Chapter 40
Shep is put into the back of a police car in short order, but I stay with Tippy until she’s loaded into an ambulance. She comes to as they’re closing the doors, swearing a string of woozy curses at Shep as they cart her off.
When the sirens kick on and the ambulance pulls away, Ardell advises that they have finished processing the scene at my house, and I can go home.
The sun is setting over the lake as I walk from Tippy’s driveway to mine, and hues of pink and purple and gold are spilling over the water.
And all I can think of is how peaceful the view used to be.
Beau and I made ourselves an idyllic, insulated existence.
And then every ghost from our past came back to haunt us.
There’s a news truck on the side of the road, and it feels eerily like the scene after Will’s death.
But otherwise, there’s no sign of the chaos from the morning.
Not the hurricane—people around here move lightning quick when it comes to rounding up debris and moving on—and definitely not the army of police officers who descended on my house in the early morning hours.
If it weren’t for the piles of broken branches stacked up like fire kindling along the curbs, awaiting yard trash collection, I might never know a hurricane ripped through town less than a day ago.
Winter Park. The queen of the cover-up.
As I reach my driveway, though, the cracks of the neighborhood’s perfect veneer reveal themselves in the form of yellow police tape draped over the entrance to our side yard. The physical signs of the police search in my home sink fresh dread in my stomach.
I don’t want to see what the house looks like now that the police have taken Beau into custody and searched every corner. But I go inside anyway, because the alternative is standing out here like a spectacle, waiting for some neighbor on a walk to wander past. I can already hear them.
There she goes, the wife of a presumed killer.
Apparently, even I can’t ignore public opinion forever.
Turns out my zero-fucks-to-give attitude comes with fine print. All it took was my husband being in jail to find it.
Nora and Marcus are waiting for me in the living room, and when I come through the kitchen, it looks like they’re spring cleaning. Marcus is mopping the floors while Nora wipes down my kitchen countertops.
“I know how gross it can feel,” she says, pulling cleaning gloves off her hands as she comes to hug me. “Knowing people have been rummaging through your house. But, oh my God,” she says, eyes bright, “I’ve been thinking, and this makes us search warrant twins.”
When I don’t laugh, her shoulders fall, and she hugs me again.
“What happened?” she asks. “I thought Tippy would be on her way to jail by now.”
“Tippy didn’t kill Gemma,” I say, wandering into the kitchen. “It was Shep. But he says he didn’t kill Simon.”
“And we’re just believing him?” Nora asks.
But I don’t answer.
I look out to the pool deck, and it’s like the murder never happened.
“Marcus power-washed everything,” Nora says in a small voice. “He didn’t want you to have to see that.” She looks to Marcus with that adoration she always seems to show without voicing.
“Thanks,” I say to them both.
I want to shower and wash the late-afternoon heat and grief off my skin. I want to crawl into bed and never come out. Want to run screaming down the street. Want to pack a bag and leave.
Every instinct is telling me to move, to fix something, to undo the last twenty-four hours. I can’t do anything, though, because Beau’s not here.
And it’s not like my parents being dead, because I can’t pretend his absence isn’t real. Because it’s everywhere.
I feel like I’m missing an appendage. Like any step I take is resignation to the fact that Beau was arrested. I’m stubborn enough—not to mention angry and defiant enough—to stand still in a cold rebuke of the facts at hand.
I notice the light outside is changing—afternoon giving way to evening—and I see a crumpled figure huddled on a lounge chair in the McGinnises’ yard.
The puffy clouds and golden glow of the sunset serve as an incongruous backdrop for a pathetic scene.
There, amidst the fading daylight, is Polly, her small frame curled in a sorrowful ball.
“Polly,” I say to Nora as if this is enough of an explanation for what I have to do next.
She must understand, though, because she doesn’t stop me or ask any more questions as I leave the kitchen, heading for the doors to the pool. She doesn’t try to follow me either, and I cut across the pool deck in a jog.
Then it’s just me and the bruised light of the sunset and all of Polly’s grief.
She doesn’t look up as I reach her. So I sit at the edge of her lounge chair, watching her shoulders shudder, and the sound she makes is strangled and broken, like she’s run out of breath to cry with.
“I’m sorry about your uncle Simon,” I whisper. It feels inadequate, but it’s all I have.
She scrubs at her face with the heel of her hand. Her cheeks are splotchy, and her eyes are swollen. “It’s not fair.”
“No,” I say. “It’s never going to feel fair. That’s the only thing I know for sure.”
For a long moment we sit there, staring at the lake. The water is flat again, and the air is cool. All of the humidity departed with the storm, leaving what should be a picture-perfect day.
I want to tell Polly it’ll get better, that the ache dulls.
But that’s not true, not really.
My parents have been gone for almost twenty years and some days, I still can’t believe it. Can’t believe all of the parts of my life that they’ve never seen. That they’ll never see.
“You don’t stop missing the people you lose,” I tell her. “You just…learn to carry them. Some days it’s heavy, and some days it’s lighter, but it never really goes away.”
Polly turns her wet face toward me, and it’s the cruelest thing, seeing the grief twisted into her features.
“My parents died when I was a kid,” I say, and it feels like a confession, like the words come out too loud. “It’s not something I talk about a lot.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever found words to describe what it’s like for them to be gone.
Nothing feels…good enough. They were so exact.
So sure. So smart. Everything I try to say feels too small.
Besides, I don’t like the way pity feels—hate people thinking I’m not strong.
And sometimes I wonder if I turned out how they wanted. I wonder if I’m good at carrying them.”
I have a sneaking suspicion they might actually think my life here is insane.
She sniffles, and I reach for her hand. Her fingers are cold and damp from tears, and I lean on the sensation to ground me.
