Chapter 41
Forty-One
JACE
I made the calls while Layla changed out of her dress. I didn’t tell anyone why, just called an immediate summit meeting and secured promises that they’d all come. I knew Layla wouldn’t want to go through this more than once.
She emerged from the bedroom in workout tights and a fitted long-sleeve shirt, her hair freed from the updo she’d worn for the party.
It was a mark of how rattled she was that she hadn’t contained it in a braid or a ponytail but instead left it loose around her shoulders.
Maybe her hair had been its own form of camouflage.
She’d gone with the thigh sheaths for her knives instead of the shoulder harness. They were strapped in plain sight.
I didn’t call her out on it. If they made her feel an ounce safer about what she was about to do, they were worth every question they might prompt. And maybe she worried we’d be waylaid on the drive and wanted to be ready for anything. That was an instinct I understood.
When we slipped back into the truck, I pulled my gun from the lockbox under the seat. From the passenger seat, Layla exhaled in obvious relief.
The drive to Sutter House was quiet. I kept my head on a swivel, checking mirrors for any evidence of a tail.
Layla likewise kept a lookout, scanning side roads as her fingers tapped restlessly on the hilt of one of her knives.
We saw no one once we left the village and hit the coast road leading up to the north end of the island.
I thought about the tightrope she’d been walking since the ferry.
Sitting in Willa’s living room and listening to us talk about her own disappearance.
Watching the video of herself bound in the hold of a ship and keeping her face absolutely still.
Sitting across a table from her brother in a prison interview room and seeing him refuse to give anything up to protect a family that included her, without him knowing she was right there.
Every day a performance of not knowing, layered on top of a grief she’d carried completely alone.
I couldn’t hold the full size of it. I tried, and the edges were too large.
Sutter House was lit up when we arrived, and for one foolish moment, I wished we were just coming for a New Year’s Eve party with friends and family. But we were so far past that, even if the news we’d come to share was something worth celebrating.
Koa glued himself to Layla as we came up the front steps and went through the door.
Willa was on her feet before we’d fully come inside, her eyes going straight to Layla and then to me. “Did something happen at the party?”
“Wait,” I said.
Her jaw set, but she sat back down.
Sawyer put his hand on her knee. “We should put together some drinks or snacks. It is New Year’s Eve, after all.”
I didn’t think Layla would eat anything, but I nodded because it would give them something to do while we waited on the others.
When they’d disappeared into the kitchen, Layla stayed where she was, staring at the cozy living room where we’d spent so much time these past weeks as a group. And then I realized what she was doing.
Staying away from the windows.
I crossed and shut the blinds, then the curtains to boot.
No reason for her to feel any more exposed than she already did.
She loosed another breath when I’d finished and finally moved inside, taking a chair beside the fireplace.
Koa assumed sentry position. I stayed standing, ready to put myself between her and everyone else if this all became too much for her.
The others arrived over the next fifteen minutes.
Ford and Bree, Gabi and Daniel, Rios and Madden.
Each of them came in and read the room immediately, the group’s shared instinct for when something serious was happening kicking in without anyone having to say it.
Grimly set expressions, questions held back, the tension of people who had been through enough together to know that you showed up first and asked questions later.
Through all of it, Layla sat very still, every resource dedicated to keeping her face neutral.
I’d had a lot of training in that sort of thing because of my job.
Intelligence work meant having one hell of a poker face.
This woman gave me a serious run for my money.
She watched the room, cataloguing the way she always did.
But beneath the professional attention, I sensed the fear.
Not of anyone here, but of what she was about to see on their faces.
No one touched the bowls of random snacks Willa and Sawyer put out.
Rios looked to me with cop eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Layla has something she needs to tell y’all.”
I stepped back, staying within arm’s reach of her chair, like Koa. Close enough she could feel me there without me being in the way of what needed to happen.
Everyone waited.
With a trembling hand, Layla reached into the pocket of her workout pants and came out with a contact lens case.
Carefully, she opened it and slowly popped out a contact from each eye.
Even from here, I saw the dark brown of the lenses as she placed them in the case.
