5. Salem
SALEM
Iwoke up to the unmistakable ache of a bad decision, which I chose to blame entirely on the tacos.
My back protested first, then my neck, and eventually the rest of me joined in like my skeleton had been rearranged overnight by someone who meant well but had no qualifications.
Ghost chiropractors. I let out a quiet laugh as I pushed myself upright, the sound swallowed by the dim, early light coming through the curtains.
The television glowed in the background, stuck on the static menu screen of the old DVD we’d abandoned in the middle of the night—a grainy eighties horror movie Rowan had insisted was a classic and promptly fallen asleep twenty minutes into.
The menu music looped quietly, the same four bars over and over, cheerful and slightly ominous.
Bowls, candy wrappers, and blankets were scattered across the living room floor like a tornado had hosted a sleepover.
I dragged a blanket around my shoulders like a tragic cape and shuffled toward the kitchen.
Coffee. That was the plan.
The pot was already full, steaming, and strong enough to temporarily revive the dead, which felt aggressively on-brand for this day. I was taking my second sip, just starting to feel like a person again, when Rowan’s bedroom door swung open hard enough to rattle the frame.
“Salem.” Rowan didn’t enter so much as detonate into the room. Her grey University of Washington sweatshirt was twisted sideways, her blonde hair pointing in four different directions, her blue eyes wide and fully awake.
I froze mid-sip. “What?”
She crossed the room and held her phone toward me. “You need to see this.”
My stomach dropped. There were only two categories of things that could make Rowan act like this: genuinely exciting news and genuinely terrible news. The expression on her face was not the exciting one.
Fog rolled across the screen. Blue light cut through it. The narrow hallway of the Butcher’s Den.
No.
Absolutely not.
There I was—front and center, in a flannel that had no business being documented. Note to self: scold Rowan for letting me wear that. My expression was caught somewhere between bored and defensive, which was accurate. Watching it back, I could see the exact moment it happened.
This was embarrassing.
He stepped out of the fog.
Tall. Painted. Bare shoulders catching the blue light.
Even now, watching it on a phone screen in my kitchen in a blanket cape, my breath caught. The moment stretched longer on camera than it had felt in my memory, the space between us narrowing frame by frame. His hand lifted—
Two fingers beneath my chin.
Tilting my face up.
And I didn’t move. I hadn’t stepped back or laughed it off or done any of the sensible things a person does when a stranger gets that close. I had just stayed there.
Great survival instincts, Salem.
“What,” I said slowly, “is that?”
Rowan swallowed. “The Butcher’s Den posted it. Official account.”
My grip tightened around my mug. “No, they didn’t.”
“They did.”
I set the mug down carefully and pressed my fingers to my temples. “How bad is it?”
She hesitated just long enough to confirm I was not going to like the answer. “Four hundred thousand.”
The room tilted.
“Thousand.” Not a question. Just the word, sitting there. A number I had no idea what to do with. How had this many people even been up early enough to see this? Just Saturday morning early risers watching birds and doom scrolling? Four hundred thousand people who liked the butt crack of dawn?
Rowan nodded, watching me with careful attention. “They have a huge local following, but it’s growing fast. A lot of reposts.”
“This is going to ruin the tour.” I groaned into my blanket cape.
“Solid reference.”
I didn’t want to look again. I looked again.
She cleared her throat.
“‘I didn’t think a haunted house could be so romantic, but here we are.’” She scrolled. “‘This is straight enemies-to-lovers core.’ ‘Someone please write a book about this. Insta-buy.’ ‘I would also let that man drag me around a haunted house by my chin.’”
She was actually reading the comments. It was very unnecessary, and I must have done something to get on her shit list because this was downright torture.
And she kept going. I didn’t look. If I couldn’t see it, maybe it wasn’t happening. That was a reasonable position. I was committing to it.
“It gets worse,” she whispered.
“What could possibly be worse than four hundred thousand people watching me stand there like a stunned deer?”
She turned the phone toward me.
Wait, is that SALEM TURNER?? The mechanic??
Tag after tag after tag. My name. My handle.
“They tagged me.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted it to.
Rowan shifted closer, her shoulder pressing into mine. “Not the Den. Just people who recognized you.”
My lungs felt tight.
This should have been a social extinction-level event. Mortifying on a cellular level. The kind of thing you moved cities over. Underneath the shock and noise, the tags and the comments and the four hundred thousand strangers, something warmer flickered.
The steadiness of his gaze. The hitch in his breath. The way he had looked at me.
Maybe I was reading into it. Maybe this was just what shirtless, gorgeous scare actors did to unsuspecting women who had been ambushed by their hormones at ten o’clock on a Friday night.