“I pretended it wasn’t real. I ran from it for a long time,” I admit.
“But the running doesn’t work. Grief will catch up to you eventually.
It’s fast, and it’s sneaky. You have to let it hit you, like a wave in the ocean.
You have to go all the way through it if you want to come out on the other side. ”
Polly squeezes my hand, and I don’t look away as she cries, deciding instead to pull her to me, holding her as she trembles into my shoulder, her tears soaking through my shirt.
Stroking her hair, I take a deep breath and steady myself. I make a quiet promise that I will not run this time. I will go all the way through my grief.
And I will get Beau out of this.
My eyes start to wander past the pool deck and into the McGinnis yard.
At first, it looks like storm debris—scattered twigs and branches across the grass—waiting for Ford’s lawn care team. They’re probably working through a roster of cleanup jobs.
But then I see them. Pale stone fragments, glinting in the light of sunset. Not branches. Not leaves. Pieces of travertine tile, the length and width of my forearm, jagged and out of place.
I’m on my feet and running, following the trail from Tippy’s renovation toward the place where Simon’s body had been pulled from my pool.
Oh my God.
“Nora!” I scream from the far corner of my pool deck. “Marcus! Call Chief Kennedy!”
The shards look like bones in the grass. Travertine, torn from Tippy’s renovation, flung like shrapnel in the hurricane winds.
My stomach drops. The truth is suddenly so close I can feel it pressing down on my chest. I can’t unsee it.
—
It takes another twenty-four hours to get Beau out of jail.
That’s enough time for Ardell to pull what little footage the McGinnises’ and the Schaeffers’ security cameras captured on either side of the neighborhood power outage—and for Ford to realize a Sig Sauer handgun is missing from his gun safe.
The same weapon they found tucked into Simon’s designer slacks. But in the end, it’s all there.
Simon wasn’t bludgeoned over the head in some midnight struggle with Beau.
He was caught in the storm, charging toward my house, his mind bent on retribution.
Judging from his blood-alcohol level, he was staggering through the hedges on too much bourbon.
We’ll never know who his intended target was—Beau or me—but by all accounts, Simon’s last few years were clouded by the humiliation of Redwood’s failure and the frustration of never quite being able to pin the hack on Beau.
Simon always did like getting the last word.
As he reached my pool, a flying stone killed him, a death as senseless and brutal as the weather itself.
The man who yearned for greatness in all things is extinguished by a mundane accident.
The cops never thought to look past the pool.
Why would they? The storm had scattered debris from every yard across this neighborhood.
To them the tiles were just more wreckage, not a weapon.
They weren’t thinking about Tippy’s renovation or the way hurricane winds could lift a chunk of stone and send it flying to the wrong place at the wrong time.
After all of the suspicion, of the whispers and lies that painted Beau as a killer.
But it wasn’t him. He didn’t kill Gemma. And he didn’t kill Simon.
By the next afternoon, I’m falling into Beau’s arms outside the Orange County jail, tears spilling too fast and hard for me to manage a breath.
This is the home we made. This is the life I want.
When I get him back to the house, I shadow him from room to room, starved for the reassurance that he’s really here. It borders on compulsive. He showers and changes into clean clothes, and I stare at him like he’s some kind of wonder of the universe.
Because to me, he might as well be.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says with a wink as I trail him from the bedroom to the kitchen.
“I know, but I need to be sure.”
He pours us each a glass of wine, and we decide to go down to the dock to watch the sunset.
The fallout from Simon’s death is playing out all over the country. If I turn on the national news tonight, he’ll be there. The beloved son, the failed CEO, all the spectacular hubris of his life.
But the version of him that haunted me is finally gone.
When he fired me, he didn’t just end a job—he tore through my life in a way that echoed the same terror I felt when my parents died.
He reminded me how swiftly everything I built could come apart—pressing against familiar scar tissue, the wounds that taught me how ruthlessly uncertain life can be.
Even with Beau, even in this new life, some part of me never stopped bracing for the next collapse.
Realizing Simon’s story ended in a freak accident brought no joy. I hated that the very things I’d spent years trying to outrun—past pain and the razor’s edge—seemed to collide in such a violent way.
But it did make the titan of my memories achingly familiar at last. He was just as ordinary as anyone else. Just as fragile. Just as mortal.
He would hate to hear that. He thought of himself as anything but common.
“Should we sell the house?” I ask as Beau and I find our chairs at the dock.
Beau frowns.
“I mean, Simon died, like, right there.” I wave behind us to the place he must have taken his last steps. “We can’t ignore that.”
“I think the story becomes whatever we want it to be,” Beau says. “Whatever we want to focus on.”
I hope he’s right. That this is the house we built. The home we made. A love Simon could never shake.
Morally, I can’t say the hack was wrong.
Although it’s ironic that a surveillance state might have exonerated Beau a lot faster.
“Wonder what the poor folks are doing,” Beau says as he looks out over the lake.
“I’ve been meaning to give this back to you.” I take the Buffalo Nickel necklace out of the pocket of my dress and fasten it around his wrist. With the watercolor haze of another Florida sunset above us, my fingers linger a little longer than necessary, just to feel the quiet thump of his pulse.
He’s still here. Still him.
Watching Beau leave police custody was one of those rare moments when your life is snatched back from the brink. I won’t forget what it feels like to balance on the edge of disaster and somehow land in the place where you’re saved.
With Beau back, the razor’s edge isn’t a threat anymore. It feels more like the cost of choosing something real.
Now as Beau reaches for my hand, I don’t hesitate. I choose him.
In a place where people are always striving, always chasing down things that glitter, all I really want is the life we made together.