Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
LAYLA
Willa’s approach to Christmas decoration could best be described as enthusiastic maximalism.
She opened a third box. “There is no such thing as too many ornaments. I have been told my whole life that things need to match and coordinate and be tasteful, and I am done with all that.”
“Wren, the tree is already listing slightly to the left,” Sawyer said from the kitchen doorway.
“The tree has character.” Willa held up a sequined lobster and a small wooden lighthouse and hung them on adjacent branches with the satisfaction of someone exercising a long-denied freedom. “Layla, there’s another box in the hall closet.”
I found the box. It contained, among other things, a ceramic cactus wearing a Santa hat, three ornaments shaped like different breeds of dogs, a blown glass pickle, and what appeared to be a very small disco ball.
“Where does the disco ball go?” I asked.
“Wherever it wants,” Willa said. “That’s the whole point.”
Jace, up a ladder adjusting the lights on the upper third of the tree, looked down at the disco ball and then at his sister with an expression of complete affection. “Granddaddy is laughing from his grave.”
“Good,” Willa said cheerfully. “Hand me the pickle.”
Roy had positioned himself directly in front of the fireplace with the absolute commitment of a dog who had assessed the situation and determined his participation was not required.
Koa had stationed himself three feet from the ornament boxes and was monitoring proceedings with focused attention, clearly unconvinced that a sequined lobster was structurally sound.
“It’s not going to fall over,” I told my dog.
Koa gave me a look that communicated he would be the judge of that.
I unwrapped an ornament and found a small sand dollar painted gold, a date written on the back in faded permanent marker. I turned it over in my hands. “What’s this one?”
Willa glanced over. “Oh, that one I found at a yard sale the first summer I was back on island. I liked it.” She shrugged. “Not everything has to mean something. Some things are just pretty or fun.”
I liked that answer. I hung it on a branch near the middle of the tree where it caught the light and turned slowly.
Sawyer appeared from the kitchen with mugs of cider and joined us, taking up one end of a length of garland while Willa decided how it needed to drape across the mantle.
Jace came down from the ladder and settled into unwinding a second strand of lights that had developed opinions about themselves, working through the knot with a patient, methodical attention.
Standing near the window, the lights pooled in his hands, he glanced up once and caught me watching before going back to the knot with the faintest shift at the corner of his mouth.
The cider was warm and tasted like cinnamon and cloves. The fire had settled into the comfortable rhythm of a fire that had been going long enough to know what it was doing. Outside, the Atlantic did what it always did, indifferent and constant and silver-gray under the December cloud cover.
“I love this,” Willa said. She was standing back, looking at the tree with its lobster and pickle and disco ball and lighthouse and the gold sand dollar turning slowly in the draft from the fireplace. “It looks absolutely nothing like any Christmas tree I grew up with, and it’s perfect.”
“It looks like someone let a child loose in a holiday store,” Jace said.
“Yes,” Willa agreed. “Exactly.” She turned to me with a warm smile.
“Last year was the first Christmas I ever got to do it entirely my way. Before that, I spent the holidays with Bree and her grandfather or with the Carreras, and that was wonderful. But this—” She looked at the tree.
“Sawyer and I getting to build our own version with the people we care about? Messier. Better.” She looked back at me.
“I’m glad you’re here for it. It feels right to have you here. ”
I had a cover story and secrets that would pull everything in this room apart if they surfaced, and Willa Sutter—because she’d changed her name when she returned to the island at eighteen—was standing in front of me telling me it felt right to have me here.
I thought about what she would feel if she knew the truth of who I was and what I’d come here carrying.
Then I made myself stop thinking about it, because that road ran nowhere useful from inside this moment.
My truth would put her in danger. Would put all of these people I’d come to care for in danger. So it would stay hidden, because I wouldn’t bring that hell down upon them for anything. Not even answers.
“Thank you.” My words came out quieter than I’d intended.
Willa smiled and pointed at the top of the tree. “Star goes up there. Jace gets that job. He’s the tallest.”
“Heard that,” Jace said without looking up from the lights.
“You were meant to.”
Sawyer’s laugh rolled out, and we kept going.
The four of us had found a rhythm by now, working in the warm room with the comfortable ease of people who had figured out how to occupy the same space together.
More ornaments were added to the tree. The garland got arranged along the mantel.
Willa added tinsel to several branches in defiance of conventional wisdom and stood back, looking satisfied.
I kept picking up my cider and setting it down and picking it up again, the warmth of the mug something to hold while my hands weren’t otherwise occupied.
I was still here.
