Owl’s Cherished Mate (Driftwood Cove #5)

1. Bonnie

BONNIE

T he lunch rush had been brutal.

My feet ached, my lower back screamed, and there was a grease stain on my apron I didn’t remember getting. I untied it and took it off before grabbing my jacket from the hook by the kitchen door.

“You okay?” Mila asked from behind the counter, where she was already prepping for the dinner service. Her chestnut hair was twisted up in its usual messy bun, and there was flour on her cheek from the hushpuppies she’d been making. “You seemed a little off today.”

“I’m fine,” I said, forcing a smile. “Just tired.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. Tired didn’t begin to cover it. Tired was what normal people felt after a long day. What I felt was something heavier—something that had settled into my bones months ago and refused to leave.

Mila studied me for a beat, her green eyes soft with concern.

She was always so kind. She’d been kind since the day she’d hired me, back when no one else in Driftwood Cove would give me the time of day.

I was Gravis Williams’s daughter, and that name was practically poison in this town now.

Even so, Mila hadn’t flinched when I’d filled out the application.

She’d looked at my availability, asked when I could start, and that had been that.

I owed her more than she knew.

“Get some rest tonight, okay?” she said, turning back to her hushpuppies.

“I will.”

Another lie, but she didn’t need my problems.

I pushed through the back door and stepped into the afternoon sunlight.

The air was cool and smelled like salt and fish from the docks down the road.

A couple of fishermen walked past on the sidewalk, and one of them—an older guy with a gray beard and a name I couldn’t remember—glanced my way and then quickly looked somewhere else.

I was used to it.

The sideways looks. The way people’s expressions shifted when they realized who I was. Not outright hostility, just this sense of discomfort, like being near me might somehow make them guilty by association with everything my dad did.

The drive home took less than twenty minutes. Our house sat at the end of a dead-end road on the outskirts of town—a small, faded-blue two-bedroom with a sagging front porch and a yard that needed mowing. It had been Dad’s. Now it was mine, at least until I figured out something better.

Which, at this rate, could take years.

I noticed Lawson’s bike was tossed in the front yard when I pulled up.

He was home?

My stomach tightened. It was two something in the afternoon on a Tuesday. He should be at school still.

I climbed the porch steps and pushed the front door open.

The TV was on—some show I didn’t recognize—and Lawson was sprawled across the couch in jeans and a black hoodie I’d never seen before.

His dark hair hung in his eyes, and his sneakers were still on, propped up on the armrest like he owned the place.

“Hey,” I said, setting my keys on the table by the door. “Why aren’t you at school?”

“Didn’t feel like going.”

The words came out flat. There was no attitude in them. No hint of defiance. They were just flat.

“You can’t just not go because you don’t feel like it, Lawson.”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t even look at me. His eyes stayed on the TV.

I took a breath and tried again. “Did something happen? Did someone say something to you?”

“No.”

“Then why?—”

“I said I didn’t feel like it.” His jaw tightened, and for a second I caught a flash of something in his eyes before he shut it down. “Can you stop?”

I wanted to push. I wanted to sit beside him and make him talk to me, make him tell me what was going on in that head of his. I’d learned the hard way that pushing Lawson only made him dig in harder.

“Fine.” I sighed. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Don’t care.”

“Okay.” The word dragged out. “I’ll figure something out.”

He grabbed his phone from the cushion beside him and stood, heading for his room without another word.

As he passed me, I caught a whiff of weed clinging to him.

It wasn’t the first time. I’d been trying not to flip out about it because I remembered being fourteen and doing the same thing. The weed wasn’t what scared me.

It was everything else.

“Hey,” I called out.

He paused but didn’t turn around.

“That hoodie. Where’d you get it?”

“A friend.”

“Which friend?”

His shoulders stiffened. “Does it matter?”

“Never mind,” I said, deciding this wasn’t a battle worth fighting.

He was fourteen, and even though I was his older sister and not his mom, I was still the enemy. He disappeared down the hall, and a second later, his bedroom door closed.

Had I really smelled weed on him?

Music came from his room a moment later, filtering through the thin walls of the house. It was way too loud and heavy with bass.

With a sigh, I walked back to the kitchen.

