Chapter 5
5
Sloane
You’d think two days would be enough to work through the stress of my new reality, but Monday night, as I’m on my way to fulfill my end of a bargain that I made with a devil, my pulse won’t slow down.
I’m okay.
Nobody’s hurt.
Everything’s fine.
But my body is on an adrenaline high, and I can’t decide if I love it or hate it.
Everything’s been wrong since Nigel showed up at the wedding on Saturday. Since I found Davis and a mystery person in what was supposed to be an empty museum.
We gave our statements to the sheriff, who thinks that it’s likely someone at the wedding was playing a game to practice for an upcoming Hollywood role. While he took photos of the workroom and dusted for prints, he says he’s not expecting to find anything. Only the coffee cup was broken, with prints on it belonging to one of our volunteers who forgot they’d taken their coffee with them to the museum the day before the wedding, and nothing was stolen. The sheriff and the rest of Waverly’s security team are convinced no one other than Nigel had gotten into town to crash the wedding, so the sheriff agreed to add extra patrols around the museum, but otherwise, they say it was the dumbest time to commit a crime, so it’s likely it was just a joy break-in.
After what Davis asked for his favor, I don’t agree.
And after I agreed to do the favor for him in exchange for him playing my pretend fiancé, including having a fake wedding with Nigel as a witness this coming weekend, my entire life is spinning out of control.
And it’s my own fault.
Approaching the house Davis told me to meet him at after I was finished with work today isn’t helping.
Not just because all of my patients wanted to talk today about how I kept my relationship with Davis a secret the past year, and I was already frazzled before my errand that’s the favor that I owe Davis.
I’m also keyed up because Davis’s house isn’t actually a house.
It’s a camper trailer hidden in the woods. Like the kind you’d pull behind a truck. A big truck—this is one of the largest campers I’ve ever seen, like the kind that’s an inch short of being a tour-bus-type RV—but still not a permanent structure here.
Probably.
With the fall leaves half-off the trees as dusk settles two days after the wedding, it’s even more eerie.
Especially since between the Shipwreck gossip chain and my work at the museum, I know all about this little piece of land, even if it’s the first time I’ve visited in person. There’s a run-down cabin sitting a little ways behind the camper with an ancient outhouse leaning in the slight breeze just beyond it, and lots of clumps of scraggly bushes all around it too. The cabin’s porch has caved in, and the roof is half blown away. It was condemned years ago, supposedly owned by a now long-deceased descendant of the founder of Sarcasm who didn’t fully fit in Sarcasm but was never accepted into Shipwreck either.
Rumor has it the former owner of the cabin died without any heirs, but I don’t actually know how long ago that was. I also don’t know if he lived here when he died or if he’d lived out his last days in a nursing home.
Rumor mill says both.
I wonder how many people in town know that Davis is staying in a trailer up here.
Gonna guess not many. If they did, I would’ve heard about it today at the very least, sooner with the company I keep.
Not only is Tillie Jean, who knows everything, one of my best friends, but I’ve also made friends with other people who know everything about everyone in Shipwreck and the surrounding areas. After my last breakup, I dove headfirst into volunteering with the historical society, and there were two things I quickly learned about my fellow volunteers.
One, if something happened in a five-mile radius of Shipwreck, they’d hear about it. And two, the townspeople here have a lot of historical data about Shipwreck.
Including maps.
Apparently I’m more fascinated by historical artifacts than I ever knew before. Participating with the historical society in getting the Thorny Rock Historical Museum opened just off the square in town has felt like finding my purpose, even more than helping patients every day as a nurse.
And I’ve stared at this lot on the map more than I’m comfortable with now that I know Davis is here. At least for tonight.
For our clandestine meeting where I’ll fulfill my half of our bargain so that he does his half.
Cheating and divorce are both bad, so having a fake husband really will get my grandmother and Nigel off my back.
I park my car on a leaf-littered gravel parking pad next to the trailer, consciously aware of the fact that there’s not another car here. No motorcycle either.
So where did Davis park?
Do I get cell signal here?
I check, and—yep.
There’s signal.
I climb out of my car and approach the trailer door. Knock once. Then twice.
Wait a bit.
Knock a third time.
When he doesn’t answer, I back down the steps. Maybe there’s another entrance? I start circling the trailer, leaves crunching beneath my feet, suddenly unsure if I’m in the right place.
I’m reaching for my phone when I feel it.
I’m not alone.
I am so serious when I say my heart cannot take much more. It’s hammering like I’m doing one of Tillie Jean’s senior aerobics classes.
Don’t knock how hard she makes us work.
