She hadn’t gathered her things yet. Her notepad was closed in front of her, and her pen was beside it, and she was looking at the boards with the expression she wore when she was still thinking something through but had reached the part of the thought where words were no longer useful.
Holt stood and looked at her for a moment.
Something moved through him that he hadn’t let himself sit with properly since the night of the storm, since the kitchen at Willa’s house and the moment before the weather warning hadshattered whatever they’d been standing on the edge of. The case had consumed everything in the days since. There hadn’t been space for anything else, and he’d used that fact deliberately and without apology because the alternative was thinking about things he wasn’t ready to think about clearly.
But Holt knew he was ready now.
June stood and turned toward him. She crossed the room and stopped a few feet away.
“I was thinking,” Holt said, and then stopped. June waited. “Would you like to go on that date tonight?” The corner of his mouth moved. “The one my mother blackmailed us both into agreeing to.”
June’s eyes brightened. “I’d love to,” she replied without the slightest hesitation.
“And I’m free tonight,” Holt confirmed, taking a step toward her. “As it happens, this rather demanding case I’ve been working on with a very brilliant attorney appears to be drawing toward its conclusion.”
“Oh?” June smiled. She took a step closer. “I’m glad to hear it.” Her eyes held his with that warmth he’d been carrying in the back of his mind since the morning she’d walked back into his life in this town. “As it turns out, I’ve just wrapped up a particularly challenging investigation alongside a very stubborn, very capable FBI director.”
“Well then,” Holt’s voice dropped slightly as he closed the remaining distance between them, “I’d say we’ve both earned a night off.”
“I’d say we have,” June agreed, her voice softer now.
She tilted her head back to look up at him, and the space between them was nothing at all, and Holt stopped thinking about the case and the boards and Victoria Morrison and everything else that had occupied every waking hour for weeks.
His head dipped.
His lips found hers.
The world outside the boardroom kept moving. The sound of the inn carried on around them, faint and distant and entirely irrelevant.
For a long moment, nothing else existed but this.
14
WILLA
The day arrived the way it always did.
Not with fanfare or warning, not with any particular shift in the quality of the light or the sound of the town outside her window. It simply arrived, the way it had every year for the past ten years, and Willa lay still in the early morning quiet of her bedroom and let herself feel the weight of it before she had to get up and carry it in front of everyone else.
Ten years.
She pressed her hand flat against the quilt and breathed through the tightness in her chest the way she’d learned to breathe through it over the years, not pushing it away, not collapsing into it, just letting it be what it was. Grief didn’t get smaller with time. It got more familiar. Willa had made her peace with that distinction a long time ago.
She got up.
The house was already stirring. Willa could hear Andy’s alarm going off down the hall, the muffled thud of it being silenced, and then the particular sound of a teenage boy moving throughhis morning with the specific lack of grace that she had accepted was simply part of the furniture now. From Grace’s room, nothing yet. Grace was always awake before her alarm, had been since she was small, and the silence from her room meant she was already sitting with the day in her own way before she brought herself out into it.
Becky was the only one Willa checked on first.
Becky was twelve years old, and of the three children, she was the one Willa worried about most on Memorial Day.
Grace and Andy had memories of their father. Real ones. They’d gone camping with him, heard his laugh, felt his arms around them. They carried Shaun in the specific, vivid way of children old enough to have known him properly. Becky had been two years old when he died. What she carried was different. Vaguer. A sense of something warm rather than a clear picture of it. A voice she couldn’t quite place. Photographs of a man holding her that she knew was her father, but couldn’t feel as her father the way her brother and sister could.
Willa had never been able to fix that for her, and it was the thing that sat heaviest on memorial mornings.
She pushed Becky’s door open softly.
Becky was already awake, sitting up in bed with her knees pulled to her chest, her eyes on the window. She looked up when Willa came in.
