Chapter 40
Forty
LAYLA
I closed my eyes.
Fourteen years. Fourteen years since anyone had said that name to me, and even then it had been clinical—social workers, lawyers, the FBI agent who would become my father walking me through what came next, his voice careful as he laid out what my life would look like from that moment forward.
Even Bruce never called me anything but my established cover name.
Nobody had said it the way Jace said it.
Nobody had said it like it was simply who I was, like it was something that belonged to me rather than something I was forced to leave behind.
I should be falling back on denial. Every protocol, every survival instinct I’d spent years carefully constructing and reinforcing was screaming at me to backpedal, to manufacture confusion, to give him something that closed the door and locked it from the inside.
I was good at that. Deflection was nearly automatic, the way breathing was automatic, the way checking exits when I walked into a room was automatic.
But this was Jace.
Jace, who’d been ten feet away from me for weeks, who’d supplied me with warm beverages and companionship and support without asking anything of me in return.
Jace, who got me out of that party without a word passing between us about what we were doing or why, and checked every lock and every window when we got back.
Who had brought me water and sat across from me and not asked the questions I’d spent the whole drive home bracing myself for—who had asked the right ones instead, the quiet and careful ones, the ones that had led, incrementally and inevitably, to exactly this moment.
I had loved him from a distance since I was twelve years old and didn’t yet have a name for what love was.
I’d been in love with the idea of him—the older brother of my best friend, the golden boy of the island who was kind without performing it, who never seemed to need an audience for his own goodness.
He had been the only person in the world who made me laugh so hard I snorted and then turned scarlet about it, and he had always laughed harder at that than at whatever made me laugh in the first place, which had only made it worse.
I’d carried the memory of that with me through everything that came after.
The way you carried a small flame into a dark place—not because it was enough, but because it was something.
Because something was infinitely better than nothing.
He wasn’t that boy anymore. He was someone better and more complicated and more real than a twelve-year-old girl’s idea of safety.
He was broader in the shoulders and quieter in his certainty, and new lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes.
His hand lay warm against my cheek, and he’d just said my name, and I was frozen.
“How did you know?” I whispered.
“You called me Golden Boy.”
The slip hadn’t even registered. I’d been too consumed with holding myself together at the party, with keeping my face exactly as it needed to be, with not reaching for the knives strapped to my thighs every time someone stood too close to me.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I’d called him by the name I’d teased him with since I was a child.
I made myself open my eyes.
I looked for everything I was afraid of finding.
The weight of condemnation. Betrayal, even—the kind that came from discovering that someone stood in front of you and lied by omission, while you suffered and searched and lost irreplaceable things.
I’d been alive all these years. I’d come back to this island and stood in rooms with people who’d grieved me and told them a version of a story, while never once telling them the whole.
I searched his face for all of it.
There was no condemnation. There was no anger, no tight jaw, no careful blankness that meant something was being held back.
What I found instead was something so far from what I’d been bracing for that it took me a long, slow moment to understand what I was looking at.
Compassion, deep and uncomplicated. Affection.
And underneath all of it, something that looked almost disarmingly like relief—like the joy that came from discovering that something you had mourned was not, after all, gone.
Like he was glad I was here. Like that was the only thing that mattered to him in this moment.
The apology came up before I could stop it, ragged and insufficient.
“I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone.
Even coming here, doing this work—I never intended for any of you to find out.
I thought I could help from the outside, that I could keep the distance, find something useful and hand it off and go.
” The inadequacy of it weighed on me even as the words left me.
“I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t begin to cover it. ”
He tilted his head slightly, the way he did when he was accepting something without turning it into an argument or a debate.
Not absolution—he didn’t tell me it was fine, didn’t tell me I didn’t have to apologize.
He simply received it, held it, gave it the weight it was owed.
Which was somehow better than forgiveness would have been. More honest.
“I assume you’ve been in witness protection,” he said.
The relief of not having to find the words myself was profound. Something wound tight in the center of my chest finally unclenched. “Yes.”
“And you left it to come here.”
“I was never supposed to come back to this part of the state at all. It was in the terms of the agreement.” I looked down at Koa, still draped across my legs, his weight steady and grounding, and warm.
“But I thought I could get some closure for myself. That I’d been carrying this for all these years, and if I just came back and saw it, if I could do something useful with it, I’d finally—” I stopped.
The sentence didn’t have an ending I knew how to say out loud.
“And then I thought maybe I could find answers for everyone who’d been living with this.
For Willa. For Miles. For Madden. For everyone on this island who’s been carrying the weight of something they were never going to be able to put down.
” I felt the bitterness of the irony even as I said it.
“I never expected to come face to face with my own brother. I never expected him to die in the course of the investigation. And I sure as hell didn’t expect to come face to face with my worst nightmare. ”
The word sat in the room. Nightmare. The slow proprietary scan he’d done of the space, the way his eyes had moved across the crowd and then stopped, deliberate and calculating, on mine.
“Do you think he recognized you?” Jace asked.
“I don’t know.” I’d been turning that question over since the moment we’d gotten into the truck.
“I look so different now. The hair, the eyeliner, the body—I bear no real resemblance to the girl he took. None of the age progressions done took into account the kind of training I’ve done or the reconstructive surgeries.
None of you recognized me, and you’d have been far more likely to than he would. You actually knew me.”
“Still.” Jace kept his voice measured and careful, the voice of someone running calculations while he spoke. “We can’t afford to assume he didn’t. It’s safer to treat him as a threat who may already know exactly who you are, and plan accordingly.”
I stared at this man who’d just had reality rewritten in front of him, who’d just heard things I didn’t say out loud to anyone, ever, and whose first instinct wasn’t grief or anger but threat assessment and protective planning.
Whatever he’d been doing in the Navy had not been wasted on him.
He was already three steps ahead, and I was still sitting in the moment of him having said her name out loud.
My name.
The sound was both alien and wonderful, like a word in a language you’d grown up speaking that you hadn’t heard in so long you’d almost convinced yourself you’d forgotten it.
I wasn’t Gwen Busby anymore. In so many necessary and brutal ways, I’d dismantled who she’d been in order to survive what came after her.
But I’d never excised her completely. The bones of her were still underneath everything else I’d built and rebuilt over the years, and Jace knew it now.
But the world had not ended. The ceiling hadn’t come down.
The thing I’d been most afraid of had happened, and I was still here.
“You think I should tell the others,” I said.
“I won’t make that choice for you. But they are all on your side.
Every one of them has been on your side since before you walked back onto this island.
From the first night you came to Sutter House.
And right now, we need every set of eyes and ears we can get.
” He held my gaze, steady and unflinching.
“You don’t have to keep carrying this alone. ”
Something broke open in my chest at that. A small, desperate, carefully guarded thing I’d kept pressed closed for so long that I’d almost forgotten what lived inside it.
Trust. The terrifying, essential thing. The thing I’d learned to live without and had never quite stopped reaching for.
I thought of all the small and large ways each of them had already proven it, from the moment I’d set foot back on this island.
Willa, who’d said it felt right to have me there and meant it without qualification.
Gabi, who’d cried watching the videos without embarrassment or apology.
Ford, with his jaw set, already thinking about protection, already considering his daughter at home.
Rios, who’d suffered as the island’s convenient answer and was still here, still working, still showing up.
Madden, who had never stopped looking. Sawyer, who had stood between Willa and danger when I couldn’t be anywhere near her.
They’d been on Gwen’s side this whole time. All of them, without knowing it.
My side.
I swallowed against the tightness rising in my throat, against the thing that was threatening to come apart in a way I wasn’t ready for, not yet. “Okay,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “Make the call.”