There’s a reason all of our senior citizens are in tip-top shape.
I wish one of them were here with me now.
Nana Rock has some biceps.
She could help with whatever I’m about to find as I turn around, expecting a bear or a grizzled mountain hermit, and instead?—
“You’re early,” Davis says.
Did he make noise when he was stepping on the leaves?
No, he did not.
Is he panting like he just ran a marathon?
Also no.
He’s standing there holding five firewood logs under one arm— how? —and catching me inspecting his camper.
“I was efficient.” I almost manage to not stutter at all.
Now that I’ve committed a crime for this man, I’m feeling less sure of myself than I did two nights ago when I convinced myself this could be a harmless trade to get myself a fake husband.
He doesn’t answer.
No, the man simply sets his firewood down, then walks up the steps and opens the door.
Opens it.
Not locked.
I’ve never seen his former bandmates without a security detail—and yes, I’ve seen all four of them in Shipwreck, including two days ago at Cooper and Waverly’s wedding—and here Davis is, staying in an unlocked camper just outside of a town with residents nosy enough to break in and have a look around.
Or is he the one breaking into someone else’s camper?
He didn’t have any problems breaking into the museum the other night, did he?
This is the real Davis Remington…isn’t it?
I shake my head and follow him.
Of course this is the real Davis Remington. An entire town of people wouldn’t have gaslit me about that.
I don’t think, anyway.
Would they?
No. Absolutely not. I don’t matter enough to gaslight about something like this, and if it was a prank on the newbie when I moved here, they would’ve cracked by now.
Plus, I know it’s him.
The first time I ever saw him was that week I was here for the other wedding. I was supposed to be digging for buried treasure in the town square with the wedding party, including my boyfriend at the time—the one Davis called the blond caveman the other day, the one who had a girlfriend he didn’t tell me about when we started dating, the wedding where my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was maid of honor to his best man—and I looked up, and there Davis was.
The notoriously reclusive fifth member of my favorite boy band from my teenage years.
My secret crush.
The guy whose posters I hid beneath my old school workbooks and piles of papers that I told my grandmother I kept because I wanted to make sure I never forgot everything I’d learned.
The guy whose concert I finally got tickets to while I was in nursing school in Copper Valley but never got to attend because the band called it off a week before they were supposed to do the show that I was going to.
When I saw Davis that day, I second-guessed myself.
What was the likelihood that he’d just be strolling down the main drag in a small town an hour north of the city where he grew up without security or anyone else with him? I’d just seen a tall, slender, tattooed, bearded, man-bunned man, and my brain made the connection without any real evidence.
Not like pictures of him were still all over the tabloids so I could see how much he’d changed in the decade or so since the band split up. How he’d aged. How many new tattoos he had. What he’d done with his hair.
I heard a bit about him here and there, since the guys in the band all grew up in Copper Valley and you can’t spend two weeks in the city without someone mentioning its most famous residents, but I’d never seen him in person.
Yet I was still so sure it was him.
And then I saw him on the balcony of the restaurant across the way, talking to his friends, and I knew.
I knew that it was him because he was with Ellie Ryder, his former bandmate’s sister, and my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend.
The sun hit him just right on that balcony, and I knew .
Much like I have this gut feeling that I can trust him.
That he is the good guy in this situation.
Problem is, my gut has steered me wrong so many times that I don’t trust it anymore.
So why did I commit a minor crime in exchange for him pretending to be my fiancé?
Because the sheriff isn’t taking the break-in seriously.
Davis is the closest thing I have to answers.
He pauses in the doorway without letting me in. “You have it?”
I straighten and smile. “I have something even better .”
The look he gives me suggests he doubts that whatever I’ve done, it’s better . And he manages to do that without twitching any of his facial muscles.
Huh.
Maybe he’s more expressive than I gave him credit for. Maybe you just have to watch him closely.
I wiggle my phone at him. “I didn’t steal it. I took pictures instead. So no one has to know.”
Oh, that is definitely a look. “You took pictures.”
“Yep.”
“With your phone.”
He asks a lot of questions that sound like statements. “Don’t usually take my Polaroid with me.”
“Is your phone backed up to a cloud?”
“Is there anyone who’s ever had to upgrade a phone these days who doesn’t back it up to a cloud?”
He purses his lips together.
Davis.
Davis Remington.
The man who straight-faces everything.
He’s pursing his lips together.
Visibly swallowing too.
Definitely displeased with my ingenuity.
I’d call this a him problem, except I’d still like him to fake marry me.
Some to get my grandmother off my back.
