“True. Let me just see what it?—”
I trail off as I read the name.
My chest tightens. I swipe it open.
Keith: You can’t be serious. Hunter Holloway’s lake house? Wow. You really have no morals, do you. No sense of loyalty. To me or even your own family.
The words feel like they’ve been dipped in acid.
I blink, the glow from the screen burning against the night.
Hunter glances over. “Everything okay?”
I lock the screen.
“Fine,” I say, forcing a tight smile. “Just someone who doesn’t know when to stop texting.”
He doesn’t press, and I’m grateful.
As we walk toward the fire, I’m not thinking about chocolate or stars or lakefront breezes.
I’m thinking about how badly I want to burn that old version of me—the one who would’ve felt guilty for this.
Because for once? I don’t.
“Faith, sweetheart—come sit by me,” Margot calls the second we step onto the sand, waving a wine glass in one hand and a marshmallow skewer in the other. “Hunter, you’re on firewood duty.”
I glance at him. He rolls his eyes but obeys, trudging off to the pile of logs.
I drop into the seat beside Margot, and she immediately hands me a glass of red wine and a perfectly golden s’more, wrapped in a napkin like it’s some sacred offering.
“This one’s for you,” she says with a wink. “Not burned. Unlike the ones Daphne keeps setting on fire.”
“Lies,” Daphne mutters from across the fire, grinning. “I made that one. She just stole it.”
I laugh, genuinely, the kind of laugh that comes from somewhere real. I can’t remember the last time I felt this… loose. Light.
Margot sips her wine, eyes tracking her son as he squats near the fire, all biceps and brooding focus. “He used to be so clumsy, you wouldn’t believe it.”
I blink. “Hunter? Clumsy?”
She nods, eyes twinkling. “Oh honey, he tripped over everything. Shoelaces, rugs, air. One time he got his head stuck in the stair railing. Trying to impress a neighbor girl. We had to butter his ears to get him out.”
Hunter groans from the fire pit. “Mom.”
“Oh hush, it’s cute,” she says, waving him off.
Daphne’s laughing, and now I am too. It’s hard not to when the picture is so vivid—tiny Hunter with a football in one hand and slippery ears stuck between railings.
Margot leans toward me, lowering her voice like she’s letting me in on some sacred family intel. “He brought a toy football everywhere as a kid. Even to church. One Sunday, he dove into the center aisle during the sermon and shouted, ‘FUMBLE RECOVERY!’ before spiking it at the altar.’”
I nearly snort wine out my nose.
Hunter groans louder. “I was six.”
Margot shrugs, not even a little apologetic. “Still one of my proudest moments as a mother.”
And just like that… something shifts.