The dishes from this morning were still in the sink and more had been added—his cereal bowl, a glass with orange juice residue at the bottom, a butter knife caked in peanut butter, and a plate.

I washed them all by hand because the dishwasher had been broken since before Dad was arrested and I couldn’t afford to fix it any more than he could have.

While I scrubbed, my mind did what it always did. It analyzed the conversation with Lawson.

The hoodie wasn’t his. The weed smell wasn’t from school because he hadn’t gone today. And a friend could mean a lot of things, but I had a sick feeling it meant one person in particular—possibly two.

Darren and his younger brother, Cade.

Darren had been in and out of our lives since I was a teenager, always hovering around Dad’s operations, always smiling that cold smile of his that never reached his eyes.

When Dad went to prison, I thought Darren would disappear from our lives for good.

Instead, I was afraid he’d latched onto Lawson.

Cade too, which made sense because Cade was closer to Lawson’s age.

Somewhere over the last few months, the two of them had gotten tight.

I couldn’t prove anything, though.

Lawson wouldn’t tell me where he went or who he was with half the time, which was why I’d installed a tracking app on his phone two weeks ago.

The fact that I needed to track my fourteen-year-old brother made me uneasy, but I didn’t know what else to do.

He snuck out at least twice a week. Sometimes more.

He came home smelling like weed, and every conversation between us turned into a fight.

I was twenty-two years old, and I was failing at the one thing that mattered most.

The water ran over my hands as I rinsed the last dish and set it in the rack to dry. I wiped my hands on a towel, leaned against the counter, and closed my eyes.

Two years ago, I’d just settled in at State to study nursing and was sharing an apartment with a girl named Emily who had a cat named Pumpkin.

It was the first time in my life I’d felt like I could breathe, like maybe I wasn’t trapped in Driftwood Cove, defined by my last name, or destined to spend my whole life cleaning up after my father.

Then the call came a few months ago that Dad had been arrested and Lawson had no one. If I didn’t come home, he’d go into the system.

So I came home.

I packed my car, withdrew from nursing school, and drove back to the town I’d spent years trying to leave. I walked into the courthouse and signed the guardianship papers, and just like that, my life became this.

Work. Lawson. Worry. Repeat.

The laptop on the kitchen table caught my eye. It was old—the kind of old where the battery lasted maybe forty minutes if I was lucky, and the fan sounded like a jet engine. It still worked, though. That was all that mattered.

I checked the clock on the microwave. Two forty-five. The library closed at seven. If I left now, I had plenty of time to get a few solid hours of studying in before I had to come back and figure out dinner.

I’d switched to online classes a month after coming back—community college courses I could take at my own pace.

It wasn’t the degree I’d been working toward at State, but it was something.

A thread I refused to let go of. The only real problem was the lack of internet.

We didn’t have it at the house. Dad had never bothered, and I couldn’t justify the monthly cost when I was already stretching every dollar to cover groceries, utilities, and Lawson’s school supplies he never seemed to use.

So I went to the library. Every day after my shift, I sat at the same corner table, plugged in my dying laptop, and connected to the free Wi-Fi.

It was the only time during the day that felt like mine.

Two, sometimes three hours where I wasn’t Lawson’s guardian, Gravis Williams’s daughter, or the girl everyone in town whispered about.

At the library, I was just a woman with a laptop and a plan to get out of here someday.

I grabbed the laptop, shoved it into my bag, and slung the strap over my shoulder. Pausing outside Lawson’s door, I listened. The music was still playing at full blast.

“I’m heading to the library,” I called through the door. “I’ll be back by seven thirty. I’ll figure something out for dinner when I get back.”

No response.

“Lawson?”

“Yeah. Heard you.”

I waited for something more. A goodbye, an okay, anything. It didn’t come.

My hand hovered near the doorknob. I could open it.

I could sit on his floor and refuse to leave until he talked to me.

I could demand answers about why he smelled like weed, why he’d ditched school, and where he was last Thursday night when the tracking app showed him halfway across town at an address I didn’t recognize. I didn’t, though.

I didn’t have the fight in me right now.

Tomorrow, I told myself. I’d push harder for answers tomorrow.

I dropped my hand from the knob and walked away. Then I climbed into my car and drove to the library.