Chapter 2 #2
“Appreciate you,” I told her, holding up the corn dog in thanks, but she was too busy to notice.
I cast my gaze toward the bonfire and begrudgingly headed in that direction, burning my tongue on the fried crust while I woofed down my free supper.
As I got closer, I surveyed the group of people—mostly male—who gathered around a flaming pile of wood scraps and cardboard boxes.
It appeared that Patty was right: a fight was about to go down.
The crowd was watching a couple of shirtless, tanned white guys who were circling each other and shouting out taunts.
The fighters were both lean and muscular. One had a military-short buzz cut, and as I got closer, my pulse pounded inside
my temples and my anxiety spiked. When Seb first got sent away to military school up north, he mailed me a handwritten letter
that included a printed photo of him with his new buzz cut—his one-and-only attempt to contact me. Now I was recalling that
photo and struggling to match the face I once knew with the buzz cut in the middle of this impromptu fighting ring.
A loud barking dog tore me out of my thoughts. I swiveled to find the ugliest, shaggiest husky I’d ever laid eyes on—no leash,
no apparent owner—barking madly at me. I flinched and backed up. Me and dogs? We didn’t get along. I was bitten by a Doberman
when I was a young child, and I’d never gotten over the fear.
This dog was no Doberman, but it was certainly big enough to scare me.
Those ice-blue husky eyes, so otherworldly . . .
When I backed away, the other fighter inside the bonfire ring turned to glance at the dog, squinting and pushing blond hair
away from his face to reveal one blackened eye. I immediately knew I’d been mistaken about the other fighter.
This was Seb.
It just wasn’t the Seb I knew.
Loose blond waves swooped over his forehead. A pair of board shorts hung from his hips, threatening to fall off. Bronzed muscles
glistened in the firelight.
Had it been only two years since we’d laid eyes on each other? In that time, the sweet, skinny boy I once knew had gone from
gangly to utterly ripped and now looked like a full-grown man.
His eyes widened. “Paige?”
Anger rose, swift and hot. “You’re dead to me, Sebastian Jansen!” I shouted.
The buzz-cut fighter laughed, turning toward me to reveal the face of a male model . . . if that model’s face had been covered
in burns and scars. I knew him, too, unfortunately. “Pretty Paul.” That’s what people called him. His real name was Paul Vanderburg,
the proverbial king of the dock bros. He’d graduated two years before us.
The devil of Haven Beach.
“Looks like we have a new contender,” he called out. “Think you can hold your own against a doughy girl instead of me? I’d
love to watch that, Jansen.”
Doughy? God, I hate him.
Seb replied, but I couldn’t hear it for all the damned barking. Or maybe I was just too busy being spellbound by the sight
of Seb after so long. The way he looked at me, with eyes bigger than the moon, caused a chaotic flurry of emotions.
I wanted to hug him.
To ask him a thousand questions.
Then push his face into the sand.
Make him hurt like he’d hurt me.
But a couple dozen faces were staring and whispering about me—“That’s the Malone girl, the family that owned the cherry farm outside of town”—and then I heard someone else in the crowd say my grandmother’s name.
That was my tipping point. Fresh grief welled up, and everything suddenly felt as if it were closing in on me. The fighting
ring. The barking dog. The wild faces watching . . .
I can’t do this.
I turned on my heel and walked away from the bonfire before I did something regrettable like breaking down in front of all
these dumb boys. My chest was tight as I trudged across the sand, ignoring whistles and taunts and the dog’s barking, which
seemed to follow me, no matter how fast I walked. Then I felt heavy footfalls coming up fast from behind.
“Paige! Hold up!”
I swung around to find both the husky and Seb racing toward me. Seb gripped a T-shirt in one hand. His racing slowed to a
jog until he caught up with me. The black dog stopped behind him and continued barking.
“For the love of Christ, shut it, Punkin!” Seb told the ugly husky, breathless. “Nobody’s fighting, okay? No barking!”
Punkin . . . ?
The dog quit barking and politely sat, panting.
“She’s a retired sled dog from up north. Got her off a musher . . . it’s a long story. Anyway, she hates fighting,” he explained,
almost sheepish but not quite.
“And you hate dogs,” I said, remembering the mystery bag of kibble that I threw away inside the cottage when I was cleaning
up. “Since when did that change?”
He chuckled and tugged his T-shirt over his head, one that had the Neely Marina logo on the front. “No, you hate dogs. I only went along with that out of solidarity after you had to have a rabies shot, princess.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why? You still have the crown.”
Before my father ruined our family, the Malones owned one of the best cherry orchards in western Michigan. We lived in a stunning
turreted Victorian near the harbor on the “good” side of town. Even after we lost the farm, I entered the Little Miss Cherry
Princess contest during the town’s annual Cherry Festival when I was seven years old and won a plastic crown.
Seb has never let me forget it.
He exhaled, curious eyes flicking over me. “Bangs, huh?”
Jesus. Never cutting my own hair again, that was for sure. Stupid influencers and their dumb videos . . .
“I just can’t believe it,” he said. “You look so different. But also, the same . . . ?”
So did he, now that I wasn’t forced to avoid staring at his bare chest. “You look like a homeless surfer who got clocked by
his board.”
