I’D BEEN DEBATING CALLING Grant on the drive home. I hated to do so unless it was urgent, didn’t want him to think I couldn’t handle things on my own.

As I was passing Breaker Beach, I decided to do it.

He would know whom to contact, and his name would carry more weight than mine. We were taught to always consult with the company lawyer before engaging. I’d already failed when I let Detective Collins inside. If the gas leak was a crime, I needed Grant’s input on how to proceed before involving the police further.

His cell rang until it went to voicemail. I turned the car up the incline of Landing Lane, leaving him a message on speakerphone. “Grant, hi, it’s Avery. Sorry to bother you, but there’s a problem. With the rentals. I think I need to talk to the police. Please call me back.” When I turned down the stone-edged drive, I tapped my brakes. There was another car in the driveway—dark, expensive-looking, familiar.

I swung around the corner of the garage, parked in my spot, hidden out of sight. I could hear voices coming from the backyard—Parker’s and someone else’s, deep and firm.

I moved as quietly as I could, hoping no one noticed my arrival. So I wasn’t paying attention as I approached the door of the guesthouse.

The front door was unlatched. A sliver of light escaping from inside. I held my breath, pushed the door slowly open.

The living room was in disarray. My box of things in the middle of the room. My clothes pulled out of the closet, heaped on the couch. And waiting in the center of the room stood Bianca.

“Hello,” she said. Her blond hair was pulled back so severely it seemed to blend in with her scalp. She was imposing, even at Sadie’s height, both of them at least four inches shorter than I was.

“Hi, Bianca,” I said. I’d been waiting for Bianca and Grant to return since the start of the season.

No one had mentioned anything about my job in all the time since Sadie’s death. The money kept coming. I thought maybe it was just a moment when we’d said things that each of us would rather take back, and we could chalk it up to grief, on both sides.

The state of my living room suggested otherwise.

Bianca’s face remained expressionless, and I knew I’d had it all wrong. “I thought I told you to leave,” she said.

SUMMER

?????2017

The Plus-One Party

10 p.m.

The police were coming. That was what everyone was whispering when I stepped outside the master bedroom, joining the rest of the party at the other end of the darkened hall.

The blackout. Ellie’s scream as she fell into the pool. Someone had heard it, called it in. Three people told me in the course of two minutes. I didn’t know any of them by name, but I assumed one of them was the person Parker had told me about who’d been looking for me. It was a small thrill to realize that they knew who I was, that I was the one to turn to. That I was the person in charge here.

Depending on the source, there was either a police car outside, or an officer out front, or one of the guests had received a call in warning. But the message was clear: Someone was coming.

Okay, okay. I closed my eyes, trying to focus, trying to think. Parker’s family owned the house; Ellie Arnold was fine. I scanned the sea of faces until I saw her—there—across the room, half in the kitchen, half in the living room. Hair wet and now braided over her shoulder, face clean of makeup, in a loose-fitting blouse and ripped jeans that hung a little low on her hips. Enough to give away that they weren’t hers. But she was here, and she was fine. Laughing, at that moment, at something Greg Randolph was saying.

I let myself out the front door, the hinges squeaking behind me as I pulled it shut, in hopes of interceding if the police had already arrived. I’d explain what had happened, retrieve a safe and unharmed Ellie Arnold, a witness or two, and keep everything outside.

But the night was empty. It had dropped at least five degrees in the last hour, maybe more, and the leaves rustled overhead in the wind. There was no police car that I could see—not with the lights on, anyway—and there was no officer on the doorstep. Just the crickets in the night, the soft glow of the porch light, and nothing but darkness as I stared into the trees.

I walked down the front porch steps, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the night so I could see farther down the road. The stars shone bright through the shifting clouds above. It was part of the town bylaws to keep the lights dim, to opt for fewer street lamps rather than more, leaving the town untouched, poetic, one with the surroundings, both above and below. It was why we had the dark winding roads in the mountains. The beach lit only by bonfire. The lighthouse, the sole beacon in the night.

From the edge of the front lawn, I saw a quick flash of red at the end of the road. Brake lights receding and then disappearing. I kept my focus on the distance, just to make sure the car wasn’t coming back. That it hadn’t been turning around and parking. I stared for a long string of moments, but no one reappeared.

My hope: Maybe the police did come. Maybe they got the call and drove up the street and realized this was just a party, just a house. The Plus-One party, they must’ve realized. And when they saw the street and realized the house belonged to the Lomans, they left it well enough alone.

Worst case, I had the key for Sunset Retreat. I could move everyone if needed.

Back inside, I saw exactly what needed to be done, could see everything playing out, three steps forward. The liquor coursing through my veins only heightened my sense of control. I had this. Everything was okay.

“Hey, can I talk to you?” Connor shifted a step so he was blocking my path. His breath was so close I shivered. His hands hovered just beside my upper arms, like he had meant to touch me before thinking better of it.

Connor standing before me could go one of two ways. There could be the slide to nostalgia, where he turned his head to the side and I caught a glimpse of the old him, the old us; or there could be the slide to irritation—this feeling that he had secrets I could no longer understand, an exterior I could not decipher. An entire second life he was living in the gap.

He held my gaze like he could read my thoughts.

Look again, and now I couldn’t see Connor without picturing Sadie. The arch of her spine, the smile she’d give, the scent of her conditioner as her hair fell over his face. And him—the way he’d look at her. The crooked grin when he was trying to hide what he was thinking, giving way as she leaned closer.

I started to turn but felt his hand drop onto my shoulder. I shrugged it off, more violently than necessary. “Don’t,” I said. This was the first time we’d touched in over six years, but there was something about it that felt so familiar—the emotion snapping between us.

He stood there, eyes wide and hands held up in surrender.

* * *

SIX YEARS EARLIER, CONNOR had found me on Breaker Beach kissing another guy. I’d stumbled after him, clothes and skin covered in wet sand, soles of my feet numb from the night. I reached a hand for his shoulder, to get him to stop, to wait. But when he spun, I didn’t recognize his expression. His voice dropped lower, and a chill ran down my spine. “If you wanted me to see this,” he said, “mission accomplished. But you could’ve just said, Hey, Connor, I don’t think this is going to work out.”

I’d licked my lips, the salt water and the shame mixing together, and, my head still swimming, said, “Hey, Connor, I don’t think this is going to work out.” Trying to get him to laugh, to crack a smile and see how ridiculous the whole thing was.

But all he heard was the cruelty, and he nodded once, leaving me there.

The first time I saw him after that night was at Faith’s, when she broke her arm. The second time, at the bonfire at Breaker Beach, where Sadie found me and our friendship began. After that, for a small town, it had been surprisingly easy to avoid each other. I kept away from the docks and the inland edge of town, where he lived. He kept away from my grandmother’s place at Stone Hollow and from the world the Lomans occupied—the orbit in which I soon found myself.

After a while, it was less an active process than a passive one. We didn’t call, didn’t seek each other out, so that eventually, we didn’t even nod in passing on the street. Like a wound that had thickened as it healed. Nothing but rough skin where nerve endings once existed.