That didn’t stop me from giving a small, panicked cry when the flickering lights finally went out, plunging all of us into pitch-black darkness.
“Fuck,” Daddy muttered, the first and only time I ever heard him swear, and I could hear him fumbling around for the big flashlight he’d brought but hadn’t wanted to turn on until he absolutely needed it because it went through batteries so fast.
Outside, the wind sounded like it had the night of Audrey, like something human and angry, and panic was a trapped bird in my chest as I squeezed my eyes shut despite the total darkness we were already in.
The air around me moved slightly, and two scents filled my nose—the Irish Spring soap we put in every guest room, and something else, something sweet and floral.
Violet candy, I later learned. A weird, old-fashioned sweet that Landon’s grandmother had loved, and she’d passed on that love to him, so he was forever pulling out that bright purple foil tube and popping one, sometimes two into his mouth.
It meant that when you kissed him, he tasted like flowers, but I wouldn’t know that for years yet.
In November of 1980, sitting in that dark kitchen while Velma pounded her fury against the walls of my home, I knew only that his hand was warm and sure when it lay against my upraised palm, and that his voice in my ear was gentle as he said, “You’re gonna be okay.”
I could hear the smile in his voice as he added, “You’re with me, and trust me, I’m not going out like this. So no one with me is, either.”
Daddy’s flashlight blazed on then, but when it landed on us, Landon had already pulled back his hand and subtly moved back a few inches.
Upstairs, I heard something crack, but Landon didn’t even flinch. He just sat back with his arms wrapped around his upraised knees and let the storm rage all around him.
Like I said, it was years after that night before we ever kissed, before I knew what his touch felt like elsewhere on my body. And when Lo asked me later—tears on her face, blood on her hands—when it had started, and how, I told her about the letters we wrote back and forth, the secret looks. The time he reached for my hand as we passed each other in the lobby at the Rosalie.
I told her about the night—the one night—on his boat, the one with his wife’s name on the side, the one that he’d finally docked in St. Medard’s Bay Harbor, just like he’d always wanted.
How he looked at me under the stars, took a deep breath, and said, “Please tell me you’ve been thinking about this for as long as I have,” before kissing me with violets and sugar on his tongue.
And that’s the truth, but like many things in life—so, so many things—it’s not the whole truth.
What started between me and Landon began on that kitchen floor, his hand in mine, a storm all around us, and Landon offering his destiny like some kind of protective cloak he could drape over anyone he cared about.
“I’m not going out like this,” he’d said.
And he was right. But what was waiting for him instead—his real destiny, the path he started down the first time his grandparents drove him into St. Medard’s Bay on a sunny Fourth of July the year before I was born—was much, much worse.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
July 27, 2025
7 Days Left
Slowly, the inn starts emptying out.
The few guests who hadn’t already canceled decide to leave early. I numbly agree to refunds and hear myself say things like “Always a gamble this time of year!” and “Of course, there’s no sense in staying and worrying!” But it’s like some other Geneva has taken over, some autopilot system that knows how to walk and talk and say the right thing to guests while the other Geneva—the real one—sits shattered and unmoored and overwhelmed.
I’ve lived in this kind of split world ever since yesterday morning, ever since August’s question—Geneva, did you really not know Landon Fitzroy was your father?—ripped my own personal space-time continuum in half.
I didn’t know. Didn’t even suspect.
That’s what I’d told August, or tried to, after I’d gotten past the knee-jerk denial.
There’s no way, I would’ve known, Mom would’ve told me once I was an adult, my dad would’ve realized, and he never—
But I hadn’t even been able to finish the sentence because I knew it wasn’t true, what I’d been about to say. That my father never would’ve raised another man’s child as his own.
My dad was gentle, kind, easier to understand than Mom for so many reasons, and he’d loved my mom fiercely. Devotedly.
He’d loved me the same.
That’s the one steadying thought I’ve been clinging to for the past twenty-four hours, that even if Landon Fitzroy had fathered me, Dad was stillmy dad, and that was a different thing, and in any other world, it would be the only thing that mattered. Except inmyworld, the man who fathered me had maybe been murdered, possibly by the woman currently staying at my inn, a woman who had apparently been very close with my mom but whom Mom had never mentioned.
