Finest Kind of Fate (A Siren’s Point Story #1)

Prologue

EWAN

Five Years Ago

The suit fits really well. Or is it a tux?

Frowning, I fidget with the cuffs and try to avoid making eye contact with myself in the mirror.

Maybe it doesn’t fit, actually, because it feels a little tight.

The suit I wore to my mom’s funeral wasn’t this tight.

Not that it mattered, since it was hard to breathe either way.

Feeling hot, I tug at the collar. This is definitely wrong.

“Stop pulling at that, kid,” Daniel’s voice says from behind me. I feel like I should tell him not to call me kid. I’m his boss, after all. Except I can’t legally drink alcohol at my own gallery opening, so maybe he’s right. I sure feel like a kid right now. A kid playing fucking dress-up.

“It’s too tight,” I mutter, rolling my shoulders back. Or trying to, anyway, but the damn jacket is too tight.

“No it’s not. It’s tailored, which means it’s exactly the size it needs to be. Come sit down.”

Rolling my eyes into the mirror, I turn and walk over to him, slumping down onto the couch. I’m surprised when he doesn’t give me a hard time for wrinkling the pants or something. Instead, he slides over the Scrabble board he’d been fiddling with.

“You ever play?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer before starting to sort the tiles.

I hired Daniel in a daze of insomnia fog, hunched over my laptop and blearily trying to make sense of numbers and words and concepts that seemed intent upon going right over my head.

When I’d done an internet search for personal assistants, the list of results had almost made me cry.

Everything just feels like too much these days.

Getting out of bed, eating food, exercising, going outside for fresh air and sun, drinking water, painting.

Painting, painting, painting. All of it, too-fucking-much.

Plucking a single person out from the mess of personal assistants had felt very much like the final straw on the camel’s back.

I’d chosen Daniel by scrolling aimlessly, closing my eyes, and clicking the cursor.

His face looked friendly enough, and I’ve never heard of a serial killer with a name as bland as Daniel Simpson. Hired.

It turns out, even people named Daniel can be a little weird.

He’s got a love of Scrabble that borders on obsession, doesn’t wear socks in his shoes, and says things like “rad” and “cool beans.” But if the last two weeks have been any indicator, he’s also a hard worker.

He seems to have a good business sense, and even took the initiative last week to bring me groceries after I’d forgotten to get them myself.

I’m still not certain what exactly I’m allowed to ask him to do as my assistant, but it hasn’t mattered yet. He just…does things.

Silently, I watch him set up the game. I wonder if I should read a dictionary or something.

Brush up on my words so I can actually give him a good game when we play.

The thought is exhausting. I can barely drag myself through the steps of a shower some days.

I don’t think I can handle Scrabble research.

“We’ve got an hour to kill before the gala,” Daniel says, propping his phone where he can see the clock. “Plenty of time for me to whoop your butt.”

I smile but can’t work up a laugh. Today hasn’t been a great day, and if I wouldn’t be shooting myself in my own foot by doing so, I’d cancel the damn gallery opening and crawl into bed instead.

There’s a strange weight sitting in my chest, hindering my breathing.

Tears have been tickling the back of my throat all day.

I want to hit the reset button and start fresh.

I want to go to my first gala as up-and-coming-artist Ewan Fate and not sad-lonely-and-pathetic Ewan Fate.

I glance up at the man sitting next to me, hair prematurely gray despite his age and lines fanning out from his eyes from how often he smiles.

Daniel seems like a good guy. I could talk to him, probably.

But he’s still a stranger, and I don’t want a stranger.

I want someone so familiar to me I know their likes and dislikes better than my own.

I want to look over and see sandy-blond hair and blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and long, leanly muscled arms. I want to smell the sea.

Blinking to hold back the tears that suddenly seem very intent on making an appearance, I stare hard across the room. Shiloh isn’t here, and thinking about him won’t change that. Thinking about him only ever hurts, and that’s not a side of me I need to give in to today. I don’t have the time.

The cell phone in my pocket feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.

As though half of my soul isn’t withered and dead, but simply on the other end of the line, waiting for me.

I could call him. I memorized Shiloh’s number the day he got his first phone, and I doubt it’s changed in the past two years.

I doubt anything about Shiloh has changed in those two years.

I’m the one who’s different—a shriveled husk of the person who used to leap off the cliffs in Siren’s Point, laughing with Shiloh as we hit the water.

I can’t call him. Not yet. Not until I can eat three meals and take a shower and paint all in the same day.

Not until I don’t have to write down every single simple task on a to-do list, because otherwise, I won’t remember or care enough to do any of it.

I’ll call him once I sleep a full eight hours through and can feel the sun on my face without wanting to hide.

“Your turn,” Daniel prompts. I look down at the Scrabble board, choking on a breath that feels like a sob when I see what word he played.

Lobster.