The teenager handed me my credit card, and the third man stood as I approached. And then I understood: It was Parker Loman, empty cup in hand.

“Avery,” he said, and then continued past. As if I were an old plot point. As if I were just someone caught living on his property when I shouldn’t have been there; as if I weren’t his sister’s best friend, hadn’t worked with him for years; as if he hadn’t kissed me two nights earlier.

It was a skill of the entire family, creating the story and owning it. Sadie herself, welcoming me to the Breakers. And now Parker, probably spreading this new story about me. I wondered if everyone at the table, behind the counter, out on the docks, knew that I had just, an hour ago, been fired.

Still, I almost felt bad for him, thinking about what his own father said of him. Parker had been robbed of the chance to want something badly.

Ambition wasn’t just in the work. Ambition, I believed, was tinged with a sort of desperation, something closer to panic. Like a dormant switch deep inside that could be forced only by necessity. Something to push up against until, finally, you caught.

“Here, have a seat.” Greg Randolph pushed Parker’s now empty chair with his foot, the metal scraping against concrete. I perched on the edge, waiting for my order. “How’ve you been?” he asked, grin firmly in place. “I mean, since Friday.”

The teenager behind the counter called my name, and I excused myself for my drink. It was something mixed with caramel, steaming hot, a spice I couldn’t place. When I sat down again, I ignored his last question.

Greg gestured toward Ellie. “We were just talking about the party coming up the week after next. Will you be joining us at Hawks Ridge?” He tilted his head to the side, and I took a sip. The Plus-One party must be at his place this year. Hawks Ridge. A group of exclusive estates set on a rise of land closer to the mountains, with a distant view of the sea.

“Probably not,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” he said, fake-sighing. I knew why I was wanted. For the drama, for the scene, so someone could say: Look, Avery Greer, can you believe she showed her face? So someone could corner me with a shot of liquor and say: I know a secret about you.

“It won’t be the same,” Greg went on, stuffing the last bite of a messy muffin into his mouth. “First Ellie, now you,” he added, even as he was chewing.

“You’re not going?” I turned to Ellie, surprised.

She shook her head, looking down at the table, then pressed her pointer finger to a crumb on the table, dropping it onto her plate. “Not after last year.”

Sadie, I thought. Finally, someone with the sense to know this was in bad taste. Another year, another party, as if nothing at all had changed.

No one else seemed to know the truth: that one of them had done something to Sadie.

“It was an accident, love,” Greg said to Ellie, voice low. “And I have a backup generator. The power’s not going to go out up there.”

“Wait. You don’t want to go this year because you fell in the pool?” I asked her.

She cut her eyes to me, sharp and mean. “I didn’t fall. Someone pushed me.” Angry that it seemed I had forgotten her claim, and I had. Last year, I’d thought she was being overdramatic, wanting attention, like Sadie had warned. But nothing about that night was as it seemed.

“Sorry,” I said.

But even Greg Randolph wasn’t having it. He smirked as he raised the cup to his lips. “Probably bumped into you in the dark, by accident.” And then to me, in a fake whisper, “She had quite a bit to drink, I seem to recall.”

“Fuck you, Greg,” she said. “I remember just fine.”

Everything was shifting then. My memory of that night: The lights going out, the power grid tripped. A commotion. A scream.

Did someone leave in the chaos? Was someone coming back?

I pushed away from the table abruptly. “I have to go.” I had to talk to someone else who had been there, who had seen everything. Connor, maybe. Except he didn’t understand all the intricacies. The ins and outs of the Lomans’ world.

But there was someone else. Someone who was there. Who saw everything. Who was dangerous, I thought, in the things they had noticed.

And who, after all of that, did not come back.

CHAPTER 22

Sadie once said she never knew whom to trust. Whether someone wanted to be her friend because of what she stood for. Whether they were drawn to the girl or the name. That life I’d watched from outside Littleport. The promise of something.

She had loved a boy once, at boarding school. She told me about him that first summer, like she was whispering a fairy tale. But he lived overseas, and after graduation they had broken up; he did not come back for her. I heard other names over the years, during college. But never with that same fervent whisper, the gleam in her eye, the belief that she loved and was loved.

I’m lucky I found you, she’d said at the end of that first summer.

I believed it was I who was the lucky one. A coin tossed into the air, one of hundreds, of thousands, and I had fallen closest to their home. I was the one she had picked up when she needed one.

How lucky I had been to find this girl who looked at me like I was someone different than I’d always been. Who sent a gift on my birthday or just because. Who called when I could hear other people in the room, or late at night, when I heard just the silence and her voice. Who confided in me and who sought my opinion—What do we think of this?

She had become my family. A reminder, always, that I was no longer alone, and neither was she. I knew better than to trust that anything so good could be permanent, but with her, it had been so easy to forget.

Every summer, year by year, I was all she needed. And then Luciana Suarez was there.

* * *

WHEN I JOINED THE family out back at the pool that first night as they toasted to summer, every time I looked across the way, I’d find Luce watching me back.

She told me she’d known Sadie and Parker for years, that their families had been friendly since they were teenagers, though none of them had gone to school together. As if to let me know that her relationship with the Lomans superseded my own, based purely on the factor of time.

Luce had just finished up her master’s degree when she arrived with the Lomans at the start of the summer. She’d put off the starting date of her new job until mid-September. She was moving anyway, she’d said. Out of graduate housing, closer to the hospital where she’d be working as an occupational therapist.

She’d told me everything I needed now. I only had to spend ten minutes looking through the staff directories of several local hospitals in Connecticut before I landed on her name—Luciana Suarez, office hours Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 4:30.

I mapped the hospital, found a nearby hotel, booked myself the cheapest room I could get in a hotel chain I was familiar with—all from the front seat of my car, which felt as permanent a place as any.

I didn’t even stop at the Sea Rose before heading out of town. All I had with me were the items in my purse—the paper with the list of names and account numbers, and Sadie’s flash drive. I left behind the boxes, the bags, my laptop, the keys. Maybe leaving was for the best, anyway.

I could imagine someone finding those items next season if I never returned. Wondering what had happened to me. The rumors about that girl who was obsessed with the Lomans. Who must’ve had something to hide.

The same way we had crafted a story about Sadie—a person who wanted to die.

It was a thought that had me calling Connor again—just so someone would know—but his phone kept ringing. I debated not leaving a message, knowing how it would look, but there was already evidence of the calls. Detective Collins had seen us together.

There was nothing incriminating about tracking down the truth.

“Hi. Didn’t see you on the docks this morning but wanted to let you know I’m heading out of town.” I didn’t know how much more to say—about the payment and the bank accounts on the flash drive in my purse. I didn’t know whether to trust my instincts or him. But Connor knew my grandmother. He knew my family. And he was always, always better at this part—at looking again and seeing something new. “I was trying to find out which bank the accounts were from.” I took a breath. “I discovered that one of the accounts,” I said, “belonged to my grandmother.”

And then I drove out of Littleport—through the crowded streets of the downtown, rising up and away from the harbor; winding through the mountain roads, the pavement cut like switchbacks in sections; through the greenery and the barren roadsides, nothing but trap shops and ice cream shops and gas stations with a single pump—until the highway.