Not as a miscalculation or a missed deadline.
Just as a true thing. I was still here, and the tree had a sequined lobster on it, and the cider was good, and Koa had finally accepted that the ornaments posed no threat and relocated to the vicinity of the fireplace, arranging himself near Roy with the casual air of a dog who had simply decided to change his position for no particular reason.
The knock at the front door came about twenty minutes later.
Willa went to answer it. I heard the door, voices in the entryway, something in the register of them landing differently than an ordinary arrival.
When she came back, Rios was with her, in full uniform.
I registered the look on his face and stiffened.
I knew that look. Something had happened, and he was here to notify us before we heard it from somewhere else first. My father had a similar version I’d seen far too often over my lifetime.
“Miles Busby is dead.” Rios kept his voice even, the professional tone of a man who understood that delivery mattered. “He was killed in prison last night. Official report says he was involved in an altercation.”
Willa sat down on the arm of the sofa. Not a collapse, just a small, controlled sit. Sawyer immediately crossed to her, laying his hand on her shoulder. She covered it with hers without looking up.
Jace stood near the window with the lights still looped through his hands.
I stayed where I was beside the ornament boxes with a ceramic cat tangled in Christmas lights in my hand and let the news settle into me, keeping my face neutral.
Dead by an altercation, in a medium security prison, just nine months into a sentence he’d accepted rather than say a single word that might have reduced it. An altercation that nobody in this room believed was random.
I breathed in and breathed out and held the ornament and thought about a twenty-year-old boy—because he had been a boy back then—standing in front of a camera saying no and believing that was a thing he had the power to do.
Then spent the rest of his life living with the cost of being right about his refusal and still being wrong about what would happen.
I made myself stop there.
“The timing,” Jace murmured.
“Yeah,” Rios said. “The timing.”
Neither of them finished the sentence. Neither needed to.
Willa looked up from where she sat with Sawyer’s hand still under hers. “We keep going,” she said. The steadiness in her voice had been earned. “We owe it to her. And now to him.”
Rios nodded. “I wanted to tell you in person. I’ll keep you updated if more comes through.”
“Thanks,” Sawyer said.
“There is one piece of good news,” Rios added.
“We’ll take any at this point,” I muttered.
“Diane Crowell got moved out of intensive care. She’s gonna make it. Staties didn’t find any evidence of foul play with her car.”
I blew out a breath. Not a guarantee it wasn’t connected, but at least she’d survived the accident. “Thanks for that.”
“Knew you’d want to know.” Rios looked at each of us in turn. “Be careful.”
After he left, nobody moved for a moment.
Then Koa was on his feet and pressed against my leg before I’d registered that my hands were shaking. The ceramic cat with the tangled lights hit the carpet—I hadn’t even felt it leave my fingers—and Koa pushed his whole weight into me the way he did, head up, watching my face.
Jace crossed the room.
He didn’t say anything immediately. He only put himself in front of me, close, and looked at me the way he had outside the police station the day Diane was airlifted off the island, his steady presence asking nothing and offering everything.
Slowly, his hands came up and closed over mine where they’d gone still at my sides.
The warmth of the contact did things to me I was too undone to manage properly.
“It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. “We didn’t do this. These people did.”
That wasn’t where my brain was. My brain was somewhere else entirely, somewhere I couldn’t let him follow.
But I let Jace think he was meeting me where I was.
Because it was easier, and because the alternative was explaining something I couldn’t explain.
And because his hands were warm around mine and the shaking was slowing down.
I leaned into him. Just slightly. Enough to be steadied by the solid warmth of him.
That was the part that got me, honestly.
Not the comfort itself, but how instinctive it was.
How my body had simply turned toward him the way Koa turned toward me, without deliberation, without weighing the implications.
I had spent years being careful about exactly this kind of thing, years keeping people at a distance where they couldn’t see anything I didn’t want them to see.
Yet somewhere between the ferry and this moment I had apparently stopped doing that, at least where Jace Hollingsworth was concerned.
Who even was I anymore?
Willa appeared at my other side and put her hand briefly on my arm, and the three of us stood there for a moment in the quiet of the room with the half-decorated tree and the firelight and all of it, and I breathed in and breathed out and let the shaking finish.
Then I bent down and picked up the ceramic cat with the tangled lights. “I think this one goes near the disco ball.”
Willa looked at the cat, and at me, and something in her face softened. “Obviously. They’re clearly meant for each other.”
Jace’s hand found the small of my back briefly as he moved back toward the ladder, and the warmth of his touch lingered even after he’d taken it away.
We kept going.