“I’m heading back to the Royal Flush in a few minutes. Text me if you find anything. I’ll call you from our room.”
I disconnected and deleted the number from the woman’s call log before passing the phone back to her with a polite “thanks.” As I left the bathroom, I spotted Steven crossing the diner toward me. There was something suspicious about his brisk pace and the intense way he was staring right at me. His eyes darted to the server’s station as he hurried toward me and turned me around.
“What are you doing—Ow, Steven! What’s wrong with you?”
“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, tucking me close to his side as he wedged open the glass door and pushed me toward the street.
“Hey, wait!” a woman called behind us. “You didn’t pay your bill!”
Steven grabbed me by my sleeve and broke into a run. He bolted down a side street as the waitress shouted after us. My lungs were burning, my breath too fast to manage any words as he cut hard to the right and onto the boardwalk. We zigzagged down a wooden ramp, our feet kicking up sand as he pulled me down the beach. He turned to look over his shoulder, making sure no one was following us before slowing to a walk.
He bent over his knees, panting hard, a shit-eating grin on his stupid face when he finally looked up at me.
“You didn’t pay the check?” I snapped, kicking sand at him.
“I didn’t have my wallet.”
“When you suggested we go out for breakfast, I assumed you had some cash! Why would you offer to take me to breakfast if you didn’t have any money?”
“Because I wanted to! How’s that for honesty?” He paced away from me as we both caught our breath. He turned toward the surf, wiping sweat from his brow as he dropped down onto the sand.
“What are you doing?” I asked, as he rested his elbows on his knees. “We should go inside. It’s freezing out here. And someone from the restaurant probably called the police.”
“It was a thirty-dollar breakfast, Finn. Nobody’s gonna come looking for us.” He tugged me down onto the cold sand beside him. “If you leave now, you’ll miss the best part.” He gestured with his chin toward the ocean, his expression hard to read in the dusky predawn light. “Remember when we first started dating,” he asked wistfully, “when we used to stay up all night and watch the sun come up?”
“You mean the nights you made me play designated driver, chauffeuring you and your friends to parties until you got too drunk to stay awake anymore?” I nodded, a deep, exaggerated dip of my head. “Yeah, I remember those sunrises a little differently.”
I waited for him to argue. To play back the memories as he had reshaped them in his own mind, but for once he was quiet. So quiet I peeped at him sideways to make sure he hadn’t died. Maybe it was hyperbolic to think it, but it had been a very long night, and I wasn’t exactly batting a thousand.
“I was a real son of a bitch, wasn’t I?” he said thoughtfully, and maybe a little contrite. “Is it so crazy to think things could be different if we gave it a second chance?”
“It’s crazy that you think I haven’t already.”
He winced. “So you and Nick… you two are serious?”
I sighed as I considered that. “I’d like it to be.” Whether or not itcouldbe depended heavily on the next three days, and I hated how much of that felt out of my control.
“Did you… you know”—Steven gestured around us and rolled his eyes—“do it on the beach? Like in your book?”
I laughed. “What is this? Twenty questions?”
“I’m game if you are.”
“I’m not playing twenty questions with you.”
“Why not? Afraid of what you might confess?” The gleam in his eyes felt like a dare. The same one he used to pin me with when we were in college, when he’d slide a red plastic cup of some unidentifiable concoction across the table toward me, his eyelids already heavy with booze, waiting for me to hesitate, like I always did, before tossing me his truck keys and drinking it himself, making some wisecrack about me being a Goody Two-shoes. But those games revealed more about him than they ever had about me. And I had a few questions about Steven I still needed answers to.
“No,” I said curtly. “We didn’t do it on the beach.” He smirked as if he’d expected as much. “We did it in his bed, on his desk, and against the wall in his dorm room. But the rest of the details you read in my book were all true. My turn,” I declared as his smug grin faltered. “How many women did you sleep with while you were married to me?” I wasn’t sure why I asked, or if I even wanted to know the answer. Mostly, I just wanted to see if he’d be honest with me.
“You really want me to answer that?” I waited as his gaze slid back to the shoreline. “Too many,” he admitted. “I could try to count them… pull some number out of my ass, but I’d probably forget a few.” His answer stung more than I’d thought it would. Maybe because it felt like the first honest one he’d ever given me and suddenly I wished he hadn’t. “We don’t have to play anymore. You’re right, it was a stupid idea,” he said, kicking at the sand.
“Are you quitting?”
He turned to look at me, staring at me with that same curiosity he’d worn after I’d saved him fromEasyCleanand whisked him away in theAston Martin, like he should have known the woman who was behind the wheel but he wasn’t sure he recognized me. “Do you ever miss what we had together? You know… our family?”
“We still have our family,” I said. “We don’t have to live under the same roof for that.”
“You know what I mean. Do you ever missme?”
