But Ellen Chambers had been my best friend since kindergarten. I had seen her handwriting in yearbooks, on raggedy pieces of notebookpaper pushed secretly from hand to hand, on Frieda’s cast in eighth grade, on the letters she’d sent me that one summer her parents made her go to Bible Camp up near the Tennessee line.
And it was that same neat, looping handwriting now telling Landon that the night they’d shared was “lovely” but “could never happen again, for too many reasons to list.” That “seeing Lo every day is too hard because I want to tell her so much,” but “is the truth worth telling if all it can do is hurt someone you love?”
I’ve thought about that question so many times over the last forty years, and I still don’t know the answer.
But what I do know is that in that moment, the truth didn’t justhurt.
It obliterated.
Of course I hadn’t been enough for Landon. Of course I wasn’t special. Of course this wasn’t some grand love story. It was just two stupid teenage girls falling for the lies of an older man, a man who wasn’t content having every toy known to man but had to makepeopleinto toys, too.
So yeah. There’s some truth for you.
I decided to murder Landon Fitzroy right then and there, standing in the middle of the bungalow he’d bought for me, the little house just down the beach from theotherother woman. And there was no plot to use the storm to cover it up because, baby, I amnota planner, and to be honest, in that moment, I didn’t give a fuck if I got away with it or not.
The only thing I cared about was seeing his blood on my hands.
And baby, I got that in spades.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
August 4 2025
2:33AM
The Day Of
I turn away from the wide-open window, with its clear view of the churning waves, to look at August. I expect to see the same shock and confusion on his face that must be on mine, but he’s watching Lo with an expression I’ve never seen before. Not from him, not fromanyone.His jaw is clenched, his hands in fists, but he’s almost… blank.
Until you look at his eyes.
Dark, dark eyes—the same dark as mine, I suddenly realize.
The same as Landon Fitzroy.
In an instant, my stomach roils, and bile is pushing up my throat, gagging me.
“You don’t look much like your daddy, until you do,” Lo tells August over the sound of the storm. “I didn’t see it at first.”
Then she points at me. “This one, I was shocked no one hadfigured it out over the years. She looks just like Camile, and her smile?”
Lo flashes one of her signature bright grins, but it wobbles slightly. “That’s Landon’s smile. Hits me right here every time I see it.”
She thumps one hand against her chest as outside, the wind seems to keep rising and rising, the sound somewhere between a whistle and a scream. Through the window, all I can see is darkness and chaos. Fitting, because that’s all I can see inside, too.
“But you?” Lo takes a step closer to August. “I don’t think you got anything worth having from him. Other than his hair.”
August laughs, a brittle, broken sound. “Don’t you think I might have gotten a lot more from him if you hadn’t smashed his fucking head in forty years ago, Lo? Like, I don’t know, his name?”
“And his money?” Lo counters, and August shakes his head. There are tears in his eyes, but he’s still got that funny little half smile on his face.
“Youwouldthink that’s what this is about,” he tells her. “You think that I spit into a tube in December 2022 and found out my father was Landon Fitzroy, and suddenly I saw dollar signs? That I had some big fantasy about prodigal son–ing my ass into the lap of luxury? That’s not what I saw, Lo. You know what I saw?”
He takes a big step toward her, startling me, but Lo doesn’t move as he lowers his face inches from hers to shout, “I saw that I was the son of a fuckingmurder victim, Lo. Do you know how surreal that is? To learn that hey, not only is your real dad dead, but he was also pretty famously killed, and oh, bonus! The selfish little bitch that did it got off scot-free, zero consequences.”
“Zero consequences?” Lo laughs at that. “Oh God, only aman would think the goddamnelectric chairis the only consequence that matters.”
“It’s what you deserved,” August says, straightening up. He turns toward me then, his hands stacked on top of his head as he looks up at the ceiling. “I got that stupid ancestry kit thing as a Christmas present from a girl I was dating. Just this… this dumb little gift, with no real purpose, just, ‘Hey, find out how Irish you are, how Italian,’ what-the-fuck-ever.”
