Chapter 10
TEN
CLARA
Kit had already claimed the corner table when I walked into the café, a half-empty latte in front of her and her boots kicked out like she owned the place. The bell over the door jingled, and she glanced up, eyes brightening when she saw me.
“You’re late,” she said, even though I very clearly was not.
“I’m exactly on time.” I shrugged out of my coat and draped it over the back of the chair. “You’re just dramatic.”
“Runs in the family,” she shot back, but there was a flash in her eyes that told me exactly where her brain had gone—wedding, runaway bride, big small-town gossip.
I pretended not to see it and busied myself with the menu board like I hadn’t already memorized it in high school. The server took our drink orders with a nod before giving us time to decide on our food.
Across the table, Kit was watching me like a cat who’d spotted a bug.
“Don’t,” I warned, palming my latte as soon as it arrived. “I can feel you about to pounce.”
She widened her eyes innocently. “What? I’m just spending time with my favorite black-sheep sister. Can’t a girl enjoy brunch without ulterior motives?”
“Please.” I teasingly kicked her boot. “You don’t even know what ‘ulterior’ means.”
“Rude,” she said, but she grinned around the rim of her mug.
Kit mentioned Mom had already started “reclaiming the house” now that I wasn’t camped out in my old room—more dinners out with Dad, fewer big grocery runs, talk of finally repainting the hallway.
It was all perfectly normal empty-nester stuff, but it still landed a little sideways.
I’d barely moved my suitcases into Wes’s house, and it already felt like my parents were quietly resetting back to life without me.
Elodie was neck-deep in farm renovations and restaurant plans, Selene was buried in archives and old paper, and Hayes was .
. . Hayes. He’d apparently managed to lock himself out of his truck at the gas station while it was still running, which felt right on brand for the most cursed man in Star Harbor.
We traded a few more low-stakes updates, but I could feel the real conversation pulsing under the table, waiting. My move into Wes’s house sat between us like a third cup of coffee neither of us wanted to acknowledge yet.
“So,” she said, drawing the word out. “There is a Keepers meeting coming up. We’re learning how to knit.”
I blinked. That was not the topic I’d expected. “Wow, okay. Hard left.”
Her eyebrows bounced. “Seriously, though . . . you’re coming to the next meeting, right? Selene has more stuff about the Lady. She actually squealed on the phone, and Sel never squeals.”
“Obviously I know the basics,” I hedged, not really sure where Kit was going with it. “Lady of the Dunes, tragic love story, cursed town.” My eyes sliced to her. “Cursed brother,” I mumbled low enough for only her to hear.
Kit scoffed. “That was the Disney version. This is the messed-up version.”
I couldn’t help it—I leaned in. “Messed up how?”
She glanced around like someone might be eavesdropping, then lowered her voice anyway. “So they found her letters.”
“Afraid, hiding, not waiting for some shipwrecked sailor but running from someone,” I recited.
“Right,” Kit said, eyes lighting. “Well, Selene’s found even more references to this man. The one in the photograph.”
I shivered, remembering the way my sisters had described it. The grainy black-and-white picture, the Lady’s eyes scratched out, and the eerie figure in the corner who looked like he could’ve walked right out of our century and into theirs wearing Hayes’s face.
“The guy who looks like our brother,” I said.
“Exactly.” Her voice dropped into something reverent and gleeful.
“We still don’t know who he is. We’ve checked the obvious stuff—marriage records, death notices, land deeds—but nothing concrete yet.
Selene thinks he might’ve worked on the Barker family land.
A farmhand, maybe. Someone who slipped through the cracks. ”
The Barkers were the old-money family tied to the Lady’s legend, the ones whose property stretched from the dunes to half the town. If there was a place for secrets, it was their land.
I frowned at my mug. “Maybe she was knocked up,” I said, half joking, half not. “Terrified and pregnant. That would’ve been about as scandalous as it gets back then.”
Kit froze, her eyes going huge. Then she slapped the table. “Oh my god, can you imagine? Secret baby? Town scandal? This is exactly the kind of thing the Keepers live for.”
A couple at the next table glanced over.
Kit dropped her voice a notch and leaned in.
“No, seriously. If there was some guy tied to the Barkers—farmhand, overseer, whatever—there’d be records somewhere.
Pay ledgers, work rosters. Selene probably hasn’t gotten through all the boxes yet. We could actually—”
“Help?” I finished, a reluctant smile tugging at my lips. “Join the coven and solve a hundred-year-old teen pregnancy?”
