“I will, but you’re coming with me,” he said, and I shook my head.
“I said no, and I meant it. Whatever I decide to do, I’ll let you know, but I’m not hiding away and then handing my baby over to another woman.”
Lo made a disgusted sound. “Was that your big plan? Stick her in a convent like it’s 1890 or something and then give her baby to your frigid-ass wife?”
“Enough, Lo,” Landon said again, but this time, there was more than just annoyance under it. There was something serious, something real, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“Lo,” I said, reaching for her, but Lo Bailey was never going to heed someone telling her “enough.”
Therewasno enough for Lo.
“You piece of shit,” she went on, venom dripping from every word. “Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go to every paper I can think of, and I’m gonna tell them about all this. About how the governor’s precious son is running around some trash beach town with not one buttwogirls, girls a lot younger than him, and hey! He’s even knocked up one of them. And then you can kiss your career, and certainly your assholedaddy’scareer, averyfinal goodb—”
He moved so fast I barely had time to register it before he was on Lo, his hands gripping her biceps so hard his knuckles went white. “You are never gonna fucking learn, are you?” he shouted over the storm, and then he was pushing her against the porch railing, his face close to hers. “You are nothing, you hear me? You’re a pretty girl in a cheap town, and there are millions just like you, Lo, trust me. The idea that someone like you can hurt me? Fucking laughable, truly.”
“Let her go!” I yelled, tugging at the back of his suit jacket, but he gripped Lo even tighter, his face so close to hers I had the crazed thought he might bite her.
“You are nothing!” he shouted again, and Lo struggled in his grasp.
“Fuck you!” I heard her say, but her eyes were scared.
I’d known Lo almost all my life, and the only thing I’d ever seen scare her was a hurricane.
So maybe it was that, the fear in her eyes, the real terror as Landon screamed at her, or maybe it was him calling her “nothing,” and knowing, deep inside, that I was nothing to him, too. A distraction, a fun way to pass time, and now, at last, the bearer of something he actually wanted, but me? Ellen?
Nothing.
I tugged at his jacket again, feeling something give, but he didn’t let her go, and I turned, my bare feet sliding on the wet porch, my eyesscanning for anything, anything I could think of that would make him let go of Lo.
There was this wooden pelican we kept outside the door, and that’s what I think I was reaching for. It was hollow, not that heavy, but it would have gotten his attention.
I reached blindly, panicked and forgetting that Mama had moved that silly statue that morning, my hands closing around something cold and metal and much heavier than the pelican, heavy enough that I almost lost my balance, and without thinking, I swung.
The sound is something I’ve never forgotten even though I have tried and tried and tried.
When I reached for that stupid bird, I grabbed the anchor for the inn’s rowboat. A twenty-pound anchor with sharp points and rust on its edges. Daddy had been meaning to replace its chain, and it had sat there by the back door for nearly a month as other chores took precedence.
Or maybe it was always meant to be there, waiting for me when I reached.
Destiny.
I think Lo screamed, or maybe it was me, and everything dissolved into a liquid horror.
Blood, spraying on Lo’s face, mixing with rain and tears.
Blood, running out of Landon’s dark hair like a river.
Blood, slicking my hands as I tugged the anchor free from his skull and watched as he staggered toward the steps before turning to me.
Landon’s eyes were wide, and his mouth was open, a string of saliva dripping from his lower lip as his mouth moved with no sounds.
A step backward, then another, and then he was falling into the sand at the bottom of the steps, his torso convulsing, rattling gasps in his chest, like a fish thrown onto the deck of a boat, and then Lo was moving past me, the anchor dangling heavily at her side as she lurched down the steps.
She rolled him over, I remember that, his face pressed into the wet sand, and then the anchor was coming down on the back of his headagain, the sound heavier and thicker this time, and finally, Landon was still.
My legs went out from underneath me, my skin numb, and I sat down heavily on the top porch step, rainwater soaking into my nightgown.
Lo dropped the bloody anchor on the sand, the wind so strong now that she seemed to be staggering against it as she made her way up the steps to drop to her knees in front of me.