The warmth was unfamiliar, which meant it was dangerous. I put it away.
Rowan cleared her throat. “So. Minor complication.”
“Define minor. This already feels like the opposite of that.”
She grimaced. “I know him.”
“You what?”
“Ethan. He owns the Hardware store. Paul works with him—you know, Kung Fu Paul, the one who likes all those movies. I went on those couple of dates with him last month.”
I stared at her.
Of course. Of course, the most embarrassing moment of my entire life would go viral, and of course, Rowan would personally know the other person involved, because Gray Harbor was that size, and the universe had a sense of humor that I had never found funny.
“Small towns,” I muttered.
“There’s more. There’s a girl. Lucy.”
I knew who Lucy was. Everyone in Gray Harbor knew who Lucy was. Lucy was Gray Harbor royalty and mean girl extraordinaire.
Lucy was the kind of beautiful that felt intentional, like she had sat down one day and decided to be stunning, then followed through with the same focused energy she applied to everything else.
Polished. The sort of person whose hair fell exactly right in every weather condition, which I found offensive.
“Paul was complaining about her a lot,” Rowan continued. “I don’t remember the details, but it sounded like a situationship that went sideways, and now she’s—his word was obsessed, but I think that might be Paul being dramatic.”
Obsessed.
I turned the word over.
I didn’t like it.
“Are they together?” I asked, hating how small the question sounded.
Rowan shook her head. “No. Doesn’t sound like it. But from the way Paul talked, she’s going to be a factor.”
“Like a four-hundred-thousand-people factor?”
“Probably.”
“So, if they’re not together,” I said slowly, “why’s she still in the picture at all?”
Rowan made a face like she’d been waiting for someone to ask exactly that. “Honestly? I don’t really know. Paul says Ethan doesn’t date. Like, at all. Hasn’t in years.”
“What does that mean, ‘doesn’t date?’”
“I asked him the same thing. He didn’t really have an answer past ‘he just doesn’t.’ Said it like it was a known fact about the guy, the way you’d say someone doesn’t eat shellfish.” Rowan patted my hand.
“Great,” I said. “This is a disaster.”
Rowan didn’t argue with that. She just pulled me into a sideways hug, blanket cape and all, and held on for a second.
“October does it again,” I said into her shoulder.
She didn’t argue this time.
She was a great friend.
After what felt like an industrial amount of coffee, Rowan decided we needed to eat something that hadn’t come from our fridge.
Considering the fridge contained one box of baking soda and half a lemon living its best life on the middle shelf, this was the correct call.
She ventured out into the world to find us lunch while I stayed holed up on the couch, not ready to face anything outside our windows.
I replayed the video instead.
Once. Then again. Then a third time, like repetition might dull whatever had lodged itself under my skin.
It didn’t. If anything, each time was worse. The moment was still right there—stubborn, intact, unwilling to shrink into something I could file away and stop thinking about.
Now it had a name.
Ethan.
And, apparently, a complication.
I opened my social media account, which was a mistake. One hundred and now forty followers—a few more than yesterday. Just my grid staring back at me. Beach grass. Long stretches of gray water going nowhere in particular. I was a regular Annie Leibovitz.
I rolled my eyes and switched to Rowan’s account, finding Paul through her followers—cute, in the way Rowan had mentioned, but I hadn’t fully believed given the way she’d described him—and clicked through to his profile.
Paul Garrett looked like someone who’d never taken anything seriously.
Tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of build that came from actually using a gym rather than just owning a membership.
Short brown hair, facial hair that sat somewhere between intentional and forgot to shave, tattoo sleeves running down both arms. Genuine bright smile.
His feed was what you’d expect—gym selfies, bowling league photos, beach days with a rotating cast of guys who all looked equally unbothered—I couldn’t tell if any of them was Ethan. There was the occasional food picture.
I could see why Rowan had gone home with him. I could also see why she was furious about it.
After scrolling through his profile once, I moved to his followers. The plan had been to find Ethan, but I didn’t make it that far, because there she was.
Lucy Hayworth.
I clicked before I could talk myself out of it, and her account came up all at once. Bright. Curated. Effortless. Every photo placed rather than taken. Blonde. Leggy. Gorgeous photography. A hundred thousand people watching her exist.
I didn’t like what I was feeling or what it meant that I was feeling it.
I backed out faster than I meant to, my thumb hitting the screen harder than necessary, and tossed my phone across the couch like it had personally offended me.
What was I doing? Why did I care?
One strange moment in a hallway. A stranger I didn’t know. A video I hadn’t consented to and couldn’t take back. That was all this was.