On the Other Side (Wayward Sons #5)

Prologue

Five months after high school graduation

RIOS

By late September, the island had gone quiet again.

Tourist season was over, and what was left of Hatterwick felt stripped bare.

The boardwalk planks creaked in the heat, and the humid air hung thick with the scents of salt, sunscreen, and gossip.

Without strangers to feed it, the talk turned inward, circling the same names like sharks lured by the scent of blood.

Mine most of all.

I’d just finished work at the docks, unloading the latest catch for the fishing company that signed my paycheck.

Not a glorious job by any means, but it was who’d been willing to hire me fresh out of high school a few months ago despite the shadow hanging over me from the police investigation that had stalled without enough evidence for an arrest or a conviction.

Not that the court of public opinion needed actual evidence to convict me.

My truck was still down—some clutch issue I couldn’t fix without parts that said paycheck still wouldn’t cover—so I started the walk home.

It wasn’t far. At thirteen miles long and only three miles wide at its broadest point, nothing much on Hatterwick Island was far.

The tide had gone out, leaving the mudflats slick and shining under the lowering sun.

Two old-timers outside the tackle shop fell silent as I passed.

They didn’t spit anymore, which I guess counted as improvement.

“Evenin’.” The greeting came automatically because my mama had raised me polite before she left us high and dry years ago.

Neither man answered.

I tried to focus on the glare off the water of the sound instead of the whispers.

Should’ve been him.

You’d think he’d be gone by now.

Same words, new mouths.

Four months on, and they still hadn’t found fifteen-year-old Gwen Busby.

She’d have been a sophomore by now, along with my baby sister, Gabi.

Instead, she’d vanished from the end-of-school-year beach bonfire like smoke into the night.

They’d dragged every inch of the inlet and the deeper waters around the island, their hooks scraping bottom until mud clouded everything.

Search choppers had beaten the air overhead for weeks, their rotors drowning out the gulls, while dogs from the mainland worked the dunes and maritime forest with their noses pressed to sand that held nothing but the ghosts of footprints washed away by tide and time.

Nothing.

Not a scrap of clothing, not a shoe, not even a hair tie to prove she’d ever existed at all.

By the end of June, the search parties that had repeatedly combed every salt-beaten inch of our scrap of land had turned into prayer circles.

Old women with sun-spotted hands clutched their rosaries outside the Catholic church, their voices rising and falling like the rhythm of waves.

By the end of July, those prayers had curdled into whispers that slipped through screen doors and across backyard fences like poison.

And by mid-August, when the tourists had gone home and left us alone with our ghosts, everyone had settled into the comfortable certainty that she was dead.

Since they needed a villain more than they needed proof, they’d picked me.

I’d been the last to see her alive—or thought I had—just a flash of her walking toward the cars when the storm rolled in.

When news had spread that she’d never made it home that night, I’d gone straight to Chief Carson and told him every detail I could remember.

How she’d stumbled a little in the sand, maybe from the beer, maybe from the wind that had already been howling off the water from the incoming storm.

How I’d watched her disappear between the parked cars and figured she was heading home like all the other kids when the lightning started forking down.

That honesty had been my first mistake. My last had been thinking it would matter.

I crossed Front Street, dust rising in small clouds from my work boots, and heard the low rumble of an engine behind me.

The sound was too clean, too smooth for the usual island traffic of rusted pickups and salt-eaten sedans.

A black SUV crept along the curb like a predator stalking prey.

Clean and new and expensive—the kind of vehicle that told you exactly who could afford to leave the island whenever they wanted, and who chose to stay just long enough to remind the rest of us of our place.

The Reilly family. Kin to the Busbys on the mother’s side, which made Gwen their blood, their loss, their grief to weaponize however they saw fit.

Mr. Reilly sat behind the wheel like a judge reading out a sentence he’d already decided, mirrored sunglasses shielding whatever passed for conscience in his eyes.

I didn’t need to see through the lenses to recognize his disdain.

It radiated from him like heat off summer asphalt.

Mrs. Reilly occupied the passenger seat with the rigid posture of someone who’d never learned to bend, her lips pursed like she’d caught a whiff of something rotten and couldn’t escape the stench.

Her gaze fixed on me with the kind of hatred that had been polished smooth by months of practice.

And in the back, Madden—dark hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight it might have been drawn with a ruler, posture as perfect as her grades, looking everywhere but directly at me, while somehow managing to watch my every move.

She was a year behind me in school—a senior now, with her sights set on some Ivy League future that would carry her far from this postage stamp of sand and spite.

Someone I noticed, not because everyone knew she’d be valedictorian of her class, destined for bigger things than the rest of us even dreamed, but because something about those hazel eyes had always pulled at me.

