Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
JACE
Nobody spoke.
We just sat with what she’d said hanging in the air.
Because I was there.
I’d known she’d been through something. I’d known it from the first night on the beach, from the way she held herself, from the scars and the reflexes and the nightmare in the storm and the dozens of small things I’d been filing away without quite naming.
I’d told myself it was the right call to respect what I didn’t know and wait for what she was willing to give me.
I hadn’t expected this.
I hadn’t expected her to be connected to Gwen.
To this island. To the specific machinery we’d been trying to dismantle.
The operational part of my brain was already running assessments, already cataloguing what this changed and what questions needed answering.
I shut it down. That part of me didn’t get to be in charge right now.
All the color had drained from Layla’s face.
Not the pale of someone caught off guard.
The white of someone making a decision that would cost them and intending to pay anyway.
Her hands were buried in Koa’s fur, fingers twisted in the thick ruff at his neck, holding on with the grip of someone who needed an anchor.
They still shook. I saw it from across the room.
Everyone else was still frozen. Willa pressed both hands over her mouth, her eyes wide and fixed on Layla.
Tears ran silently down Gabi’s face without a sound.
Ford sat, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
Sawyer wrapped his arm around Willa, his eyes on me with an expression that said he was holding her together and needed me to hold the room.
Madden sat perfectly straight, the prosecutor’s composure wrapped around her like armor, and I could see the cost of maintaining it in the rigid set of her shoulders, the way her hands were folded too carefully in her lap.
Daniel held Gabi and looked at the floor, a muscle jumping in his jaw as he hunted for his own composure.
Rios stood by the window with his arms at his sides, looking at Layla with an expression I’d seen on his face only a handful of times in thirty years of knowing him.
I got up and walked into the kitchen, going through the motions of filling a glass with water. Then I stood at the sink for three seconds and made myself be useful instead of being whatever else I was in that moment.
Koa heard me coming. His head came up, and a low sound vibrated in his throat, not fully a growl but working toward one, the sound of a dog whose person was in distress and who’d identified me as an incoming variable.
“Koa. Calme-toi.” I kept my voice easy, the French coming without thinking.
He held my eyes for a moment, running his own assessment, and then the sound stopped.
Layla’s hands loosened fractionally in his fur at the sound of the familiar language, some part of her registering it even through whatever she was in the middle of.
I squatted down in front of her. Below her eye level. Not touching. Put the glass on the coffee table where she could reach it.
“You don’t owe us your story,” I said. “But if you know something about Gwen…”
Layla looked at me with eyes full of devastation.
Something moved across her face—a complicated negotiation happening faster than I could track, weighing things I didn’t have full visibility into.
Then she looked at the room. At Willa, who still held her hands over her mouth.
At Gabi crying silently. At Rios by the window.
At all of them, these people who’d loved Gwen Busby for nearly thirty years and spent half that trying to find out what had happened to her.
She looked back at me.
And she decided.
“I wasn’t taken from the party.” The steadiness in her voice clearly cost something. “Not from this island. I was further up the coast. A runaway from the foster system. Nobody was looking for me.”
Gabi made a sound. Layla glanced at her briefly and then looked at the middle distance. Not at any specific face, the way people looked when they needed to get through something without the weight of other people’s reactions pulling them under.
“The boat Willa saw—it met a larger vessel offshore. I was already there when they brought Gwen aboard.” She reached for the water glass with a hand that trembled.
Drinking seemed to take effort, and I fought not to reach out to steady the glass.
When it was half empty, she set it back down.
“I don’t know exactly how long I’d been on the ship.
A few days. They moved quickly. That’s how it works.
You don’t stay in one place long enough for anyone to start looking. ”
“How did they—” Willa stopped. Started again. “Were there others? On the ship?”
“Yes.” Layla looked at her water glass. “Several. I didn’t know their names. You learned not to ask.” A pause. “We were the girls who wouldn’t be missed.”
The room absorbed confirmation of Madden’s theory in silence.
“The video,” I said. I needed her to keep going, needed to give her somewhere to put the momentum of it. “You said it wasn’t the first one.”
She looked at the dark television screen where the image had been.
“They didn’t document the other girls. Not like that.
Gwen was different. Someone wanted something specific from that video.
Proof. A demonstration.” Her jaw tightened.
“They didn’t get what they wanted the first time.
So they tried again. More than once. They needed to make sure she was properly terrified. ”
The silence after that was the kind that fell when a room understood something without it being said directly. I heard Willa make a small sound that she swallowed immediately. Sawyer pulled her closer without looking away from Layla.
What Layla wasn’t saying, and what everyone in the room now processed, was what it had taken to make Gwen look sufficiently terrified for the video to serve its purpose.
