CHAPTER THREE #3
Gabrielle and I smirked.
“He did play college basketball and was slated to go to the NBA before an injury,” my cousin pointed out. “Those guys might be in for more than they bargained for.”
“He held an assembly for the whole school, and any student could raise their hand and ask him a question,” my daughter said. “I asked him what his favorite animal was.”
“And?” I asked.
“He said black panther.”
“And his favorite color is blue, his favorite food is pizza, his favorite dessert is cookie dough ice cream, and if he could have any superpower in the world, it would be the power of invisibility,” Laurel finished. “He also has a daughter named Mabel. She’s thirteen and homeschooled.”
Gabrielle and I exchanged quick glances with each other before steeling our expressions until the kids were not in the room.
“Something he and I have in common,” my cousin said. “I also have a child who is homeschooled.”
“Damon in his room being a hobbit?” Laurel asked, throwing in an eye roll for good measure.
“Where else would he be?” Gabrielle replied.
“Can we bake?” Honor asked, directing her question to Gabrielle, since the girls loved to bake together but did so in Gabrielle’s kitchen as it was the biggest.
“Yeah, but I need my oven by five,” Gabrielle said, nodding. “And leave it on. I’ve got a spinach and gruyere quiche I need to put in for dinner.”
The girls agreed, then headed off to go get their bake on.
“I’m going to go practice my Hacky Sack,” Austin said, pulling out one of his many Hacky Sacks from his pocket.
“Do you have homework?” I asked.
His face fell. “Can I do it after dinner? I want to practice while it’s still light out.”
“How much homework?”
“Like four pages of math and three questions for social studies. But they shouldn’t take me more than an hour.
” He gave me his very best puppy dog eyes.
Eyes that I’d always struggled to resist. Thankfully, both my children had inherited what seemed like ninety-nine percent of my looks.
So it was easy to melt when they looked back at me with my own eyes, rather than the sadistic, sociopathic pale-blue gaze of their father.
I was sure I would have learned to deal with it, but if Austin had looked like his dad, I know it would have been a haunting reminder of an extremely dark time in my life.
A time I worked hard to forget. A time where I’d nearly ended it all—for everyone.
Gabrielle snickered behind me.
I gave my watch a quick peek. “Hacky Sack for an hour, then inside for homework.”
“Deal.” He tossed his floppy, multi-cowlick hair off his eyes, but all it did was lift into the air, then fall back over his forehead as he tossed me a big, accomplished smile and headed out the door.
We waited until the door was fully shut and my son was out of view before I spun around to face my cousin. She already had her phone out and her brows bunched.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I can’t find an age for him.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I can see what high school he attended and everything, but the graduation year has been redacted.”
“Redacted?”
She met my gaze. “Redacted.”
“Red flag?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Maybe?”
“I mean, he does look young. But he might just be one of those guys that looks young even though they’re …
not?” I wasn’t sure why I phrased that like a question.
“Maybe he had his daughter at like eighteen or nineteen. If he had her at eighteen with his high school girlfriend, that would put him at thirty-one. Even if he had her at sixteen—which can and does happen—that would put him at twenty-nine. And he could totally be twenty-nine.”
Gabrielle nodded in a non-committal way. Her brows had pinched together even tighter, and her fingers were just flying across the screen. “He looks as young, or younger than Maverick,” she muttered.
“And Maverick is what? Twenty-six?”
She nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
“But that would mean he had his daughter at … thirteen.”
Gabrielle looked up at me. “That’s fucked up.”
“God, we sound like Jolene Dandy. We’re speculating a whole hell of a lot right now, with our only fact being that he has a thirteen-year-old daughter.
She might not even be his biologically. Maybe his best friend or older brother died, or went to war, or prison, and he became her legal guardian. Maybe it’s just temporary.”
Gabrielle lifted one brow and glanced up at me, skepticism burning in her gaze. “War?”