Not that I’d ever done anything about it.

Someone like her would never have looked at the likes of me, even before the scandal.

She hadn’t even been at the bonfire that night with the rest of the student body, too buried in test prep or college applications or whatever other serious business occupied the minds of people who planned to escape this place through merit instead of luck.

That whole prim, proper, overachieving, stick-up-her-ass vibe should have been everything I wasn’t interested in.

But even I’d been able to see the way grief had carved hollows under her eyes in the weeks after Gwen disappeared, how she now moved around the island like someone walking underwater.

They slowed at the intersection, waiting for a cluster of men to cross—guys I’d worked beside last summer before all this started, before my name became a curse word that mothers whispered to keep their daughters close.

One of them, Jimmy Kowalski, caught sight of the SUV and then let his gaze drift to me with deliberate slowness.

“There he is.” He pitched his voice just loud enough to carry over the engine noise.

“The one who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. ”

Sharp, ugly laughter erupted from the group—reminding me of the scavenger birds wheeling overhead, waiting for something to die so they could pick the bones clean. The sound echoed off the storefronts and bounced back at me from all sides.

Mrs. Reilly leaned forward and cranked down her window.

When she pinned me with her stare, the weight of it struck like a physical blow, all that carefully cultivated blame and hatred focused into a laser that could have burned holes through steel.

“You ought to be ashamed.” Her voice carried the crisp authority of someone who’d never questioned her right to judge.

“Walking around like you belong here, like you have any right to breathe the same air as decent people.”

The words landed like a slap across the face, and the men nearby chuckled with the satisfied sound of people who believe justice was served, however crude.

Mr. Reilly said nothing from behind his sunglasses, but his silence spoke louder than words.

It was permission. Encouragement. A green light for anyone who wanted to take their frustrations out on the convenient target the police and his family had painted on my back.

I stood there with heat crawling up my neck like a rash, my heartbeat hammering so loud in my ears it nearly drowned out the jeers.

Every muscle in my body coiled tight, ready for fight or flight, though neither option would solve a damn thing.

Madden sat frozen in the backseat, her eyes darting between her parents and me like she was watching a tennis match where someone was about to get their head taken off.

I saw her mouth fall open and caught the moment she seemed to realize words were coming out.

“They wouldn’t still be looking at him if there wasn’t a reason.” Her voice rang clear and certain as a church bell tolling the hour.

The words weren’t overtly cruel—not compared to what I’d heard from others—just delivered with the unshakeable conviction of someone who’d never had reason to doubt what the adults in her life had taught her.

A smart girl repeating smart-sounding logic that seemed as solid as the ground under her feet.

No doubt she’d absorbed those words and worse from her parents’ dinner table conversations, their careful explanations of why the world worked the way it did and who deserved what.

There was zero reason I should’ve expected her to contradict the people who’d raised her, fed her, shaped every thought in her head since birth.

And yet the remark hit me like a gut punch, stealing what little air I’d managed to hold on to.

The window hummed closed with mechanical finality, sealing the Reilly family back into their climate-controlled bubble.

The SUV rolled forward with the stately pace of people who’d made their point and could afford to take their time savoring it, leaving behind nothing but exhaust fumes and the kind of silence that weighed heavier than noise.

The laughter that followed was low and satisfied, the sound of people who’d just seen their entertainment for the evening and found it exactly to their liking.

“Guess the Reillys said it plain enough,” someone muttered, and the group began to disperse, their work done.

I turned my face toward the sound of the sea and started walking.

The air tasted like rain and salt, though clouds hadn’t yet rolled in.

Every muscle in my body wanted to bolt—to catch the first boat out and never look back—but I couldn’t.

Not with Gabi still in high school, too softhearted for her own good, and Caroline running herself ragged trying to keep the lights on.

Dad might not raise a hand the way he used to—not since I’d grown big enough to hit back—but the threat was always there, sitting in the next room, waiting.

So I stayed. Worked. Endured.

Home wasn’t far—a weathered house near the marsh where the grass hissed with crickets.

Caroline would already be there, working through the evening cleaning schedule before heading to her second job at the tavern.

Gabi would be at the table with her homework, pretending not to watch the clock.

Dad would be in his chair, silent and simmering, same as ever.

I’d get home, wash up, make sure my sisters were safe, and keep my mouth shut.

Leaving would’ve been easy.

Staying was what hurt.

But if I left, who’d protect them?

The sun slipped lower, turning the sky toward the mainland the color of a burn. I stopped at the edge of the road where the marsh opened wide. My throat felt raw. I looked toward the water and said it again, the way I did most nights, quiet enough that the wind carried it away.

“I didn’t hurt her.”

The tide didn’t answer.

It never did.