Chapter 24
Two Days Before the Hurricane
I knew the Ritz-Carlton property well. Beau and I had spent time here after we left California.
The lobby gleams, soft light bouncing off pale stone and soaring ceilings defined by elaborately carved archways.
But it isn’t warm. It’s not supposed to feel cozy—it’s supposed to feel slightly out of reach.
The marble arches and muted light convey a kind of hushed reverence that makes you want to whisper even when you aren’t sure what you’re feeling guilty about.
Every smooth leather chair is placed carefully, like stage dressing for the theater of keeping up appearances.
And then, there he is.
Simon Avery is sitting in an oversize chair near the bar in the back. He looks comfortable. Like he’s been here all along, waiting with the patience of a statue. He’s wearing dress pants and a white button-down. In the middle of the Florida heat, he’s decked out in designer digs.
When he spots me, he doesn’t wave. Of course he doesn’t. Men like Simon don’t wave when they can command. Instead, he rises, and before I can decide whether I want to be touched, he reels me in, sliding his hand behind my back and brushing a kiss against my right cheek.
In California, I thought those vaguely European gestures he’d picked up at his East Coast boarding school were sexy. Now, they feel rote. The cloying scent of his aftershave clings to my skin as he lets me go, sharp enough to spark a headache.
“Este.” It’s almost gentle, the way he says my name. Almost.
“Ew. Stop it.” I bristle at the implied warmth. “I didn’t come here for that.”
“But you’re here.” His eyes drag over me, as sharp and measuring as always.
Standing beside him is like stepping into a wrinkle in time. His voice, his face, it all yanks me into the past with disorienting force. I can’t believe I’m speaking to him again. I can’t believe he still exists on this planet.
“You look the same,” he says, meaning it as flattering.
I search his face, hunting for the real reason he’s standing here, before I say, “What do you want, Simon? Why are you here?”
“There’s a bar this way.” He points toward a white-neon scroll of text announcing a restaurant. “It’s more private.”
He smiles faintly as I fall into step beside him. “Does Beau know where you are?” he asks.
“Does it matter?”
“It might,” he says, studying me, calculating, searching for a crack in my facade.
I want to ask how he found me. When we left California, I changed my number, leaving no forwarding address. No breadcrumbs, no trail. The only person who had my details was Gemma, and she only got them because we’d fallen back into each other’s lives one Instagram DM at a time.
Did Gemma tell Simon how to find me? Or was it the news coverage from last year that tipped him off?
“I didn’t realize you were in hiding,” he says.
He watches me for a reaction. If I know his tells, he knows mine.
“Beau and I wanted a fresh start. There was nothing left for us in California.”
“Nothing? You wound me.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes as we find a high-top and slide onto velvet stools. “How’s he doing, by the way? Looks like he took a beating in the news.”
“You would know,” I bite back.
His eyes go wide for a breath. “You’ve been keeping tabs on me.”
“You were kind of hard to miss for a minute there.”
His smile crooks, but it doesn’t soften him. “Funny, isn’t it? How fast something can crumble. One good push and the whole thing goes.”
This is the game. In a Simon Avery negotiation, no one says what they really mean. Discussion twists through detours and dead ends until the floor shifts and you find yourself boxed in.
I haven’t missed his double talk. But I can’t afford to blow up this conversation without some answers. So I relax my shoulders, telling myself to stand down. “When’s your meeting? The one in Miami?”
His eyes flick to the floor for a second. “Postponed. With the hurricane, everyone south of here is headed to Orlando to avoid the worst of the storm.”
“But you’re staying put? What about the hurricane?”
He shrugs noncommittally. “A few more days. There are some loose ends I can handle from here.”
The words prickle under my skin. My pulse ticks up, but I don’t flinch. Instead, I narrow my eyes. “Am I one of them? A loose end?”
“You always were direct.” Simon nods, looking me over like he’s trying to recall some buried memory. “I’ve missed that about you.”
“Answer the question, Simon.”
A server approaches with water glasses but, sensing the tension in the space between us, seems to think better of asking if we’d like to order anything.
“No.” He softens. “You’re not a loose end, Este. You’re…you’re a question mark.”
I hold his gaze, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a reaction. “That’s poetic. Did you rehearse it in the mirror?”
He chuckles fondly. “Still quick. Still sharp. You’ve no idea how rare that is.”
“What do you want?” I ask, barely repressing the urge to slap the tabletop.
“I was worried about you,” he says, as if it’s the most innocent thing in the world.
“I hadn’t heard from you in years, and then last year, you turned up on every cable news channel after your friend’s husband was murdered.
And then I saw the news on Beau with that waitress,” he continues, giving a weary sigh like he’s weighed every other option and there’s only one choice left.
“I think you should come back to California with me, Este.”
My eyes go wide with the absurdity of it. “That’s quite the non sequitur, Simon.”
“I’m here because I want you to know how sorry I am. I never should have let you go.”
“God, men will do literally anything but go to therapy. Including fly across the country to bother a former employee with their personal problems. Why. Are. You. Here?”
“Because I fucked up,” he says, finally coming alive. He leans across the table, urgency pulling his face into something I recognize as pleading. “The last time my life made sense, I was with you.”