What had happened in between takes. What a fifteen-year-old girl had been put through in the hold of a ship so that her brother would see her face on a screen and understand they meant what they’d said.
I kept my face neutral and shut every door my brain tried to open so I could stay present in this room.
“You don’t have to say more than you want to,” I told her.
“I know.” Layla looked at me, and for a moment it was just the two of us.
I could see the full weight of what she carried and what it cost to carry it in front of all these people.
“After a while, they moved us. A port somewhere north. New York, maybe Boston, somewhere with enough industrial traffic that one more ship was nothing remarkable.” She looked away again.
“They separated us. I don’t know what happened to the others after that. ”
“But you got out,” Gabi said. Her voice broke on the last word.
“Eventually.” One word. A door closing. She wouldn’t go further than that, and I would have stopped anyone who tried to push on it.
Nobody did.
Ford lifted his face out of his hands. His eyes were red. He looked at Layla with the expression of a man who had a daughter almost the same age as Gwen when she disappeared. A man who was clearly imagining that fate for his own baby girl. He opened his mouth and closed it again.
Daniel rubbed Gabi’s back in slow circles. Her face turned into his shoulder, her shoulders shaking.
Madden hadn’t moved. The composure was still there, but something had shifted beneath it.
The prosecutor’s distance cracking at the edges, her jaw set in a way that meant she held something back that wouldn’t be held back forever.
She’d spent years building the case file.
She’d been the one who wouldn’t let it go, who’d kept asking when everyone else had stopped.
Now a survivor sat in this living room who’d been in the hold with Gwen.
Rios finally moved, laying a hand on her shoulder in support.
But he didn’t take his eyes off Layla. He’d spent so many years being the convenient answer to a question nobody could prove, and now he had to reckon with the full shape of what really happened to the girl everyone had blamed him for. That would leave its own scars.
Willa lowered her hands from her mouth. Her eyes were wet, and the look on her face broke something in my chest. She’d been in those woods.
She’d been on that boat. She’d been thrown into the water, surviving by the grace of God and Sawyer, only to spend all the years since not knowing what had happened to the person she’d been with that night.
And now she was looking at someone who’d been there.
Who’d been in that hold. Who’d seen Gwen when she arrived.
“She was scared when they brought her aboard,” Willa said. It wasn’t a question.
Layla looked at her. “Yes.”
“But she was alive the last time you saw her.”
“Yes.” Something moved across Layla’s face. “She was alive.”
Willa closed her eyes, and Sawyer pressed his lips to her temple and held there, offering comfort as only he could.
I still crouched in front of Layla, below her eye level, not touching.
Close enough that she could see me and know I was there.
She wasn’t looking at me right now. She looked at Willa, at what the confirmation had given her and what it had cost. But I stayed where I was.
Present. Available. Not requiring anything.
“I’ve been doing this work for years.” Layla’s voice softened.
“The photographs. The cold cases. The families who never got answers.” She looked down at her hands in Koa’s fur.
“It started because of her. Because of what happened to her and the others like her. Because they didn’t have anyone asking. ” A pause. “This is why.”
“She had us,” Willa said. Her eyes were still closed. “She always had us asking. We just couldn’t find the answer.”
“You never stopped.” Layla looked at her. “That matters. You have no idea how much that matters.”
The room breathed in and out. The fire had gone completely cold now. Nobody moved to rebuild it. Too caught in the amber of shock, absorbing the significance of what Layla had just revealed.
Rios brought us back with the steady purpose of someone who understood that while grief needed its moment, work did too, and that both could be true at once.
“There’s something else in the original file that was never followed up on.
A witness statement. Someone who said they’d been asked to deliver a note to Gwen that night at the bonfire.
The statement was taken and nothing else was ever done with it.
” He checked his notes. “The name is Lauren Holloway.”
Willa’s head came up sharply. “Lauren? She runs the animal shelter. She’s been here for years. She was at the bonfire?”
“According to the statement, she told the investigating officer that someone had asked her to pass a note to Gwen that night. She didn’t know what was in it.
Gwen read it and she—” He consulted the notes once more.
“She looked surprised and pleased, was the description. And then that was it. Nothing else. Nobody ever went back to ask Lauren anything more.”
“Because Carson had his answer.” The flatness in Ford’s voice held an edge.
“Because Carson had his answer,” Rios confirmed. “And once he had it, he stopped asking questions.”
I looked around the room. We’d all arrived at the same place.
“We need to talk to her,” Madden said.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “First thing.”
Layla set her water glass down and sat with both hands flat on her thighs, Koa pressed against her leg, her face composed in a way that I understood was costing her significantly. She looked up at me when I said it and gave the smallest nod.
Tomorrow. First thing.
Tonight she had given this room enough.