Some because it’ll give me the joy of a lifetime to make Nigel watch me marry my teenage boy band crush when Nigel didn’t even believe Davis knew who I was.
Davis holds his hand out. “Give me your phone.”
“I can transfer them to you over Bluetooth.”
“Do you know how to fully delete files so that the internet as a whole has no record of their existence?”
Would you look at that?
He’s fully frustrated.
I didn’t think that could happen. In all of the pictures I’ve snuck of him over the past year, he’s always wearing the same expression.
Always .
But I have managed to visibly exasperate him.
Guess this answers a lingering question I’ve had for a while.
I am, in fact, the reason all of my past relationships haven’t worked.
Or possibly every last man on this planet simply sucks.
Actually, thinking about my history with men—Nigel, the boyfriend I was dating the first time I came to Shipwreck, the gaslighters, the thieves, and the narcissists—yeah, I’m pretty sure every man on this planet simply sucks.
“Please give me your phone.” Davis’s words are slow and calm, not unlike how I speak to irrational patients at work sometimes.
“Will I get it back?”
“Yes.”
“Before or after you get a copy of the pictures so that I don’t have to go make another excuse to see Pop?”
He doesn’t answer.
I’m starting to get used to that.
It’s starting to annoy me too.
“Tell me why, again, you wanted to see Thorny Rock’s— aah umph .”
Huh.
I’m inside the camper now, and the door’s shut. “Well. This isn’t getting weirder by the minute. Also—hey! How did you get my phone?”
He lifts it over his head, and since he has a few inches on me, I can’t reach it as I stand there, going up on my tiptoes on the creaky vinyl flooring inside the small, enclosed space that smells vaguely like curry chicken.
He swipes to unlock my phone with it angled just right for face ID, and then opens my photo app.
Okay, that takes talent.
Anytime my friends ask me to take a picture, their camera and photo apps are always in different places and I have to search for a while.
Not Davis.
He just knew .
“Are you actually a spy? I’ve heard the rumors. The job at the nuclear reactor is a cover story, isn’t it? It makes sense. You being there when someone was breaking into my museum despite me not seeing you at all the rest of the wedding, fake weddings with an untold number of women—including your sister—clandestine meetings at secret trailers in the woods, abnormal abilities with electronics, you never smile, no one knows if you’re dating anyone— oh my god , that’s what your previous fake weddings were about, weren’t they? You were on missions.”
The man doesn’t acknowledge me.
Heat creeps up my chest.
I hate how much I’ve been second-guessing everything I know since Saturday.
And now I’m wondering if I’ve accidentally put myself in danger by believing I know Davis because I developed a parasocial relationship with him in my teenage years, then saw him as a real person—but still mostly out of my sphere of existence—once I moved to Shipwreck.
One game of darts does not make a friendship.
Nor does a year of telling lies about him being my boyfriend.
I sneak a glance around the interior of the camper, looking for any evidence of blood or dead bodies while telling myself I’m being overly paranoid.
There’s a galley kitchen with 1990s-style oak cabinets and ivory Formica countertops. No food on the counters. Across from the kitchen, a closed computer sits on the beige dining table with built-in brown benches on either side. No stickers on the lid, very much unlike my small laptop, which I’ve decorated with stickers from all over Shipwreck and Copper Valley.
Beyond that is a door that I assume leads to a bedroom. To my other side, there’s a small sitting area with a tan leather couch along the side wall of the trailer.
Maybe it’s not a bedroom back past the kitchen.
Maybe it’s a special operations spy center.
Am I breathing heavily?
Or am I breathing too light?
Davis shoots me a look. “Do you need a paper bag?”
“Are you going to murder me?”
No answer.
I do get quite the look though.
This one involves his eyebrows and his mouth and a little tic high on his cheek, high enough to see it over the beard, not high enough to impact his eyelids.
And a small part of me dies a little.
I had such a crush on this man when I was a lost and lonely teenager feeling like everything I did was wrong and that I was definitely never going to be a good enough person to escape the pits of hell.
And I could have a crush on him again if I wasn’t over men and if he wasn’t clearly as annoyed with me as every other man I’ve ever dated has ultimately been.
“That wasn’t a no,” I point out.
He hands my phone back without a word, but I get the feeling if he were to use his words, he’d say something like, Thanks for coming, get the hell out now .
I open the photo app.
The pictures of Thorny Rock’s diary are gone. All sixty-four of them.
I got every page that he wrote on.
And I made sure they were clear too.
None of my other photos appear to be missing.
Not even the photos that I took at the wedding and realized later that Davis was in.
“Are we still getting fake married?” I ask.
