Chapter 4
Four
MADDEN
The taco place had taken over the spot where the old bait shop used to sit.
Someone had painted the cinder block walls a saturated turquoise and strung a tarp for shade.
Box fans hummed under the eaves, rattling the paper lanterns and the hand-lettered menu boards.
The line spilled past a cooler of bottled sodas.
The smell of grilled fish and warm corn tortillas wrapped the whole corner like an invitation.
Astrid waved me in from a picnic table half under the awning. “You found it!”
She’d staked out a spot with a view of the ordering window and the walkway, sunglasses in her hair, elbows planted like a general guarding a strategic position.
Three students clustered around her—early to mid twenties—sunburned noses, university T-shirts, waterproof watches.
The exuberance of people who didn’t yet know where their limits were.
“I smelled it from two blocks away.” I slid onto the bench and tried to ignore the itch between my shoulder blades that said half the patio had glanced up when I walked by. Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe that was just the voice in my head that had learned to listen for whispers.
Astrid gestured between us. “My ducklings. Maya, Tyler, Priya. This is my friend, Madden Reilly. She’s local stock, even if she ran off to the big city.”
“Local stock,” I echoed, wry. “I’ll put that on my resume.”
Maya—pale and freckled, with a sunhat big enough to shade a small village—pushed a paper cup toward me. “Horchata. It fixes everything.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” I glanced around again as the first cold sip hit me with twin blasts of sweet and cinnamon.
A kid two tables over tried to balance a lime wedge on his nose while his sister documented him for posterity. Gull cries braided with laughter and the crackle of the flat-top grill. Normal life. Loud and bright.
“I’m gonna put in my order.”
I left them there and stepped to the window, trying not to appear as uncomfortable as I felt among all these people.
I didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes. Didn’t want to risk finding someone I knew who might ask questions I didn’t want to answer.
When it was my turn, I ordered a couple of the day’s special fish tacos and rejoined Astrid and her students with my tray.
“…N-17 and N-19 both started caving last night,” one of the grad students was saying as I sat. “We logged sand temps at eighty-eight, so I’m betting on a boil in the next forty-eight hours.”
“Make sure the interns know that means watch, not poke,” Astrid said dryly, peeling the wrapper off her fish taco. “Last week I had to confiscate a selfie stick.”
That got a round of laughter.
Priya flashed a smile as she shoved dark hair out of her face and resumed fiddling with the hair tie on her wrist. “At least they didn’t try to ‘help’ a ghost crab out of a burrow again.”
“Small mercies.” Astrid shook her head and took a sip of her drink.
Her phone buzzed on the table, the screen smeared with sunscreen fingerprints.
She thumbed a quick reply, then set it face-down.
“Anyway, tonight’s team will rotate between N-17 and N-19 until midnight.
Keep the red filters on your lights, and remember to flag the predation tracks before you fill in. ”
“Yes, ma’am,” they chorused in teasing unison.
I smiled into my sweet tea, half-listening, half-watching the way this little crew orbited her—comfortable, competent, full of the kind of unguarded energy that came from doing work you believed in.
Their hands moved constantly while they talked: one checking notes on a phone in a waterproof sleeve, another scrolling through photos of tracks in the sand, someone else jotting with a pencil on a crumpled Rite-in-the-Rain notebook.
They looked happy. Certain of their path in life. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like that about anything.
Astrid nudged me with her elbow. “You okay?”
“Just admiring how much smoother your job sounds than mine ever was.”
She rolled her eyes affectionately. “Only because you never had to herd grad students. They eat more than sea turtles.”
When the students finally cleared out, taking their trays, half-finished horchatas, and a cloud of laughter with them, the table felt bigger and quieter.
Astrid leaned back, ankle over knee, and sighed like a woman who’d been running at full speed since sunrise. “God, I love them, but I swear they make me feel ancient.”
I pursed my lips. “You’re thirty.”
“Exactly.” She pointed a chip at me. “Ancient.”
I huffed a laugh and let my shoulders ease a little. “They seem good, though. Happy.”
“They are. It’s a nice change of pace. Most summers I get at least one who thinks data collection is optional and sunscreen is for cowards.”
The breeze caught the edge of the tarp overhead, flapping it like a lazy sail. I watched it for a moment, letting the motion steady me. “You sound happy, too.”
“Can’t complain. Field season keeps me outside, my team’s competent, and I get to come home to air-conditioning and actual showers.” She tilted her head, eyes narrowing playfully. “You, on the other hand, look like someone still bracing for impact.”
