Chapter 44
Chapter Forty-Four
I’m sitting at our usual table at La Madeleine, half-listening to the soft clink of champagne flutes and silverware while the women around me drift in and out of the sort of conversation that passes for intimacy in Tigertail Beach Estates.
The café is full in that elegant, curated way it always is, sunlight pouring through the front windows and turning everything golden: the polished glassware, the white plates, the buttery layers of croissants stacked in baskets no one really touches.
Tara is to my left, Lisa across from me, Julia and Stephanie beside her, all of them dressed too beautifully for a weekday lunch, all of them drinking Veuve Clicquot as though it were sparkling water and not a hundred and fifty dollars a bottle.
It should feel normal. Familiar. Instead it all feels slightly out of focus, as though I’ve slipped half a step outside my own life and can no longer quite find my way back in.
Today, as it has been for the last month, the subject is Phillip.
His death has become the social event of the season in the cruelest possible way, something whispered over cappuccinos and picked apart over pastry, his gunshot wound elevated into neighborhood mythology because no one has anything better to do than turn other people’s tragedies into table talk.
A month has passed since he was found dead in his front yard, blood seeping into the same immaculate lawn he used to pay men to manicure twice a week, and still the police haven’t named a suspect, haven’t announced an arrest, haven’t done much of anything beyond letting the speculation bloom.
Here, in this beautiful little pocket of privilege, uncertainty is its own kind of entertainment.
“I heard it was a business deal gone wrong,” Lisa says, lowering her voice as though secrecy gives her more credibility.
Her nails tap lightly against the rim of her flute, pink and gleaming and absurdly delicate for the kind of conversation she’s trying to have.
“Phillip made a lot of enemies. Everyone knows that. He wasn’t exactly ethical. ”
Stephanie makes a face and takes another measured sip of champagne.
“Please. Ethical has nothing to do with men like Phillip. He was smart, that’s all.
Men like that know how to move money, how to make it grow, how to keep themselves protected.
If he was killed over a business deal, it was probably someone outside the Estates. You know how these things happen.”
Julia leans in, her eyes lighting with the kind of conspiratorial pleasure she always takes in anything sordid. “Honestly, it was probably The Seminoles. Who else rolls through a neighborhood like that and makes a point of being seen? They were basically announcing it.”
The Seminoles.
The word moves through me like something cold.
My brother’s club. My brother, whom I haven’t spoken to since Phillip died, not because I don’t want to, but because every time I think about calling him I’m hit with the sickening possibility that whatever he tells me will only make things worse.
I tell myself his silence is protective, that if he knows anything he’s keeping me away from it for my own good.
But another part of me wonders if that’s too generous.
Another part of me wonders what he knows, what he’s heard, whether he’s closer to this than I can bear to imagine.
The thought leaves a metallic taste in my mouth.
“They say it might’ve been a drifter,” Lisa says, dropping her voice even further, as if speaking nonsense softly somehow makes it less ridiculous. “Or maybe a robbery gone wrong. Tigertail isn’t as safe as it used to be.”
“That’s absurd,” Stephanie says immediately. “Nothing was taken. The house wasn’t touched. If it was robbery, they forgot the robbery part.”
I let them talk. Their voices wash over me in soft, expensive waves while I swirl my champagne and don’t drink it.
They’re doing what women like this always do, dressing instinct up as intelligence and gossip up as concern, but none of them know anything.
None of them even seem to care beyond how thrilling it is to live in a neighborhood now touched by not one mysterious death, but two.
No one says Whitney’s name. No one even tries.
That’s the part that hurts more than I expect.
Phillip’s death has swallowed hers whole.
A man shot in his front yard is dramatic in a way a yacht explosion is not, at least not to people like this.
There’s something cleaner, more cinematic, about a bullet wound than a body lost to water and flame.
And so the story has shifted, as stories always do, away from the woman who disappeared into the bay and toward the man who bled into his own lawn.