He’s head down over his own phone. “I don’t back out of my promises.”
“You didn’t ask about wedding plans.”
“Tillie Jean’s on it.”
He’s not wrong. Tillie Jean and her other sister-in-law, Annika, got us a room at the winery just outside of Sarcasm, and TJ’s working on picking someone who can be a fake minister with real-looking paperwork.
She has no shortage of options. Because she’s Tillie Jean.
I lean against the countertop and keep watching him mostly ignore me. “You’re very well-informed.”
“Not difficult.”
“I saw Nigel today.”
“Condolences.”
Freaking Nigel. “He’s taken a short-term pastoring gig in Copper Valley because he knew that I’d be stubborn about accepting what’s best for me and that it might take me some time to come to my senses.”
Davis lifts his head and gives me another blank look that’s not quite blank.
This one either means truly, you can go, or I’d like to put my boot through Nigel’s head .
“Those were basically his exact words,” I say. “Also, I’m sorry about what I said the other day about you fornicating with sheep. I don’t believe that. My grandmother has lived…a peculiar life…and she’s not entirely in touch with reality. Really, it was funny and cute when I was growing up. But I don’t know if she’s changed or if I have, but it’s not funny anymore.”
“Far from the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Nigel can’t get away again to come up here for a few days, so neither of us needs to worry about him surprising us anywhere.”
Intense brown eyes study me like he’s deciding if I’m stupid for believing that, or if he’s having second thoughts about getting involved and fake marrying me now that he has what he wants.
Truth?
I didn’t bring all of what Davis wanted in the format he wanted it because I was afraid he’d back out of the wedding.
I’m dangling little bits so that he doesn’t have a reason to bolt before I get my fake husband.
“Plus, he’s still super glittery, so you see him coming a mile away,” I add.
“Heard you started that.”
“I’m not always at my brightest when I’m panicking. You are exceptionally well-informed. Are you sure you’re not a spy?”
After one lingering look that I’m almost positive means this conversation is about over , he resumes studying the pictures on his phone.
“Does your phone back up to the cloud?”
“No.”
“Just out of curiosity?—”
“Only people who bring me what I actually asked for get a hint of a real answer to that question.”
I’d ask how he could read my mind, but who wouldn’t be in this situation and desperately want to know why he wants a centuries-old pirate diary that said pirate’s descendant adamantly refused to let us put in the town museum about the pirate?
While living on a curious piece of land near Shipwreck?
And that circles me back to the one obvious answer to my question that I’ve been avoiding acknowledging to myself since Saturday night.
Davis is hunting for Thorny Rock’s treasure, and he thinks there’s a clue in the diary.
And if my hunch is right, then I also think that Pop Rock, Tillie Jean’s grandfather, knows there’s a clue in the diary.
Why else would Pop have given us so many Thorny Rock artifacts but refused to let the museum hold the diary?
Thorny Rock died over two hundred years ago.
Pop never would’ve met him.
Pop doesn’t have any grandparents or great-aunts or great-uncles that he would remember from even his youngest childhood days who would’ve ever met Thorny Rock either.
There’s something in the diary.
And these people think it has to do with a treasure.
“What are you going to do with it if you find it?” I whisper.
He once again looks up from his phone to study me. “What would you do with it?”
I bite my lower lip.
What would I do with it?
There’s likely not a person in Shipwreck who hasn’t asked themselves that question.
What if I was planting a flower garden and I found Thorny Rock’s treasure chest?
Rumors say it’s buried somewhere in Shipwreck. It’s a fairly normal question to ask yourself.
Except every time I ask myself that question, right after acknowledging that I’d turn it over to the Shipwreck historical society because I’d feel guilty for the rest of my life if I kept anything that I didn’t deserve for myself, I come back to the logical answer.
“That’s kind of a pointless question since it doesn’t exist.”
He watches me a moment longer, then goes back to his phone. “What time’s the wedding?”
“Two p.m. on Saturday. You think the treasure exists.”
“Its existence is irrelevant. Do you need money for a dress or catering?”
“I thrifted a bright pink prom dress a few weeks ago that’ll give Nigel a coronary, and Annika’s insisting that we let Grady bake wedding cookies, which is also so beautifully nontraditional that if the coronary doesn’t do Nigel in, the aneurysm will. Especially if we do sugar cookies in unfortunate shapes, which I’m considering asking for but probably won’t because I’ll have regrets, but Grady would do it anyway to be funny. The only thing I really need to complete the day is for you to show up in jeans and a leather jacket, and for us to ride off on a motorcycle, but only for like a block. Just far enough for Nigel to not see when I get off of it and let you go about your life. If the treasure’s existence is irrelevant, why did you want the diary?”
