Chapter 25 #2
“Thank you,” Scarlett says, and it kills me a little because the fight’s gone out of her voice.
Shea nods. “You need anything, my room’s at the end of the hall. Dean knows where it is.” She squeezes Scarlett’s shoulder—brief, warm, the kind of touch that says more than words—and heads back toward what I assume is whatever accounting crisis she left mid-spreadsheet.
Room three is at the top of the stairs. Small. Wood-paneled. A brass bed with a quilt that probably came from Mimi’s hands, or Lana’s before her. A window that looks out over the back garden, where the vegetable beds run in neat rows toward the tree line. The curtains are heavy. I close them.
Scarlett sets her suitcase on the bed and stands there. Doesn’t unpack. Doesn’t sit. Just stands with her hands at her sides, looking at the quilt like it might have answers written in the stitching.
I lean against the doorframe. My clothes are still damp.
Salt’s dried stiff on my jacket sleeves.
I should go. I should get back to the boat, change, collapse on the cot, and sleep for twelve hours.
My body’s been running on fumes since the search started, and the adrenaline from her call is wearing off, leaving a hollow ache behind my ribs that feels like the precursor to something worse.
I don’t go.
“Talk to me,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I’m tired, Dean.”
“I know you’re tired. Talk anyway.”
She sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress sinks under her weight.
She picks at a loose thread on the quilt.
“I keep thinking about Evangeline. What she wrote. What Charles did to her. How nobody believed her. How the story became something else entirely because the truth was too ugly to fit the narrative.” Her voice is steady.
Too steady. The performance is back, or some version of it—the careful control, the measured words.
“Malcolm knows. He has to know. Why else would No Name be missing from every map in his archive? Why erase an entire island unless what happened there contradicts everything you’ve built your family’s identity on? ”
I cross the room and sit beside her. Not touching. Close enough that our shoulders almost brush.
“Someone was on my balcony,” she says. “They wanted me to know they were there. They wanted me to see them. That’s not random. That’s a message.”
“Yeah.” I stare at the closed curtains. The fabric’s thick enough to block the harbor lights. In here, it’s just the bedside lamp and the sound of our breathing and the old house settling around us. “It is.”
She looks at me. Really looks. Her eyes find the scar through my eyebrow, the salt still crusted in my stubble, the exhaustion I stopped trying to hide about six hours ago. “You believe me.”
“I never said I didn’t.”
“You searched the balcony. You didn’t find anything.”
“I believe you,” I say. Simple. Direct. The way you state a fact about the weather or the tide or the depth of water under your keel. Not up for debate.
Something in her face shifts. The performance cracks. Just a little. Just enough that I can see the woman underneath—the one who’s been carrying this alone for eighteen months, who stood on a beach and handed me the worst thing that’s ever happened to her and called it trust.
She leans into me. Not all the way. Her shoulder against mine, her head tilted toward my collarbone. I put my arm around her. She’s warm. She fits against me the way she did on the boat, in the storm, in the dark cabin with the single lamp swinging overhead.
We sit like that. The house creaks. Somewhere downstairs, a pipe knocks. Shea’s probably making tea. Or doing dishes. Or solving whatever crisis the B&B’s books have presented her with at one in the morning.
I should go.
I don’t.
Scarlett’s breathing slows. Her weight settles against me. She’s falling asleep sitting up, the way exhausted people do when the adrenaline finally quits. I ease her down onto the pillow. She doesn’t wake. Her hand finds the edge of the quilt and holds on.
I stand. Look at her. Blonde hair spilled across the pillow, one arm flung above her head, the journal on the nightstand where I placed it. The scars are hidden under my sweatshirt. I can see the shape of them in my mind—the pale lines, the rebuilt tissue, the map of a war she fought alone.
I kill the lamp.
In the dark, with the sound of her breathing and the harbor beyond the curtains and the whole fucking island gone quiet at last, I make a promise.
It’s not out loud. It doesn’t need to be.
Some promises are between a man and whatever he answers to, and this one’s so simple it doesn’t require language.
Someone scared her. Someone stood on a balcony in the dark and watched her through glass and wanted her to know it.
Someone’s been entering her room. Someone’s been watching.
They picked the wrong woman to frighten.
And they picked the wrong man to come after her.
I close the door softly and go downstairs to make coffee. Dawn’s still hours away. I’ve got a boat to secure, a parrot to feed, and a day ahead of me that’s going to require every ounce of focus I’ve got left.
Whoever you are, you just made the biggest mistake of your life.