“I know you’ve never made one before, but this is not how apologies work, Simon.” The more emotional he gets, the more remote I feel. I want to tell him to leave, but I need to know why he’s really here. So I’ve resorted to my strongest suit of armor—sarcasm.
“I mean it, Este. Come back to California. I’m sorry about all of it.”
“I feel the need to correct the record here, because I think you’re misremembering the part where you fucked me and then you fired me. On a note card.”
He sighs, all manufactured attrition. “That was cold of me. But after the way I botched that acquisition meeting—all because I couldn’t focus with Beau looking at you—after all that time I spent trying to get you to take down your walls, here was Beau making you smile like you belonged to him.”
For a brutal second, I can only blink. Holding my breath, I wait for more. For a real reason. Some grand reveal that might justify the note card, the exile, the humiliation, and the years I’ve spent nursing a wound that never quite closed.
But that was it. The end of my career, the end of everything I had built hinged on Simon’s petty jealousy.
The truth is so banal it feels like mockery. So ordinary it steals the air from my lungs.
It’s my turn to laugh, but my chest is stiff.
He exhales another long sigh. “I did everything I could back then. To get you to take us seriously. To get you to let me past your walls—”
“You? Tried to get me to take down my walls? Such a convenient way for you to remember it—”
“I believed in you—”
“Stop talking. You don’t get to say anything. And whatever you’re feeling isn’t my problem. Me coming here isn’t some opening. You’re not invited back in. So I need you to hear me when I say: I am never going back to California.”
“Fine,” he goes on. “I don’t care where we go, but for God’s sake, let me get you out of this situation. I care about you enough to say seeing Beau with that girl was very worrying.”
Oh, the magnanimity.
The way he says “that girl” makes the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. He thinks Beau’s guilty, or at the very least, he thinks Beau cheated on me.
“Beau didn’t sleep with Gemma,” I snap. “Not everyone bails as soon as things get complicated. Not everyone is as mercurial as you.”
He doesn’t have an answer to this. And Simon always has an answer.
“You’re right,” he finally says.
My nails bite into my palms under the table. “I want to know when you got here.”
“That’s not really what you want to ask me,” he chides. I didn’t expect his disapproval to sting. But it does. “Now who’s not being direct?”
After all these years, I want to win. To best him.
To make him take back his careless dismissal of me.
I hate it, but it’s true. I used to fantasize about confronting Simon in this new life I’ve made.
I’d be unaffected and untouchable, and he’d finally be truly sorry.
But in those fantasies, Beau wasn’t down at the police station giving a statement.
“Fine.” I lean forward and lower my voice. “Were you here the night Gemma died?”
I don’t know why Simon would follow Gemma all the way to Florida to kill her, but everything started the night she died. Including his text messages to me.
His smile falters, but in a breath, it’s back to something smooth and practiced.
“Gemma?” he repeats, like the name is brand-new to him.
I roll my eyes. “You knew her. You went to Greenleaf as much as anyone.”
“Of course, I knew her. Everyone knew her,” he says lightly, though his jaw tightens. “She was…memorable.”
“I saw you,” I blurt out, worn down by his deflections. “Outside of Lemon & Fig. The night she died. I saw you.”
He doesn’t blink. Just takes a sip of water like he has all the time in the world. “Why do you care?”
“Why don’t you admit it?”
“So you can ignore the footage they’re playing on a loop? Of Beau and Gemma arguing? I think you’re worried Beau’s involved, and you want me to give you a reason to believe he’s not.”
My pulse jerks. He wants me to give him something he can use, offer some shadow of doubt that he can slip through and drive a wedge between Beau and me. I square my jaw. “This isn’t about Beau.”
“Everything’s about Beau.” His smile sharpens. “Even her.”
I steady my voice. “So you were here.”
He leans in, close enough that I catch the aftershave again and the back of my throat pinches. “You’re asking the wrong question again.”
Suddenly, I’m boxed in like I always was with him. Simon writing the rules and making me play his game.
“Why would I kill a girl like that?” He gives a dry laugh. “Think about it. Why would I bother?”
“You’re not denying it.”
“Of course I am.” His gaze sharpens. “She didn’t matter to me. She mattered to Beau.”
He won’t let it go. Always back to Beau. Always circling.
“What is your obsession with him? I’m sorry he didn’t sell his company to you. But that’s not why Redwood failed.”
“I know why Redwood failed,” Simon says through clenched teeth. After a beat, his jaw relaxes, slow and deliberate, like he’s savoring the moment. “You really don’t see it?”
“See what? You’re reaching,” I say, though my stomach twists.
“I don’t need to reach.” His smile sharpens. “I already have what I need.”
I watch him, searching my memory for some tell—a tap of a finger or a tic of his brow—that he is bluffing. But I come up short.
“Where were you that night?” I press. “Answer it straight.”
He drains the rest of his water, sets the glass down with care.
“The night Gemma died?” His voice lowers to something dangerous.
I open my mouth, but he keeps going, his voice low enough that only I can hear.
“If you want answers, you’ll have to look closer to home.
Ask your husband.” His eyes glitter. “Ask him what really happened the night Gemma died. Ask him what really happened to Redwood while you’re at it. ”
The last of his words slips poison into my bloodstream, and the truth of what Beau’s done slides into place with chilling ease.