Whitney, my best friend, the person who knew me better than anyone has ever known me, has become a footnote in the saga of Phillip Winthrop’s violent end.
I miss her so badly some days it feels like physical weakness, like my body is missing an organ and no one else has noticed the blood loss.
She was the only one who really understood me, the only one who knew what it meant to live in the space between two lives and belong fully to neither.
She knew my secrets. She knew my shame. She knew the parts of me even Bennett has never touched.
And now she’s gone, and I’m sitting here at a table full of women in Dior and Cartier pretending not to scream.
“I heard they’re trying to pin it on Chrissy,” Stephanie says, and the words bring my attention back sharply.
Chrissy.
Even now, the thought of her as Phillip’s killer feels wrong, not impossible exactly, but incomplete.
I’ve heard the whispers too, of course I have.
She was living in the house. She had access.
She had motive if you squint hard enough and let misogyny do the rest. But I haven’t said a word to anyone.
I haven’t told these women what I know, and I certainly haven’t told Bennett everything I suspect.
Not that I could talk to him if I wanted to.
Not now.
Not after the folder in his office. Not after the contracts.
Not after the ugly little revelation that my husband, for all his warmth and kindness and pressed Oxford shirts, knows exactly how to structure a deal so that someone else gets destroyed while he walks away untouched.
Not after realizing I’ve been sleeping beside a loaded gun for ten years without ever knowing it was there.
His composure through all of this, the steady nonchalance, the careful way he keeps suggesting grief counseling as though my problem is sorrow and not suspicion, unsettles me more than I want to admit.
No, Bennett is not someone I can go to with this anymore.
I look around the table instead, at the women with their perfect blowouts and curated concern, and it occurs to me that Tigertail Beach has become something else entirely.
It used to feel like a fantasy, a luxury paradise built from money and landscaping and social ambition.
Now it feels like a gilded prison. Everyone here is hiding something.
Everyone has a version of themselves they perform and another they keep tucked carefully out of sight.
Secrets move through this neighborhood as easily as sea air.
The thought turns my stomach.
I push my champagne glass away and let the women’s conversation blur into nonsense.
Tara is talking now about a shopping trip in Paris, something about a trunk show and a custom bag, but the words don’t stick.
My mind is elsewhere, moving back and forth between Whitney and Phillip, between the noose and the jar and the blood on the pearls, between my husband’s hidden contracts and my brother’s careful silences.
Then my phone buzzes against the table.
The sound is small, almost delicate, but it cuts through everything.
I pick it up absently at first, expecting a delivery notification, a promotional email, maybe something from Bennett. Instead, the screen glows with a message from an unknown number.
If you want answers, meet me in North Tampa at 6 p.m. Come alone.
For one long, suspended second, I just stare at it.
My heart doesn’t exactly stop, but it stumbles badly enough to feel like it has.
Heat rushes up my spine, followed by a chill so immediate it leaves my fingers cold.
The café recedes all at once, the sound around me flattening into a dull hum as adrenaline starts pushing through my system in hard, uneven pulses.
“McCullough?”
Tara’s voice reaches me from a distance that shouldn’t exist across such a small table. I look up too quickly and find all of them watching me, their expressions shifting from gossip-bright curiosity to polite concern.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say too fast, already rising, already gathering my bag. I force a smile onto my face, though I can feel how brittle it is. “Sorry. Bennett just got home early from his trip and he’s not feeling well. I should probably go.”
It’s a flimsy lie. Bennett isn’t due home for two more days, and under normal circumstances one of them would absolutely notice that. But maybe my face is pale enough to sell it, or maybe they’re too conditioned by manners to question a sick husband.
“Poor Bennett,” Stephanie says automatically. “Give him our love.”
“Of course,” I murmur, already stepping back from the table. “I’ll talk to you later.”
