Chapter 1
ONE
PRESENT DAY
“What’s with the names of the roads?”
My best friend, Hayley Clifton, cocked her blonde head and studied the laminated map that had been part of my packet when I’d moved into the Landings, a community deemed “luxurious,” on Skidaway Island in Savannah, Georgia.
“What do you mean?” I watched the movers deposit my couch in the living room.
One of them looked up to silently ask if the spot was okay. I nodded. I would move the furniture where I wanted it once it was in the room. I just needed them to go. This had been the longest day of my life.
“You live on Yam Gandy Road. What’s a Yam Gandy?” Hayley asked.
I shrugged. I might have been an author, someone who understood words better than most, but I had no idea. “I know what a yam is.”
“So … you live on a Temu potato road?”
I pressed my lips together in an effort to keep from laughing.
It didn’t work. Laughter burst forth, and Hayley joined in.
Hayley was a romance writer. We’d met in college, both joining a fiction group that was full of some of the most nonfunny people to ever put fingers to keyboards.
Bree James and Hayley Clifton had not mixed well with Jim Pile, a literary fiction writer who believed every sentence should be toiled over for a full hour.
Jessica Midgen, a women’s fiction writer who had never met a heroine she didn’t want to torture with some kind of cancer, had complained to the group organizers that the group was for serious writers and said Hayley and I were clearly not that.
We hadn’t been kicked out of the group, but nobody took us seriously.
On the face of it, we were an odd couple. Hayley wrote clean romance. That meant no swearing, no sex—even the innuendo that the hero and heroine might do it was a bridge too far for her—and no drugs. Basically, her cowboys weren’t supposed to wear chaps for any reason other than horses.
I, on the other hand, wrote steamy paranormal fantasy books where the hero and heroine occasionally needed to solve a pesky mystery or save the world with a fight, but that was always secondary to the boning. I spent more time writing sex scenes than I did anything else, and I was good at it.
Hayley was adamant that I not tell her what I was writing on any given day because she was convinced she would die of embarrassment.
Her refusal to even talk about sex had me wondering.
She was a lesbian—another thing she didn’t want to talk about—and seemed fine floating through life unattached, other than the group of writers we’d made friends with.
I adored her. Sometimes I didn’t understand her, though.
“Are you really obsessing with the road names?” I asked as I went back to monitoring the movers.
They were almost done. I couldn’t wait. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with them—they seemed perfectly fine, thank you very much—but I was ready to flop onto the couch and pretend I didn’t have a million boxes to unpack.
“I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this situation.” Hayley’s expression was somber. “It’s not just Yam Gandy Road. There’s also Peregrine Crossing and Water Witch Crossing.”
I balked. “There’s a Water Witch Crossing? Man, I should have moved to that road.”
She shook her head. “It’s one of those teeny roads. It only has six houses.”
“Bummer.”
She shot me a sympathetic look. “There’s Cotton Crossing.”
“That sounds unfortunate for the South.”
“There’s Lampwick Lane, Rookery Road, and Sweetgum Crossing.”
My smile was back in an instant. “Why do you think they have so many weird road names?”
“I have no idea. You should have figured that out before moving here.”
I waved her off and took the envelope of cash I’d tucked aside for tipping the movers. “Is that everything?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
The man had strode into the room after the last delivery and just stared at me with his hands on his hips. If that wasn’t a pay me now glare, I wasn’t a good judge of character.
“You need to pay the invoice I just texted you before I can leave,” he said in a gravelly voice.
I was caught between amusement and annoyance. “What happens if I don’t pay it?” I had every intention of paying it, but this guy had been zero fun throughout the entire process, and I wanted to know how he would respond. “Do you pack everything back up and take it away?”
His stare remained dark. “No. That would be too much work. We would just break everything we’ve already delivered. Maybe we would set it on fire after.”
I paused, uncertain. “Was that a joke?” I asked finally.
He cocked his head and remained silent.
“Not a joke,” I muttered as I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The invoice was in my text messages. I tapped it, looked at the total, and shook my head. “Geez.”
The mover lifted an eyebrow. “What do you expect when you pay people to do what you don’t want to do?”
“Good point.” I paid the invoice. Even though the mover had the personality of my ass, I gave him the tip. It was generous. “Thanks for everything.”
