~ 32 ~
PEYTON
There were perfect things and quiet things, but it wasn’t often that you got to experience both. When you did, I decided, you really needed to enjoy it.
“My mother would kill me if she could see me right now.”
I leaned back against the railing, pulling my borrowed baseball cap low. The still morning was a blessing in contrast to the chaos and tension of the evening before. I had silence. Fresh air. The soft light from a newly-born, Caribbean sun.
“What do you think she’d say?”
Colson asked the question while cutting and eating a pineapple. He was meticulous about the way he sliced the fruit, but that didn’t make me feel any less uneasy every time he ate a piece straight off the long, gleaming knife.
“She might not even be with us any longer,” I joked. “The wedding might’ve killed her.”
“Lackof wedding,” Ripley corrected me. He was leaning against the transom, chin against his chest. His own hatwas pulled way down, over both his eyes.
“Right.”
Our fishing boat cut a clean, white line through the morning waters, launching us into the unknown. The brightening horizon was a still unblemished line, with not a wave in sight. The water itself might’ve well have been turquoise-colored glass.
“My mother introduced us, actually,” I sighed. “Of course, Donovan took an instant liking to her. The two of them talked so often it was annoying, but I grew to accept it. I mean, it’s usually the opposite, right?”
“There is no ‘usual’ when it comes to that prick,” Ripley muttered from beneath his hat.
The captain weaved his way past us, grabbed some rope, then disappeared again. But not before beaming his lighthouse beacon of a smile my way.
“He’s actually still fishing?” I chuckled.
“It’s better if he has the drag nets out,” Colson explained. “Less conspicuous.”
“We make worse time though.”
“True enough,” he allowed. “But right now it’s more important that we don’t stick out.”
I thought about my family, maybe for the first time since this whole thing began. Would Donovan use them against me, the way he had with Theo? Of course he would. It wasn’t even a question.
“I should probably call my mother, at some point,” I sighed. “She’s probably worried I’m in a ditch or something.”
“Oh… I don’t know aboutthat,”Theo stumbled,awkwardly.
I looked back at him curiously. The expression on his face told me he knew something I didn’t. Likewise, the others had grown suspiciously quiet.
“Now’s the time to tell her,” muttered Colson.
The morning silence deepened. An icy unease stole over me.
“Tell me what?”
“Your mother was in the files,” Theo began awkwardly. “On the locket.”
I blinked. “My… mother?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean she wasinthem?”
“Emails tied to her consulting firm,” Theo went on. “There were… conversations about compensation. Agreements made, in regards to—”