He pins me with another look, this one mostly the neutral expression I’ve come to expect from him with the barest hint of lingering frustration. “Have you heard of the Fenn treasure?”
“The one buried by some guy out west that a med student found in Wyoming? Yes. Of course. Pirate town, duh. We hear about treasures. Plus, we’re working on an interactive display in the last wing of the museum, and parts of it are about treasures that have been found around the world.”
“Do you know how many people died looking for it?”
“Not an exact number.”
“More than one. That’s what matters. How many people are coming to Shipwreck right now looking for the treasure that you don’t think exists?”
“So you’re going to find it so no one dies looking for it? Even if it doesn’t exist?”
I’ve clearly used up my quota of answers from him for the day because once again, he doesn’t answer.
Awesome.
And once more, I am never, ever, ever getting married.
For real, I mean.
I don’t even want to date anymore.
Men are fucking awful.
All of them.
I pocket my phone. “Could you do me a favor and not die looking for a treasure before we get fake married so that I didn’t steal photos of that diary in vain? I have this thing where I feel an absurd amount of guilt and responsibility for things that aren’t my fault, and while I recognize that I was gifted with that guilt and shame in childhood as a control and manipulation tactic, my emotions don’t always get the logic message to overcome the guilt and shame. Also, in this case, since I basically committed a crime for you to get you information that you might use to hurt yourself, I feel premature remorse and shame over your demise while looking for it too.”
“I won’t die.”
Men.
Freaking men and their egos. And their ability to only comprehend the slightest bit of what a woman says, and only the parts that concern them.
“So you know, if you do die, I’ll be under a ton of pressure all over again to marry Nigel so that he can take care of me since being a widow would turn me into a helpless ninny.”
Flat brown eyes lift to mine once more.
And somehow, he keeps a straight face while also silently asking me if I really just used the word ninny .
I stifle a sigh. “That’s what they’d say. My grandmother and her friends and the people I grew up with.”
“Ever thought about simply disappointing them?”
“Tried that once and have the exorcism videos to show for it.”
I’m joking.
I say it like I’m joking.
But the way he keeps staring at me?—
It’s like he can read my soul, and he knows it has scars, and he knows that me telling them to fuck off and let me live my own life won’t work.
“Nigel fucking moved from Iowa to try to claim what he thinks is his right. My grandmother and the people who helped her raise me—they view the world one way, and I used to see it the same, but I don’t anymore. They think I’m damning my eternal soul while I’m happier and healthier and more at peace and grateful to just have this life to live than I’ve ever been. I know they think they’re trying to save me, I know they believe they have my best interests at heart, but they’re just…”
I shake my head.
Davis doesn’t care.
This is transactional. He wants my help so he can go find a treasure. I want his help so that I have a buffer between my family and their misplaced worry about me.
You don’t try to control and manipulate people if you don’t care about them, right?
“Anyway. Thank you. Again. Even Nigel won’t try to break the sacred bonds of marriage, so having a fake husband will go a long way toward me continuing to keep my peace. I’ll just send photos every once in a while like I did before, except this time you’ll know it. Yay. Hooray. Everyone will be happy.”
Everyone will not be happy.
Davis glances up at me once more. “Is he coming again before Saturday?”
“That’s not the plan.”
“Does he follow plans?”
I wince. “I mean, lunch wasn’t exactly in the plans today…”
Swear on my old poster of him, Davis looks like he’s considering making some plans of his own that I definitely need to know nothing about.
And his quiet “Call me if he shows up” makes me even more convinced there’s danger simmering beneath his surface.
I suddenly have an old song that Waverly played for us once back in my head. A song about a guy named Earl.
“I—I don’t have your number.”
He sets his phone down, pulls a notepad out of a drawer, scribbles a number, and hands me the paper. “That’ll work. Use it if anyone you don’t want to see shows up.”
That’ll work .
Not that’s my number .
And use it if anyone you don’t want to see shows up ?
What does that mean?
Aside from the fact that it makes him fascinating and dangerous.
And aside from the fact that if my gut says I can trust him, which it’s actively telling me right now, I absolutely should not.
“Thank you. Again. I know you don’t have to do this. I should handle my own problems.” Shut up, Sloane. Don’t be an overly apologetic ninny .
He nods once more.
And that’s that.
Davis Remington and I will see each other again only when necessary until we get fake married in five days and convince Nigel to go back to Iowa, and then I’ll go back to therapy to discuss my first crush on a guy since I gave up on men.
Yippee.