“Precisely.” She sat back, smug. “Tell me that doesn’t sound more fun than moping around Star Harbor.”
“I’m not moping,” I pouted. But Kit had a point.
My life felt like it had stalled out in my childhood bedroom and on Wes’s sagging couch. The idea of focusing on someone else’s mess—a dead woman’s secrets instead of my own—had an undeniable appeal.
“Fine,” I said slowly. “If there was some mystery man hanging around the Barker farm, and if he was the one she was hiding from or hiding with . . . there might be a paper trail.”
Kit’s grin turned feral. “That’s my girl. We’ll pitch it to Selene. She’ll pretend not to be thrilled and then stay up all night reading microfiche or whatever archivists do for fun.”
I laughed, the sound loosening something in my chest. For a minute it felt like old times—me and Kit in some diner booth or crappy bar, spinning stories out of nothing and daring each other to go one step further.
Except this time, there was a ghost, a cursed town, and our brother’s face in a photograph that shouldn’t exist.
I took a long sip of my latte, letting the warmth slide down. “Okay,” I said. “I’m in. On the condition that if we accidentally raise the Lady from the dead, you’re the one who explains it to Mom.”
Kit snorted. “Deal. I’ve survived Dad’s lectures about responsible life choices. I can handle one homicidal ghost.”
The joke landed, but as I set my cup down, a little shiver walked up my spine anyway.
Maybe it was the thought of the Lady, or her scratched-out eyes. Maybe it was the eerie, unexplained resemblance to Hayes. Maybe it was the idea of some scared, pregnant young woman hiding in the dunes and nobody listening.
Or maybe it was just that digging into someone else’s haunting sounded a hell of a lot easier than dealing with my own.
Kit’s eyes slid back to me, sharpening in that way it did when she smelled fresh gossip.
“So,” she said slowly, sipping the last of her latte.
I groaned. “Don’t.”
She ignored me completely, and her grin turned wicked. “How’s life with Mr. Sunshine? Have you two learned to coexist, or is it mostly aggressive glaring?”
Heat crawled up my neck. I suddenly found the latte foam very interesting. “It’s fine,” I said, too quickly. “Awkward. He’s . . . Wes, but different.”
Kit’s brows rose. “That was a lot of syllables to say nothing. Hayes made it sound like he’s one bad day away from becoming a full-time hermit.” She leaned in. “Is he really that bad? Missing appointments, shutting people out, refusing help, all that?”
Images flickered through my mind, uninvited—the dent in his couch where he clearly slept more than his bed, the lip into the bathroom that caught his prosthetic every time, the way he’d gripped the parallel bars this morning, jaw clenched as sweat slid down his spine.
The stubborn line of his mouth when Jess pushed him, the raw humiliation in his eyes when he’d stumbled.
I forced my shoulders to relax. “He’s doing better than Hayes thinks,” I lied. “He’s stubborn, but he’s . . . trying. You know how dramatic big brothers can be.”
Kit frowned into her drink. “Hayes isn’t dramatic, he’s—”
“Protective,” I cut in, softening it. “I get it. I just don’t think treating Wes like a lost cause is helping.”
Kit frowned again. “I never said ‘lost cause.’”
“You were thinking it,” I said lightly, then immediately regretted the sharpness in my tone.
Her eyes narrowed. “Okay, what’s that about?”
I tapped a fingernail against the ceramic mug. “Nothing. I just . . . he’s not a project. That’s all.”
A small voice in my head grated on my nerves. Since when do you care?
Since he let me move in and I saw what it costs him just to get through a day, apparently. Since I watched him work his ass off at PT so nobody could accuse him of not trying. Since I’ve seen enough of the man he used to be to know he’s still in there somewhere.
Kit’s mouth tugged into a smirk. “Wow. Listen to you, defending Wes Vaughn. Is there something there?”
“Shut up,” I muttered, but there wasn’t much heat behind it.
What I didn’t add was that hearing Wes reduced to a problem to manage or a list of failures made something twist in my chest. I didn’t like him being picked apart when he wasn’t here to defend himself.
For reasons I really didn’t want to examine, it suddenly felt like my job to make sure nobody else got to write his story for him.
“So what’s it actually like?” she pressed. “Living with him.”
I hesitated, then gave her the sanitized version. “He gave me rules.”