I don’t walk out of the café so much as flee it, aware of their eyes on my back until the front door swings shut behind me and the cool air hits my face.
It feels like surfacing. I stop on the sidewalk for half a second and read the message again, as if the words might change if I stare long enough.
If you want answers.
It could be a trap. Of course it could. It probably is. It could be Phillip’s killer, Whitney’s killer, someone trying to frighten me, someone trying to lure me somewhere isolated and finish whatever game they’ve started. Every instinct I have tells me not to go.
But I’m already moving toward my car.
Because answers are the one thing I haven’t been able to deny myself.
My hands shake as I unlock the door and slide behind the wheel. The engine turns over, the air-conditioning blasts too cold against my skin, and before I’ve given myself time to reconsider, I’m pulling out into traffic, leaving the café and its harmless, venomous little world behind.
The drive out of Marco feels both immediate and endless.
Streets I know by heart blur past, then widen into highway, then stretch into long miles of asphalt and sky.
I don’t let myself think too hard about what I’m doing, because if I do I might turn around.
Instead I focus on the road, on the clock, on the thin white line of my headlights as afternoon starts tipping toward evening.
My mind still does what minds do when they’re frightened. It wanders where I don’t want it to. To Whitney. To Phillip. To Chrissy’s bloodied nightgown. To Bennett’s unreadable calm. To the possibility that everyone in my life is keeping some version of the truth from me.
Three hours in a car gives a woman too much time to think, and by the time the outskirts of Tampa begin to rise around me, my nerves are humming so sharply I feel flayed open by them.
Then my phone buzzes again in the cupholder.
I glance down at a red light and see the second message.
Meet me at Honeymoon Island. On the point.
My stomach drops.
I know the place. Everyone local does. It’s the kind of quiet, desolate stretch people go to when they want to disappear into the scenery, far enough removed from the more crowded beaches that you can stand there at sunset and feel like the edge of the world belongs to you.
It is not the sort of place you suggest if your intentions are good.
Still, I plug it into the navigation.
As I follow the directions west, the sky deepens from gold to bruised blue.
The roads narrow. Traffic thins. My chest feels tight in a way I can’t stretch out of.
Every rational thought in my head tells me to call someone, to send a location, to turn around.
But I do none of those things. I keep driving because after everything, after months of half-truths and dead ends and useless sympathy, I cannot bear the idea of coming this far and refusing the one person who claims to know something.
By the time I pull into the lot, the sun is sinking, staining the horizon in dim coral and purple. The beach is nearly empty. The only sounds are the low wash of water, the far-off cry of gulls, and the rattle of my own breathing as I step out of the car and lock it behind me.
The air out here is colder than I expect.
Or maybe that’s just fear.
The point stretches ahead, all scrub brush and pale sand and drifting shadows. Every instinct I have is screaming at me now. I could vanish out here. That thought arrives whole and undeniable. I could disappear into this dark and no one would find me until morning, if at all.
Still, I keep walking.
The old fishing hut comes into view at the far edge of the point, weathered and leaning slightly, its door hanging partly open as though whoever sent the message wanted to make things just eerie enough to feel theatrical.
I stop a few feet away, my heart pounding hard enough to hurt.
The darkness inside is thick, almost solid.
“Hello?” I call, and my voice sounds too small in the open air.
Silence answers me at first.
Then movement.
A figure shifts in the dark interior, stepping slowly into the faint spill of twilight. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Familiar in the way only danger can be.
Fear hits first, fast and electric.
“Who are you?” I ask, though even as I say it I can feel recognition beginning to take shape beneath the panic.
The figure takes another step.
And another.
Until the light catches his face.
“Maverick?”
My brother stops just inside the doorway, his expression unreadable, his leather vest dark against the fading light, his silence heavier than any answer could be.
Something in me goes still.
Because whatever he called me here to say, whatever truth he’s carrying, I know it before he ever opens his mouth.
After this, nothing stays the same.