Everyone else … oh, they all said the right things, but Morgan could read between the lines perfectly well. The only messages he got these days were from people either digging for a scoop on the fate of his company or gold-digging. It seemed like every single person he’d dated over the past five years was reaching out again, newly interested in him now that he had a hefty payout in the bank.
Well, fuck them. And fuck Bentley, and fuck email. Morgan set his phone on silent and plugged it into the solar charger he’d brought with him because this place wasn’t fully electrified (he’d been a little horrified when he realized that, like any true city boy), then looked outside again. Not at the shore this time but at the island.
He really ought to find the only other person legally allowed to live here and formally introduce himself. After all, this island was only a mile long. How hard could it be?
Pretty fucking hard,it turned out.Apart from the path down to the dock where the boat was kept and the steps up to the lighthouse, the island was incredibly shaggy and overgrown, thick with butterfly bushes, lilac, and holly among others. They were probably gorgeous at the height of summer when everything was blooming, but right now they made for a painful and prickly path. Morgan thought he was doing all right, actually, until he got to the stretch of blackberries that seemed to take up every crevice between the occasional Douglas fir and Sitka spruce.
All right, fine. Walking across the middle of the island wasn’t going to happen. He frowned as he thought his way through the problem, plucking a few ripe blackberries as he did. The guy—Ty, Uncle Phil’s letter had said, Ty Smith—was the only other legal resident of Parrish Island. He was a primarily a fisherman and always a loner, but he’d managed to drop fish off for Morgan every single morning since he’d been there, fresh and gorgeous in the cooler. So he had to have a reliable route from his home to the lighthouse, unless he was just swimming every day, which—
“Idiot,” Morgan muttered to himself. No one would do that. And taking a boat would be almost as unwieldy since there wasn’t a lot of room to tie another one up at his little dock. Besides, Morgan would have heard a boat motor out there … wouldn’t he?
Whatever. There was probably a path around the edge of the island instead of through the middle, one he’d missed. He backtracked, munching on a few blackberries as he went, and once he was at the lighthouse again, he did a more thorough check of the grounds until—aha!There, covered up with fresh growth from the seagrass but still present, was a tiny trail that led down toward the water. It had probably gotten weedy once Uncle Phil stopped using it, after he—
Morgan closed his eyes and breathed through the grief he felt over Phil’s death. The man was actually a great-uncle, his grandfather’s youngest brother and the only one in the family who’d opted to maintain their homestead on Parrish Island. He’d manned the lighthouse his own grandfather had originally built, then was given leave to stay there once it was decommissioned. Parrish Island was a protected wildlife sanctuary for the most part—apparently, a group of Steller’s sea lions liked to spend time on the rocky beaches, and there were some endangered marbled murrelets who nested there too. The only people allowed there on a permanent basis were Phil, any family members who came to visit him, and Ty.
Morgan didn’t know much about Ty’s situation. He’d visited a number of times when he was a child, first with his family and then by himself, when no one else wanted to take Uncle Phil up on his offer of two weeks without the amenities they were used to, but he didn’t remember Ty.
“He’s shy,” his uncle had said the one time Morgan has asked about him. “We like to give each other our space, but he’s a good friend. He’s always looking out for me.” He’d been the one to call with the news that Phil had died, according to Morgan’s mom, but he hadn’t been here to meet the family or the coroner when they’d come for his body and personal effects.
Morgan still carried around the letter he’d received from Uncle Phil in his wallet.
Hey, kiddo,and ha, Phil was the only one who could get away with calling Morgan “kiddo” when he was pushing thirty.If you’re reading this, I guess that means I’m gone. I don’t mind; I lived a good life just the way I wanted to. If I could have changed anything, it would have been seeing more of the family, but that’s just the way things go.
Morgan had felt intense guilt the first time he read that line, but the next had allayed it … somewhat.
You always were my favorite, though, and I guess you liked it here, too, since you came more than anyone else. I know you’ve got a lot going on in your life—your mom tells me you’re a big-shot tech guy now, good for you—but if you feel the need to get away from the rat race, know that you’re welcome to come here. We only maintain our permission to live on the island and maintain the lighthouse if we’ve got someone here for three months of the year or more, so … well, just think about it. You might like it more than you think, and I know Ty would like the company even though he says he’ll be fine on his own.
I love you, kiddo. I hope you take good care of yourself.
Uncle Phil
The letter had come just when everything else in Morgan’s life seemed to be falling apart. Bentley, his business partner and, for the decade before that,lifepartner had put their company up for sale without telling him. Apparently, the offer was too good to refuse even though Morgan had been crystal clear regarding how he felt about their proprietary tech getting gobbled up by a venture capital firm.
“They’re going to ruin it!” he’d shouted at Bentley while the other man poured himself a drink. “They’re going to strip NovaChem for parts and fuck everything up, fire half our employees, screw the other half over, and leave us with a husk!”
“They won’t,” his idiot partner had insisted. “Trust me, it’s all laid out in the contract. I—”
“You didn’t even have our lawyers look over it before you signed it!”
“Because I’m not fucking stupid! I know how to read a contract, Morgan,Jesus.”
That defensive tone meant the fight was getting out of hand, so Morgan had reined in his anger and tried to go about the next part logically. “Look, are there at least clauses in there about us maintaining control?”
Bentley had shrugged. “There’s one for me, yeah.”
A feeling like ice had slipped down Morgan’s spine, numbing and tingling all at once, and suddenly it had been hard to breathe. “What does that mean?”
“It means … look, babe …”
“What does that mean?”
What it meant was that Bentley had negotiated a place for himself in their newly acquired company but not a place for Morgan. Instead, Morgan got a fat check and a kick right out the door.
Never mind that he was the person who actually knew how the bioware worked; never mind that he was the one with the PhD in Biomechanical Engineering while Bentley had a fucking business degree—his partner was the one the company wanted to keep. Not Morgan.
And Bentley had been all right with that if it meant getting them an admittedly enormous amount of money, but it also meant that all of their dreams about the future, the things they wanted to accomplish with the tech, and the plans for the brilliant minds they wanted to recruit and foster, were gone up in smoke.
The fight had been a loud one, full of cracking voices and breaking hearts. It had ended predictably: Morgan left their high-rise San Francisco apartment with a single bag and a resolve to never have anything to do with his ex or their formercompany again. The type-A personality in him had wanted to be making plans, figuring out the next big thing, plotting investments, making connections, and finding another company to work with, but …