That got her full attention. “Rules? Like . . . chore chart rules?”
“Well it was only one,” I said, rolling my eyes. “A very specific one about no random guys in the house.”
Kit barked out a laugh. “Oh my god. Of course he did. Did he at least write it down? Please tell me he wrote it down.”
I thought of the way his jaw had clenched when he’d said it, the way something had flashed in his eyes. “No. Just grumpy landlord vibes.”
“You should absolutely poke at that,” Kit said, wicked delight sparking again. “Make your own list. Hang it on the fridge. ‘Tenant Rule Number One: Landlord must smile and stop being a broody asshole.’”
Despite myself, I laughed. The idea lodged itself in my brain and refused to budge.
“Seriously,” she went on. “He wants to play house-rule dictator? Fine. Give him something to look at besides his own misery. Make him mad. Maybe he needs to be mad more than he needs to be sad.”
I wasn’t sure that was sound psychological advice, but I couldn’t deny the tiny, reckless thrill the thought gave me.
I took another sip of my latte, letting it linger on my tongue. “We’ll see,” I said.
Kit’s phone buzzed and she glanced down, nose wrinkling. “Ugh. I’ve got to go or Elodie’s going to fire me from my unpaid labor position at the farm.”
She stood, leaned over to kiss my cheek, and squeezed my shoulder a little harder than necessary. “Text me if he drives you nuts,” she said. “Or if you find any secret ghost babies.”
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” I promised.
When she left, the café felt oddly louder. Conversations rose and fell around me, the hiss of the espresso machine punctuating the quiet at my little corner table. I sat there for another minute, hands wrapped around my empty cup like it could anchor me.
Eventually, I pushed to my feet and took the mug back to the counter.
“Have a good one, miss,” the older woman at the register said as she passed, patting my arm.
I blinked. I had known the woman my entire life. “Ms. Fitzsimmons, it’s me, Clara Darling.”
She paused, squinting at my face. “Oh! Right. The middle one. I forgot about you.”
She laughed like it was harmless and moved on before I could do more than force my lips into something resembling a smile.
Forgot about you.
Awesome. Love that for me.
Outside, the air was cold enough to sting my nose. I tugged my coat tighter and started walking toward my car. Star Harbor had always been prettier on foot anyway.
Main Street was a postcard—the kind of place city brides begged me to recreate in styled shoots.
Brick storefronts with hand-painted signs, strings of white twinkle lights still up from Christmas because nobody had the heart to take them down yet, the distant glint of Lake Michigan at the end of the road.
A few tourists in puffy coats wandered in and out of the bakery, but mostly it was locals ducking their heads against the wind.
My boots clicked along the sidewalk as I passed the Lady’s Lantern, its carved wooden sign swinging gently in the breeze.
Across the street, the historical society building hunkered like it was keeping its secrets to itself.
Beyond that, if I squinted, I could see the faint rise of the dunes and the dark slash of pine trees against the gray sky.
A pregnant Lady of the Dunes. Possibly a homicidal farmhand. Hayes’s cursed face in an old photo.
Sure, why not.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and thumbed out a quick text to our oldest sister.
Have you checked old Barker ledgers for mysteriously handsome farmhands who disappeared? Asking for a ghost.
Three dots popped up almost immediately but then disappeared again. I smiled to myself. That meant Selene was already thinking about it, probably mentally rearranging her entire afternoon around the idea.
I slipped my phone away and kept walking, letting the cold air clear my head.
It was a strange feeling, being back in the town where everyone knew the Darling kids by name . . . and having to reintroduce myself. Being the sister who’d left and stayed gone long enough that people forgot about me.
Now I was back, half jobless, living with my parents one week and in my brother’s best friend’s house the next. No husband. No grand plan. Just a complicated living situation and a talent for making wedding dresses look good.
And on top of that, I’d somehow appointed myself the emotional goalie for a man who barely wanted to look me in the eye most days.
By the time I looped back toward my car, my brain had run through every bad decision I’d made since college twice.
Back at his house, the pine trees behind his place stood tall and dark, a solid wall between his backyard and the dunes beyond.
Smoke curled lazily from a nearby chimney, and the faint swell of the lake carried on the wind.
I paused at the bottom of his front steps, eyeing the porch and the front door and the life I’d stepped into without really thinking it through.
He wanted rules?
A smile tugged at my mouth. Maybe it was time the fridge got an official list.