He looked in the envelope then back up at me. For the first time since we’d met—which had happened weeks before in Michigan, when I’d hired the company—he smiled. “Thanks.” Suddenly, he was a happy guy.
All I could do was shake my head. Apparently, I should have given him the tip first. That might have made the two-day trip from Michigan to Georgia more enjoyable. “I appreciate all you did.” I meant it. “This was a big deal for me.”
The man didn’t wait for me to tell my story about starting over. He just spun on his heel and walked out the front door. He didn’t close it behind him.
“Well, I guess he didn’t want to hear that story,” I said on a laugh.
“Don’t take it personally.” Hayley said. “I have to think all that lifting would make anybody crabby.”
I was right there with her. My Michigan sensibilities—you couldn’t live close to Detroit and not have survival instincts—had me closing and locking the door. Then I returned to her at the kitchen table. “Any other funny road names?”
“Oh, I’ve given up on those. I’m on the Landings’s website. Did you know what this place was when you decided to move here?”
I shrugged as I sat down. “It’s luxury living.” I let loose a hollow laugh. I’d grown up poor—like, dirt poor. Luxury living was something I was still adjusting to. “What’s the problem?”
“Well, for starters, they say it’s ‘thoughtfully planned and beautifully maintained’ and that it promises a ‘life well lived in one of America’s most distinguished private communities.’”
“And that’s a problem how?”
“It sounds very Stepford.”
Now that she’d brought it up, I couldn’t disagree. “I wanted to live in Savannah.”
That was the truth. When I’d decided to leave Michigan—which had been a long time coming—I’d only considered moving two places. They were my happy places. New Orleans got too many hurricanes. That left Savannah, which also suffered from hurricanes but not on the same level.
“I looked at houses in the downtown area, but a lot of them are historical,” I explained. “That seemed like a lot of work. Plus, the closer you are to downtown, the less real estate you actually get for the price. I would’ve had to live in a condo instead of a house.”
“And why is that the worst thing ever?”
I shrugged. How was I supposed to explain this to her?
Hayley had grown up on a farm in Tennessee before moving to the suburbs of Savannah.
She’d sat at the dinner table every night with her parents and brothers, and they’d talked about their days.
I couldn’t even remember my father. He’d taken off when I was an infant.
As for my mother, well, she lived life on her terms, and everybody else had to adjust.
“I just always wanted a house,” I said finally. “Something to call my own.”
Hayley glanced up. We’d discussed my mother—mostly when I’d been drunk in college—and Hayley understood the basics, but even she didn’t get it completely. I’d never told anybody the whole story about my mother.
“Okay.” Looking at my face, she quickly changed tactics. “This place is still crazy, though. Did you read up on it before you decided to live here?”
“I just liked the house.” That was true. It had beautiful white cabinets, marble countertops, and amazing tiled floors. I’d fallen in love the second I saw the huge bookshelves in the living room. I already knew exactly how I was going to decorate them.
“Well, let me enlighten you.” Hayley cleared her throat as if preparing for a great speech. “It’s a private community because they have six golf courses.”
I frowned. “They have six golf courses in Savannah?”
“No, there are six golf courses in the Landings.”
“Geez.” I couldn’t imagine hitting a ball with a stick that many times. “Weird.”
“It gets weirder … and cooler. The athletic club has pickleball and yoga.”
“I don’t do either of those things.”
She ignored me. “There are more than eight thousand residents, and the full golf membership is more than thirty grand.” Her eyes landed on me. “Did you buy the full golf membership?”
That was the most ludicrous thing I’d ever heard. “No. I do believe I signed on for the athletic membership or something, though. I just remember if I wanted to eat at the restaurants, I had to have some form of membership.”
“See!” Hayley jabbed a finger in my direction. “Stepford.”
I laughed because I couldn’t help myself.
“Let’s talk about the restaurants, though, because they’re one of the cooler aspects of this place,” she said, returning to her perusal of the Landings’s offerings. “There is Deer Creek A Coastal Grill. Yes, that’s it’s real name. Why not just call it Deer Creek?”
I shrugged. I was with her on that one. The only reason to have an overblown name was for laughs, in my book. And yes, I’d done that a few times in my books. The readers always loved it.
“Looking at the menu, it’s stuff like oysters and hearts-of-palm fries.”
“Are those regular fries with weird seasonings?”