Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Here, sit down,” Noa says, making room for me on the couch.
When I sit, it’s comfy, the sort of well-worn sofa you sink into and have to catch yourself.
This little house exudes warmth and love.
Family photos line the wall almost haphazardly, and I can see Noa’s entire family at various stages of their lives.
The only family photo up in our house is a posed one over the fireplace that my mother had commissioned.
It may as well be AI generated—we’ve all been smoothed and depixelated enough to make our faces look like Play-Doh.
And there on a bookshelf, in a small wooden frame, is a photo of Noa sitting on the dock. She’s fifteen, holding a fishing pole in one hand while shading her eyes from the sun with the other. Next to her, grinning madly and all skinny and suntanned… is me. Gazing at her adoringly.
Well, damn. It aches—but not really in a bad way. Nostalgia, a reminder. That photo, the life back then—we had everything we needed. We had the days and nights. We had the beach and sea. But mostly, we found peace in each other. What I wouldn’t do to find that peace again.
There is the sound of an icemaker, little cracks as a few cubes hit the floor, and then Noa comes back in with a washcloth swollen with ice. “Sorry, out of orange popsicles,” she says. “Here, put this on your face.”
She drops down next to me, knocking me into her before I can straighten. I tip my head back on the top of the cushion as she helps place the washcloth on my eye. I wince at the contact.
We’re quiet for a minute, but I can feel her watching me, even with my eyes closed. I smile. “What?” I ask.
“How good did it feel to hit Matteo?” she asks. “I bet it felt so good.”
“It actually felt great,” I tell her. She nods along emphatically, as if trying to imagine it.
“Why did you hit him?” she asks. “I think I know why you fought him,” she clarifies, “but what did he say to make you punch him in the first place?”
“Does it matter?” I ask. When she doesn’t answer, I know that it does. “He said something about how I should get in line.”
“About me?” She tries to laugh it off, but I can hear there is real pain there. “What a joke. Honestly, I wish I never talked to him in the first place.”
“Not that it’s any of my business,” I say, “but how did the two of you become a thing?”
“I meant it when I said it wasn’t that serious,” she explains, exhaling. “He had great timing—for him. For me? Not so much. I was still getting over you, and… my mom just died. I was lonely. And I was all alone.”
For my part in that, I feel absolutely horrible. She should have never been alone.
“I wanted to feel normal again,” she continues.
“And at first, it was kind of nice to have someone to talk to. Someone who didn’t really know me, didn’t feel sorry for me.
But… then I overheard Matteo talking to his father.
” She rolls her eyes. “The typical class-war, slut-shaming bullshit. So I ended things real quick.”
“I’m sorry that happened,” I say, but she shrugs it off.
“He’s the one who can’t seem to get over it,” she says.
“And honestly, I barely had time to think about it. Because right after, Ellis left. The Shack started going under.” She groans, leaning her head back on the couch to stare at the ceiling.
“The last two years have just been a perfect storm of shit,” she says.
“It’s like everything fell apart after you. ”
To this, I can relate. I look again at the picture of us on the dock.
“I haven’t been happy since that last night I was with you,” I admit, studying our photo. “That was the last time I felt like anything mattered. Including myself.”
Noa sighs, and then she shifts to lean her head on my shoulder. I rest my cheek on the top of her head.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur. “I’m sorry for everything I put you through.”
“I know you are, Jamie,” she replies.
We stay like this for a while, just the two of us. No television, no music. Just the comfort of being next to each other.
When her fingers slowly start to trace over my hand, the small cuts on my knuckles from the fight, I close my eyes. Her touch is tender, loving.
“I’m still not over you,” she whispers quietly, and I feel myself smile.
“Good,” I say. She laughs softly, and then buries her face in my neck, embarrassed.
When I look down at her, she gazes up at me with those gorgeous eyes. Her cheeks flushed. I lick my lips, and she smiles slowly. And when she kisses me, my entire body reacts and I gather her up.
And it’s not slow or tentative. It’s our lips and our tongues; it’s years of silence and regret and missing each other so bad that it hurts. Her fingers knot in the front my shirt, pulling me closer still, as my hand slides up her thigh.
“Noa,” I murmur against her mouth like I’m going to lose myself.
Then she’s kissing me again, breathing in small gasps as our bodies tangle together like we can’t get enough. She is perfection. She is desire. She is summer.
And then, our kisses become deeper. More certain. Like we’ve finally both accepted that this is it. This is how it’s supposed to be, no matter how much I’ve fucked it up in the past. We were always going to end up here, together.
In this moment, I am hers. I always have been.
And just as I lay her back on the sofa, there is a sharp knock at the kitchen door.
Startled, we quickly pull apart, the spell broken. Noa slips out from underneath me, getting to her feet as she adjusts her clothes. She touches her lips, as if she can still feel me. Then, as if just remembering I’m still here, she looks over, wide-eyed.
I’m a bit out of breath, my heart still pounding wildly as I watch her. I try to think of something funny to say… but instead, I just smile. She matches it, even if she looks slightly embarrassed.
“That was dangerous,” she says, pointing at me, and then starts for the door.
We’re past dangerous. I don’t think either of us can go back to pretending now.
