Chapter 1
Chapter One
T he last time Dylan had lived in her childhood home back in Pride, she’d had a freshly printed high school diploma and an associate’s degree, thanks to all the college classes she’d taken online during high school. All of her worldly possessions were packed in the trunk of her old Subaru.
She’d left without looking back, heading straight to Portland, where she spent the next four years immersed in classes on criminal law, police investigations, and forensic psychology.
She had loved every single moment of it.
The structure, the challenges, the sense of purpose—it was everything she had craved growing up in a town that had always felt too small for her ambitions.
To fill the hours she wasn’t studying, she started working for a small PI firm just outside of Portland.
It hadn’t taken long for her to realize she had a knack for the work.
Digging into people’s lives, uncovering secrets, piecing together puzzles—she had fallen in love with every bit of it.
So, naturally, she’d started her own PI business after graduation. No boss. No limitations.
Now, two years later, her business was easily as busy as the last firm she’d worked for.
Which was how she found herself back in Pride at the beginning of the summer.
For the next two months, she was going to follow one of the nation’s sexiest chart-topping music artists.
Kevin Sinclair, her client, had walked into her freshly painted, one-room office in downtown Portland and hired her to get to the bottom of an old family tragedy. She’d been excited about the case, then she’d heard the name of the man he suspected.
Abe Collins.
The Abe Collins. Music superstar of the decade.
The man whose voice filled her apartment on rainy nights when she was feeling lonely.
The one she danced to while making breakfast on weekends when she never left her loft apartment.
The one whose songs had gotten her through some of the darkest moments of her life after her father’s death last year.
That Abe Collins.
She’d had to work to keep her reaction neutral as Kevin slid a thick envelope across her desk. Inside were photos, schedules, and a neatly typed check with a figure that made her pulse skip. It was more money than she’d ever made on a single job.
Her PI license was valid in Oregon, Washington, and California, and she had assumed she would be heading to LA at first. After all, everyone knew that Abe lived on a horse ranch outside the city, tucked away in the hills where the press couldn’t hound him.
But then she’d heard a rumor. One that placed him a whole lot closer to home.
So instead of hopping on a flight to California, she’d taken the two-hour drive south and ended up right back where she’d started. In Pride, Oregon. The one place she had spent the last year trying to avoid.
The last time she had been here, it had been to bury her father and lock up the property she’d grown up in and had inherited.
Now, as she pulled into her small hometown, she wasn’t sure what unsettled her more—being back in a place she had sworn she’d never return to or that her first big case involved shadowing a man she had spent years obsessing over.
Either way, she figured that this summer was about to get a whole lot more complicated.
She hadn’t planned on stopping at her dad’s place.
She had told herself that she’d just do a drive-by, maybe glance at the place from the road, and then check into the motel for the duration, or maybe see if one of the cabins was available at Pride’s B&B.
But as she passed the familiar turnoff, her hands tightened on the wheel, and before she could talk herself out of it, she was pulling into the gravel driveway, the sound of crunching rocks beneath her tires loud in the otherwise silent afternoon.
The home, a one-story log cabin, stood just as she had left it months before—quiet, untouched, and frozen in time.
The once warm and inviting log walls now seemed darker, older.
The wide front porch was coated in a thin layer of dirt and pine needles.
The rocking chair by the door, where her father used to drink his morning coffee, sat motionless, tilted just slightly, as if waiting for him to return.
She shut off the engine and let out a shaky breath.
It felt wrong being here without him. Empty.
For the last year, this cabin had represented memories she had wanted to escape, a place filled with sadness she wasn’t ready to face.
But there had been plenty of happy times before he had died. And now, something deep down caused her to reach for the car’s door handle.
Even the air seemed, different. Stale.
When she stepped onto the porch, the wood creaked beneath her boots, the sound causing so many memories to replay in her head. She almost turned around and ran back to Portland.
Then she remembered why she was there, and she straightened her shoulders and stepped forward.
The key was exactly where she remembered it, tucked beneath a loose plank of wood near the edge of the deck.
She crouched down and brush away the dirt and debris before pulling it free.
It was cold in her palm, the weight of it heavier than she’d expected.
Holding her breath, she unlocked the door, stepped inside, and flipped on the lights.
The air was thick with dust and the faint scent of pine and old wood.
The living room was just as she had left it—an old couch against the far wall, a fireplace filled with cold ashes, and a wooden coffee table cluttered with magazines her dad had read through daily.