“There are still wars going on,” I said. “Many. Maybe her father is part of an elite black ops team that is deep in the jungle hunting a drug cartel, and until he’s home, Lennox has offered to watch over her?”
“Stop reading those military romance books.”
“No. Or, his older sister had the baby, then got killed in a horrific car accident when the baby was in the NICU, and she went out to buy a breast pump. So Lennox stepped up, and Uncle became Dad. Too early, but he did it anyway because he’s a stand-up guy.”
She glanced up at me again. “Another romance book?”
“I diverted from the plot a little. She was killed in a mall mass shooting, not a car accident. But otherwise … yeah. That’s not the point though. The point is—”
“The point is, I think we have the right to know who this newcomer is hanging out with our kids.”
The look she gave me reminded me of Jolene Dandy and the face she’d made earlier today when she said that she didn’t have school-aged children, so it was basically my responsibility to keep her informed.
It wasn’t any of her goddamn business. Just like it wasn’t any of our goddamn business who a man who seemingly appeared to be just over the age able to rent a car, had a thirteen-year-old daughter.
None. Of. Our. Business.
An uncomfortable heat began to prickle like acid in my belly, and I reached out and covered Gabrielle’s phone with my hand, stopping her investigation. “Stop. This feels icky.”
She met my gaze. “We have a right to know who our kids’ new principal is.”
“Yeah, but he also has a right to privacy, Gabs. We didn’t want our dirty-ass laundry aired to the island and kept it a secret for years.
For good reason. Maybe he has good reason too.
And until he gives us a reason to question his position at the school, I say we let it go.
We’ve raised wary kids. They know enough about our past now to not let anything shady get swept under the rug.
And if this new dude starts acting weird, we’ll hear about it.
We have to trust our kids. We have to trust him.
For all we know he could be in WITSEC or something. ”
Gabrielle frowned for a moment, but I could see she knew I was right. After a second, she nodded and closed her phone.
“Promise me you won’t go Googling him or calling your private investigator buddies to do some digging? The last thing we need is his identity getting out to the wrong people. People he might be running from.”
She sighed. “Let’s just hope the people he’s running from aren’t the cops, or the parents of the child he’s kidnapped and is calling his own daughter.”
I scoffed. “Would you stop listening to those fucking podcasts? You have murder, kidnapping, and true crime on the brain. You think everyone is a secret serial killer.”
Smirking, she stuffed her phone into the back pocket of her dark-gray, wide-legged trousers. “I’ll stop listening to my murder podcasts if you stop reading those smutty, slutty romance books with the sticky pages.”
“First of all, they’re not slutty. And ‘smutty’ has a bit of a negative connotation now.
We prefer ‘spicy.’ And the pages aren’t sticky.
I read on my e-reader for convenience, and I use a vibrator I don’t have to hang on to, fuck you very much.
” I stuck my tongue out at her as I headed to the back room again.
“And besides, my books are inspiring. They’re feel good, and give hope.
That true love does exist, and happily ever afters do happen.
Your podcasts just remind us that men like our husbands aren’t as rare as the world assumes, and the number of unsolved murders—of women—is outrageous. ”
She followed me into the back room. “I feel like if I had the time and energy to dedicate to being a homicide detective, I’d solve over half of these cold cases.”
“I’m sure you do,” I muttered. “Just like die-hard Grey’s Anatomy fans believe they could perform a Whipple, they’ve watched enough on TV.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon sipping from our favorite rosé and chatting about the upcoming grape season.
It was supposed to be a hot summer, which meant sweet grapes hanging heavy on the vine.
We never had a problem hiring seasonal staff to come work the vineyard, but what there continued to be on the island was a lack of accommodation.
Yes, there were campsites and cabins to rent, a hostel, and some short-term, dorm-style housing for fishing guides down on the docks, but it still never seemed to be enough.
Because tourists also wanted to come to the island. And they had more money, and more flexibility to book the accommodations first.