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In the end, Jayla and I didn’t do more than flirt with the idea. One awkward date, a few kisses, and we realized we didn’t click on that level.
After that, we should have gone back to being friends, right? It didn’t work out that way. She went off to law school and drifted, and there’s been a Jayla-sized hole in my life ever since.
ThatisKit’s car, then. Jayla must have borrowed it—
“Kit!” Madison shouts as she gets out, slamming the car door.
I dimly hear Madison greet Jayla, too, and there’s more said, but I don’t catch it. I’m frozen in the driver’s seat as Kit appears. He looks toward my car and shades his eyes against the sun. Then he lifts a hand in a tentative wave.
If Madison were still in the car, I might have hit reverse, peeling from the lane. That’s silly, of course. Our split was amicable.Hey, we tried, and it didn’t work, no hard feelings.
That’s the story.
That’s the lie.
Still, I’ve put on my happy face for Madison. She adores Kit—has since she was a baby—and I’m not about to take him out of her life. Neither of them deserves that.
I steel myself and open the car door. In three long-legged strides, Kit’s there and holding it for me. I look up to feel my heart twist as I see the Kit I know—dressed in a hoodie, faded jeans, and hiking boots. It’s so much easier to see him in an expensive suit, all corporate CEO, a far cry from the little kid with a skateboard, the teen with dreadlocks and a guitar, the husband who’d come to Hemlock Island every weekend, looking exactly like this.
“Hey, you,” he says.
“Hey, yourself.” I wave at his face. “Check out the new look.”
He rubs a hand over the short and perfectly trimmed beard. “You hate it.”
“No, it makes you look very distinguished.”
He crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth, and I laugh, the tension slipping away, as hard as I try to gather it back in.
“Sodistinguished,” I say, and his dark eyes light up in a grin.
The moment lingers two heartbeats and then fades. He clears his throat. “I, uh, heard what happened. With the renters.”
Tension snaps back as my gaze shoots to Madison.
“Nah, it wasn’t Mads,” he says. “Bill at the campground called me this morning. I decided to come up and check it out for you.”
He glances at Jayla, who’s walking toward us with one arm looped over Madison’s shoulders.
“Yep,” Jayla says. “That’s exactly how it happened.”
I narrow my eyes at her. She meets my look with one that warns me if I call out Kit on this particular lie, I’ll be dealing with her.
“So,” Jayla says. “We hitting the high seas? Or hanging out awkwardly until nightfall?”
“Ooh, weshouldwait until night,” Madison says. “Get the full-creep effect.”
They riff on that, but I don’t hear it. I don’t hear anything. Don’t see anything either, until Kit’s face is lowered right in front of mine.
“Laney?” he murmurs.
I snap out of it, and pull my jacket tighter. “I’ve got this. You guys go into town for an early lunch. The fish-and-chips place is open.”
“What?” Madison says. “We’re all going out—”
“I’ve got it.” I head toward the dockside lockbox.
Jayla jangles the keys. “Not without these.” She walks toward the boat. “Someone put blood in your closet, Laney. From what we heard, it isn’t the first disturbing thing that’s happened out there. You are not going alone.”