He wrinkled his nose and gingerly touched the skin around his black eye. “Clocked by Pretty Paul Vanderburg, but yeah. I’ve
been doing a little surfing. What about you? I thought you were going to Europe for the summer. Surprised to see you back
home.”
How would he even know about Europe? And he didn’t look all that surprised, frankly. Were he and Jazmine talking again? She
hadn’t mentioned him.
Police lights flashed on Harbor Drive, the main drag that curved along the lake.
“Shit,” Seb said. “We should probably . . .”
He didn’t have to tell me. The last thing I needed today was getting questioned by the local Haven Beach cops, who all seemed to be a horrible mix of dumb, power-hungry, and bored.
Seb whistled at his dog and set off after me as I headed past the food truck park, praying that Patty didn’t see me with Seb.
“Christ, Paige! Slow down. Thought you were studying art history, not track and field.”
“And I thought I could leave this town for two measly semesters and come back to find my own home intact.” I halted long enough
to dig his key ring out of my pocket and threw it at him, missing by a mile. “Don’t even tell me it wasn’t you who trashed
the cottage.”
“But it wasn’t!” He bent low to search for his keys in the sand, shoving blond waves out of his eyes. “Paige, come on—”
“Don’t, okay? Just don’t. Your lies may work on the rest of the people in this town, but they don’t work on me anymore.”
I continued trudging across the sand, leaving him behind as he dropped a dozen f-bombs while searching for his keys. For a
few minutes, I occasionally glanced back at him and the dog, wondering if he’d just give up and leave. But after I rounded
the little hill that harbored my grandmother’s cottage and made it to the back porch, I felt him running up behind me again.
“I found ’em,” he announced, like I cared.
“Next time I’ll throw them in the lake. See that?” I said, pointing toward the window I’d secured with tape and cardboard.
“You’re paying for that.”
“Me?” he said, sounding like the bewildered boy I once knew. And I suppose it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s
back, because all the grief and hurt I’d been feeling earlier while cleaning up the cottage now came back in a rush of anger.
“How dare you,” I said, stopping at the bottom of the cottage’s back porch. “Nana would have been so disappointed. Would’ve broken
her heart that you did this to our home. She took care of you when your dad was working—washed your clothes, fed you. Gave
you presents.”
“Paige—”
“And to pay her back, you break into the cottage—”
“I didn’t break in!” He pulled out his sandy key ring and jangled it in my face. “I still have a fucking key!”
That honestly surprised me. “You’ve been letting yourself into my house?”
His eyes flicked everywhere but my face as he tried to come up with a story. But I knew him too well, knew that fight-or-flight
look on his face and the nervous laugh that followed. “Okay, I may have, once or twice, crashed here—but only when I didn’t
have any other options. I had the old spare house key—”
“And that gives you the right to host ragers here and tear up my stuff? Nana nursed my mother in that rocking chair! It’s
been in our family for decades. But if you didn’t care about that, I thought for sure you’d respect Nana’s paintings. Four
of them were so damaged, I don’t think they can be saved. What the hell is wrong with you?”
He looked wired and exasperated. Defensive. “I didn’t break the chair or the paintings, Paige. You’ve gotta believe—”
“I don’t ‘gotta’ do nothing,” I said, unable to stop my eyes from brimming with tears. “Why should I believe anything you
say? You made it clear that you didn’t want anything to do with me or any of your other friends years ago when you all but
abandoned the Wags for those fucking Vanderburg dirtbags!”
“I got sent off to boot camp!” he shouted, throwing up his arms while his dog started barking at us again.
“And we all tried to get you out of that place! You know we did, even though you barely spoke to us the year before you got
sent away. We still wanted to help you. You know this! After Nana got in a fight with your dad when she tried to intervene,
and you sent me that letter and told me to leave you alone—”
“Because helping me was pointless, all right? I was fucked, and I’d done it to myself, and I just had to get through the punishment.
That letter, by the way, was supposed to be me riding off into the sunset. You’re spoiling my dramatic goodbye right this
minute, you know.” He said this as if he were joking, but I heard hurt beneath his easy words.
“I left you alone, just like you asked, Seb. I didn’t write you back. I didn’t call. And I didn’t visit. I did what you asked,
only to have you waltz back into my life with a sledgehammer!”
“I don’t know how many times I need to say this, but I did not wreck the cottage, Paige. I mean, sure, I’m no domestic goddess
and may have occasionally left the cottage a mess when I occasionally crashed there while you were away at Harvard—”
“She’s dead,” I blurted, angry and confrontational. “Nana is dead. She’s been dead for almost an entire year.”
Seb opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. He stood still, a little frozen, as if he had no idea how to respond.
“Cut the shit,” I said. “You wouldn’t dare break into here if she were still alive.
And I know Benny told you about the funeral because I asked him to call you last summer when it happened, seeing how he was the only Wag you stayed in touch with,” I said, accusatory, then a fresh wave of grief washed over me, and I felt my shoulders sag with the weight of it.
When I spoke again, my voice was small and broken.
“You didn’t come, Seb. She practically raised you, and you couldn’t even bother to show up at her funeral—not for her, and not even for me. ”
I would not cry in front of him, I just wouldn’t. When tears brimmed, I turned my face away and climbed the porch steps past
the Mr. Legs tree-trunk sculpture, rushing to swing the screen door open so that I could get the cottage unlocked before I
lost control.