Honestly, sinking to the bottom of a pool sounds like a reprieve right about now. I might try it later.
Grateful for the distraction from the fiery blaze that is my life’s problems, though, I turn back to Nora. “So you won’t go on a date with him, but you let him do your hurricane prep?”
Her facial features turn down in exasperation. “Not this again.”
“What?I think he wants to kiss your face, and I think you also want that. And in the hour of my discontent, you two finally just kissing a little might cheer me up.”
“Okay. As much as I’d love to help, Marcus called this morning looking for you,” she explains. “I told him you were asleep. But he said he’d come over and wait.”
Looking back at Marcus, though, I’m not buying it. He can’tnotbe close to her. But he’s patient.
It reminds me of Beau. Maybe that’s why I keep nudging them together. Nora deserves something steady and earnest.
Something like what I thought Beau and I had.
As Marcus appears in the doorway, though, I’m not ready to forgive him for covering the security footage details for Beau.
“I’m still not speaking to him.” I point in his direction.
Nora looks between us.
Marcus sighs. “We need to talk.”
“Why?” I frown, knowing it’s mean and misdirected and hating myself for not being able to stop the words.
“Because I’m here,” Marcus starts, pulling his phone from his back pocket and holding it up like it’s a white flag of surrender, “to broker peace.”
He crosses to the counter and sets the phone down between us with a tap, and the sound carries through the tense silence of the kitchen.
“I shouldn’t even have this,” he says, his voice rough with the guilt of whatever he’s offering. “And I definitely shouldn’t be showing it to anyone.”
My gaze locks on the mobile device. Ordinary. Harmless. But the tension in the air makes my pulse skitter.
“The restaurant’s copy of the surveillance footage is on there,” Marcus says. “From the night Gemma died. Everything my cameras caught behind Lemon & Fig.”
My mouth goes dry.
“Beau and Gemma fight, then split. He goes one way. She goes the other. You see a hand reach out and drag her into the alcove. The one with the arches. It’s where she was found.”
Marcus looks to me for permission to play the video as he unlocks the phone. I nod once, and my skin prickles cold despite the sunlight warming Nora’s kitchen.
With the push of a button, the screen flares and the narrow alleyway appears, and my stomach flips as if I’ve been dropped into the scene playing out onscreen.
There’s no sound, but lights mounted on buildings and a few lampposts cast a faint glow against the cracked asphalt. He’s timed the bird’s-eye view of the footage behind his restaurant to play right at the moment Beau and Gemma push through the door. At the sight of her, my heart leaps into my throat. She’s alive, and in a matter of minutes she won’t be.
Grief spikes hard and fast, but I swallow it back.
Their argument is already under way—hands waving, Gemma crowding Beau’s space, like she’s goading him. He puts his hands up, keeping his face composed, shaking his head. And then she shoves at him—once, like the final punctuation of their showdown. And she turns to go. Beau watches her for a moment, lingering. He glances left and right, then slips back through the door he came out of.
And then, like Marcus promised, I can see Gemma in the top left corner of the footage. She’s walking away from the restaurant, past the employee parking lot, cutting a path behind the store to the left, which shares a wall with Lemon & Fig. And then, from the dark stone mouth of an alcove, a hand—whosehand?—reaches out, yanking her into the shadow of the arch and out of view.
Nora gasps.
But I lean forward, scouring the screen for any sign of who pulls Gemma into the darkness. And without asking for permission, I snap a photo of the final image, and the grainy, rounded sneaker toe that seems to step out of the alcove for a fraction of a second.
Marcus’s eyes are raw when I finally take my eyes off the phone to look up at him. “I’d have told you if I thought Beau was in trouble,” he says to me. “I don’t know why someone leaked the footage of them leaving together, but whoever’s seen that has probably seen this too. Beau didn’t hurt Gemma.” The ache behind his eyes is for Beau. “He’s worried about you. He’s sorry. He wants you to come home.”
Brokering peace.
