pressing against familiar scar tissue, the wounds thattaught me how ruthlessly uncertain life can be. Even with Beau, even in this new life, some part of me never stopped bracing for the next collapse.
Realizing Simon’s story ended in a freak accident brought no joy. I hated that the very things I’d spent years trying to outrun—past pain and the razor’s edge—seemed to collide in such a violent way.
But it did make the titan of my memories achingly familiar at last. He was just as ordinary as anyone else. Just as fragile. Just as mortal.
He would hate to hear that. He thought of himself as anything but common.
“Should we sell the house?” I ask as Beau and I find our chairs at the dock.
Beau frowns.
“I mean, Simon died, like, right there.” I wave behind us to the place he must have taken his last steps. “We can’t ignore that.”
“I think the story becomes whatever we want it to be,” Beau says. “Whatever we want to focus on.”
I hope he’s right. That this is the house we built. The home we made. A love Simon could never shake.
Morally, I can’t say the hack was wrong.
Although it’s ironic that a surveillance state might have exonerated Beau a lot faster.
“Wonder what the poor folks are doing,” Beau says as he looks out over the lake.
“I’ve been meaning to give this back to you.” I take the Buffalo Nickel necklace out of the pocket of my dress and fasten it around his wrist. With the watercolor haze of another Florida sunset above us, my fingers linger a little longer than necessary, just to feel the quiet thump of his pulse.
He’s still here. Still him.