A layer of dust coated every surface, proof that no one had stepped foot inside since the day she had locked the place up after his funeral.
She ran a hand along the back of the couch, her fingers leaving a clean streak in the dust. It was strange being here without him. Even after all the time away, the cabin still felt like his space, a place she had only borrowed.
Now it was hers.
The thought made her stomach twist.
She moved down the short hallway, pausing in front of the second door on the right. Her bedroom.
The door creaked as she pushed it open.
Nothing had changed.
There was the same twin bed with the faded blue comforter, the same wooden dresser with stickers she had slapped on as a teenager, the same books lined up neatly on the shelves above her desk. Most of them about true crime.
It was like stepping into the past, like the younger version of herself could walk through the door at any moment, still full of plans and dreams, still eager to leave Pride and never look back.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, her fingers curling into the old comforter.
Being here was even harder than she’d expected.
She had spent the last dozen months trying to move forward, trying to build a life separate from this place.
Now she was back here for who knew how long.
And worse, when the case was finally over and it came time to leave, she feared it wouldn’t be easy, that she’d leave a piece of herself behind.
Pride had a way of wrapping around you, changing you in quiet, permanent ways.
Some of the people were just too easy to love, and they knew exactly how to pull you back.
She just knew that being here now, things would change. She could feel it in her bones.
When her stomach growled, she snapped back to reality. Staying here at the house was a heck of a lot cheaper than renting a cabin or staying in some hotel room, with who knows who for neighbors, so she brought in her two duffle bags and then headed into town to pick up some basic supplies.
First, to see if the rumors were true, she headed to Baked Pizzeria for food and gossip.
She had barely made it through the door when she heard that Abe Collins was indeed in town.
Rumors had him staying the entire summer at his good friend Max Wilson’s place.
The writer and producer had purchased the lighthouse the previous year and had just finished remodeling the property ahead of his wedding to a local woman Dylan knew personally, Juliette Elliott.
Juliette had been a few grades younger than her and, to her memory, had been kind.
Abe and Max had met a few years back on a movie shoot that Abe had played a small part in. Their friendship had bloomed fast.
Juliette’s family ran the local coffee shop and bookstore, the Brew-Ha-Ha.
This was going to be easier than she’d expected. It was much simpler to spy in a small town where you knew everyone and there was lots of gossip to listen in on.
After grabbing a pizza to go, she hit the store for some basics and headed back to plan her next move.
She fell asleep on the sofa with her laptop in her lap after spending hours researching Abe’s past. Or trying to, at any rate.
There was very little on his life before he had recorded his first album for Lucky Dog Studio, a huge label out of Texas, almost five years ago.
From there, the man had become a household name.
You couldn’t listen to the radio without hearing one of his songs every half hour it seemed.
His face was everywhere for the first couple years after his first record hit the charts.
Billboards were filled with images of him modeling everything from underwear to cologne.
Then, about a year ago, everything changed. Rumors started spreading about him buying a ranch in the country somewhere in California, and even though his music was still flooding the airways, his face was seen less.
She suspected the why of his disappearance, since a few articles had surfaced about his tragic past. Which, of course, was the reason she’d been hired.
The information on Abe’s earlier life was fluff that he retold in every interview. Most of it was lies.
He had been raised by a single mother in a small town just outside of LA. He was an only child who had grown up on a horse ranch. He was a straight-A student who had taken a few college classes before dropping out to play music full time.
The lies were obvious to anyone who looked deeper.
He hadn’t been discovered in a bar.
He had lucked out and been friends with two people who had made his career—Tony Carson, his PR manager, and James Lyle, producer to the rich and famous.
The three of them had met years before in college. Abe was best man at James’s wedding six years back.
She figured the being-discovered story was good press.
After his underwear ads came out, several rumors circulated of romantic involvement.
Some claimed the relationship between Abe and Max was more than just a friendship. Others had him seeing a mysterious woman.
According to the minimal information she had found, Abe had met and started dating Kara Sinclair in college six years ago. Then, a year later, Kara had died in a car accident. That happened shortly after Abe finished recording his first album.
Kevin Sinclair, Kara’s older brother, had hired Dylan to look into Abe’s involvement in this accident. For the next few weeks while Abe was staying in Pride, her job was to get close to him and find the answers that Abe, no doubt, wanted to stay hidden.
Answers about the night he had possibly killed his girlfriend.