I winced. “That obvious?”
“To me? Always.” She speared a piece of fish with her fork. “How’s the houseboat?”
“Old, creaky, and exactly what I needed.” Scrubbing the whole thing from fore to aft had been cathartic.
She still needed the kind of TLC she’d only get off season and out of the water, but that sense of staleness and abandonment had been banished.
I’d even picked up a plant while I was in town this morning.
“Good.” She studied me for a moment, then grinned. “You know, I half expected you to chicken out. You’ve got that L.A. polish now. I thought you might wither in the humidity.”
“I’m acclimating.” I plucked at my sticky blouse. “Slowly.”
Her laughter drew a couple of curious looks from nearby tables, and I fought not to shrink beneath their gazes.
“So, tell me what’s been going on around the island lately.” Better to steer the conversation toward other people.
“Well, you definitely missed a few things while you were gone. Sawyer and Willa eloped last fall.”
“Wait, Willa Hollingsworth?” She’d been a couple of years behind me in school and one of Gwen’s best friends.
“Yep. Total stealth operation. Whole town found out when they came back wearing rings.”
“Wow. Didn’t her parents disapprove of him?” Sawyer Malone hadn’t remotely been of a social class the Hollingsworths would’ve approved of. I knew because my parents were cut from the same cloth.
“Well, probably, but Willa basically told them to fuck off and entirely cut them out of her life when she came back to the island at eighteen.”
I tried to imagine the quiet girl I remembered doing such a thing and couldn’t quite see it. For a moment, envy flared that she’d gotten out from under her controlling parents. “Good for her.”
“I thought so. They’re disgustingly happy.”
“Double good for her.” She’d always been an incredibly sweet girl. She deserved whatever happiness she’d managed to carve out of life. “What else is good news?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any other kind.
“Ford’s back on-island, and he just proposed to Bree last week.”
“I thought she hated him.” They’d been besties from elementary school, but a few years after high school, there’d been some falling out. I didn’t ever hear the details.
“So did we all. But whatever happened, apparently they worked it out. Oh, and he’s got a teenage daughter. Not Bree’s.”
I blinked. “Wow. That’s… unexpected.”
“Took the whole island by surprise. Ford, too, from what we all know. She’s a smart kid.” Astrid took a sip of her drink. “Let me think. Oh, Lindsay has a new beau. None other than Corbin O’Connell.”
My brain spun, sifting through names and faces and bits of old knowledge about people I hadn’t thought of in ages. “Didn’t he go into the Coast Guard?”
“He did. Came back to help out when his daddy’s knee surgery had complications. Lindsay’s been working as office manager for their fishing company for years, and she ended up getting attacked at the office one night.”
My hand shot out to close over Astrid’s wrist. “Attacked?”
“She’s okay. Promise. She was just concussed. Anyway, Corbin found her and went all bodyguard on her until they caught the guy, so she’s been living her best romance novel life.”
That dragged a chuckle out of me. “I love that for her. She’s had a crush on him since, like, freshman year.” I nibbled at my taco. “Sounds like it’s been an eventful few years.”
“It has.” Her expression sobered, and I knew what she wasn’t saying.
As if the universe was determined to bring it up anyway, a woman at another table murmured, “I still can’t believe the mayor killed that man. Crazy world.”
The words hit like a glass dropped on tile. The clatter of the patio kept going, but all the air seemed to thin.
The mayor. My cousin. Gwen’s older brother, Miles, who’d been convicted of voluntary manslaughter for killing his blackmailer.
Astrid shot me a quick look. “Ignore them.”
“I do.” But it wasn’t true. I’d been ignoring ghosts for years, and they were better at waiting me out.
Her hand brushed mine briefly, grounding. “How’s your uncle?”
“He’s… holding together.” I managed to keep my voice steady. “Still working boats out of Beaufort. I think keeping busy is the only thing keeping him upright.”
In the wake of his daughter’s disappearance, he and my aunt had eventually gotten divorced. With this latest scandal involving his son, I’d been really worried about him.
Astrid nodded. “Grief’s funny that way. The motion’s sometimes the only thing that keeps you from sinking.”
“Yeah.”
For a while, we just ate, the rhythm of it easy again, until she pushed her tray aside. “Listen, we’ve got a couple nests likely to boil Friday night. You should come out. Bring coffee and watch the hatchlings run. It’s magic every time.”