She blinked for a moment as her eyes adjusted.
Then she looked up with hazel eyes, and I understood exactly how much of a disguise those contacts had been.
Because even with the slight modification of eye shape from the tattooed eyeliner, those eyes were unmistakably and achingly familiar to anyone in this room who’d spent time looking at Madden Reilly’s face.
For a long moment, I worried it wouldn’t be enough.
That they wouldn’t understand. But even as I watched, something shifted in Layla’s face, the release of some sort of mask.
And I saw the subtle emergence of Gwen in those features.
I didn’t know how. Couldn’t even comprehend the level of fine muscle control it took her to avoid exactly this.
But suddenly I saw what had been there all along.
A ripple of confusion moved through the others.
A collective processing of something that didn’t immediately compute.
Then eyes began to shift from Layla’s face to Madden’s and back again, the resemblance suddenly visible in a way that had been hidden before, the bone structure and the coloring that had been there all along underneath the dark contacts and the hair dye and the tattooed makeup and the time between.
Willa made a sound.
It wasn’t a word. It came from somewhere far deeper than words, from the place where years of grief and searching had been stored, and she was on her feet before it finished leaving her, moving forward with her hand outstretched like she needed to confirm with her fingers what her eyes were telling her.
“Gwen?” Her name was barely a whisper.
The corner of Layla’s mouth moved. Barely. The kick of something real underneath everything else, the smile of the girl who had known Willa since before either of them knew what the world was going to do to them. “Hi, Wills.”
And then Willa’s arms were around her and my sister was crying with her whole body, holding on the way she’d wanted for all these years because she’d just been given something to hold.
Gabi shot to her feet but stopped two steps away, her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide and wet. I watched her fight the impulse to rush forward because some part of her brain was still asking the question her heart had already answered. “How do we know it’s really you?”
Layla—Gwen—pulled back just enough from Willa to look at her.
“You have a scar on your right butt cheek from scaling the playground fence in the fourth grade because Bobby Downy said girls couldn’t climb.
You could climb just fine, but he pushed you, and you slipped.
And you didn’t want anyone to tell the teacher because you didn’t want the school to notify your dad. ”
Gabi made a sound that was almost a laugh and had nothing of laughter in it.
“Oh my God.” She was already moving, already crying, stumbling forward into the hug that was still happening, and now there were three of them holding on in the middle of Willa’s living room.
The room around them held a silence that was full of fifteen years and grief and the stunned quality of a miracle that nobody had let themselves believe in.
I looked at Madden.
She sat perfectly still, her hand in Rios’s, as she stared at the three women with a look that told me she was simultaneously processing something at two speeds.
The fast layer that understood what it was seeing, and the slower, deeper layer where the full weight of it hadn’t finished arriving.
Gwen was her cousin. Her blood. The girl whose disappearance had irrevocably marked her, whose case had brought Madden back to this island.
Gwen was alive. Had been alive. Had been sitting at their table, going through files with them, sitting across from Miles in a prison room.
Had known the whole time and said nothing.
All those layers landed, and I watched Madden do the thing I suspected she’d done as a prosecutor holding something complicated without letting it hold her instead. Rios’s hands tightened around hers because he saw it too.
Around the room, the others were having their versions.
Ford standing with both hands in his hair.
Bree’s hand on his arm. Sawyer with his hand on Willa’s back even through the hug, his face doing something private that he wasn’t going to put into the room.
Daniel quiet the way he was quiet when something mattered.
The hug loosened eventually. Not broke. They stayed close, the three of them recalibrating something that had been long fractured and was in the early stages of becoming whole again.
Rios let the room have what it needed. Then he did what Rios did, which was to bring it back with quiet authority and an understanding that feeling and moving forward were not mutually exclusive.
“Tell us what we’re dealing with. Something changed tonight for you to bring this up now. Because you never planned to, did you?”
Color moved into Layla’s cheeks. The involuntary flush of someone caught in a truth they hadn’t meant to be standing in. “No.” She sucked in a bracing breath. “But since the man I thought I killed to escape was hosting the party tonight, we’ve got bigger problems.”