I rest into the couch, smiling and waiting for my blood pressure to come down.
There’s another sharp knock followed by the sound of Tech’s voice. I laugh, a bit annoyed that he’s the reason for the interruption.
As Noa dashes through the kitchen to answer the door, I press the ice to my eye, wincing again.
There is the sound of a lock turning and then Noa says, “What the hell?”
“Why is the door locked?” I hear Tech say. “You never…” But as he enters the living room and sees me on the couch, he pauses. “Never mind,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t want to know.” He spins back to Noa. “We have to go,” he says.
“Go where?” she asks, putting her hand on her hip. “We’re supposed to be lying low.”
“We need to go to Naples.”
Noa’s lips downturn. “Tonight? Why would we go to Naples?”
“Okay, hear me out,” Tech says, as if he’d been prepared for this conversation.
He walks farther into the room and takes a seat in the chair across from me.
“When I was going through the letters from Florence’s room, there was one that didn’t fit.
No name, scratchy writing—not hers, from what I can tell.
Most of the ink had faded, but what was there talked about going to Naples later that year, before she got married off.
And that was the term, ‘married off.’ Kind of negative, right? ”
“Definitely,” Noa says, leaning in to listen.
“The letter wasn’t signed, so I had no idea who it could be from,” he says.
“Then my grandma comes into the kitchen, sees me searching through old papers. She asks what I’m doing, and I’m not going to lie to my grandma.
I tell her I’m looking into what happened to Uncle Gabriel.
You know what she did?” Tech asks. “She left the room and came back with a big manilla envelope. Then she dumped out twenty to thirty postcards, all unsigned. All from Naples. She said, ‘If you find him, tell him we’re having dinner on Sunday at four.’ And then she walked out. ”
“Wait, find him?” Noa says. “So your grandma thinks Gabriel is still alive?”
“Seems so,” Tech says. “Up until now, the topic of my uncle has been off-limits or nonspecific. But suddenly, my grandmother comes in and drops this bomb like a badass.”
Tech reaches into his pocket and takes out a postcard, the edges slightly frayed. He hands it to Noa, who reads it first, seeming confused. She passes it to me.
The picture is of a pier with the word “Naples” written above it. Who sends a postcard from Naples, Florida, I’m not sure. I turn it over and it reads simply: Safe travels.
I hand it back to Tech, who takes it protectively.
“All the postcards say the same thing,” he says. “Nothing extra, nothing missing—although the postcard pictures change. Well,” Tech says, nodding, “I think you can guess where this is going.”
“Not really,” Noa says, confused.
But it clicks for me suddenly. “It’s a match,” I say, looking at Tech. He grins.
“You’re good,” he replies. “Yes, the handwriting on these postcards matches the letter written to Florence. It’s definitely the same person, not to mention, who the hell else talks about Naples so much?”
“You think your uncle knew Florence?” I ask.
He wags the postcard. “I don’t know for sure,” he says, “but if these postcards are from him to my grandmother, then yeah—I think he and Flo had some history.”
“So how do we find him?” Noa asks.
“Well,” Tech says, sighing heavily. “The postcards stopped arriving about a year ago and they didn’t have return addresses anyway.
But as it turns out, I have a great-aunt who lived on Keewaydin Island, accessible only by boat.
It’s not far from Naples. Now, what’s strange is that no one in my family has spoken to her in decades. ”
“Families sometimes lose contact,” Noa says, a twinge of sadness in her voice.
Tech presses his lips together sympathetically, but then stands up to let us know he’s serious.
“That part of my family went silent just after the tragedy at the Starline,” he says.
“Seems like a big coincidence. And now I’ve got her address on the island—she’s in her eighties, but from what I hear, she’s a spitfire. We’re going to talk with her.”
Noa stands up, energized. “If Gabriel’s alive,” she says, smiling for the first time, “we end the curse of the Starline Hotel. We get him back, telling the truth. And once that’s broken wide open, we should be able to figure out what happened to Felix.”
Tech nods, meeting her in the middle of the room to give her a hug. I hope it’s true. I can’t imagine having to live with that kind of family guilt for your whole life. A judgment that you’re completely innocent of.
“Now,” Tech says, pulling back and turning to me. “We need a boat.”
To this, I deflate and sit back into the couch. “That… is going to be a problem.”
“Why?” Tech asks.
“Before my father confessed to being an accessory to murder…” I tell him, and he widens his eyes. “He took my boat. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to me today, but it has left me boatless. I’m sorry.”
Noa tilts her head. “Not exactly,” she says.
“Not exactly what?” I reply. “Why do you look so shifty right now?”
She grins. “Well, your dad didn’t remove it from our dock, at least not yet. He just took you off as an authorized user. But… we have a spare key.”
Tech looks at me to see if I’m in. Honestly, it’s a good lead. I nod, and Tech slaps his hands together.
“Sounds like a plan,” he says. “Shawn’s already on her way in. Should we load up?” He waits for me to decide, including me in their group. And damn, it feels pretty good to be back.
Still, I look at Noa. “I’m not getting pizza or wings tonight, am I?” I ask. She laughs, shaking her head no. I sigh, standing up.
“Fine,” I tell them. “Let’s go steal my boat back.”