But close enough that the image carried something deeply unsettling beneath it. Awareness. Instinct. The sense that some part of her had known.
“Someonewasthere,” she murmured.
No one answered because they all knew she was right.
Wes turned the photograph over.
Words were written across the back in thick black marker.
YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE COME HERE.
The room went silent.
Something cold shot through Rowan’s chest.
It wasn’t exactly fear. It was something heavier.
The message didn’t feel random.
It felt personal.
As if whoever had taken the photograph knew exactly who she was. Exactly where she’d come from. Exactly what she’d brought back with her.
Micah stepped farther into the room, his expression hardening as he looked at the photograph again. “That wasn’t taken from far away.”
Wes’s attention stayed fixed on the image.
He was very good at noticing danger.
And someone had gotten this close to Refuge Cove without him ever seeing them.
By the time they stepped back onto Main Street thirty minutes later, Rowan’s nerves felt scraped raw.
She tugged the brim of the baseball cap lower as they headed toward her Tesla.
“Hey . . . is that?” someone said in the distance.
Rowan looked up and saw a woman standing outside the coffee shop next door staring openly now, her phone halfway out of her purse. She was maybe in her mid-twenties.
Recognition spread across her face. “You’ve got to be kidding me . . .”
Rowan instantly felt the shift.
“Aren’t you Rowan King?” the woman said.
Wes moved closer beside her. “We need to go.”
But the woman had already pulled out her phone.
“I love your movies!” Excitement rushed into her voice now. “Wait—is it true you disappeared after that guy died? Did you have something to do with his death?”
Every head on the sidewalk seemed to turn at once.
Heat flooded Rowan’s face.
Wes stepped between her and the phone camera. “No pictures.”
The woman blinked, startled enough to hesitate.
