“My family. Okay. Well, you met Anna—and heard her whole opinion of me.” He grimaces. “My parents are like a Norman Rockwell painting. High school sweethearts. Went to college together. Married right out of school and settled into suburban bliss. Had kids. Boy and a girl. Got a dog—a few over the years. And my parents are still totally in love with each other, kind of like Avery’s. Never heard them raise their voices to one another. Or to us, for that matter.”
A pang of envy strikes. “Sounds pretty perfect.”
“Perfect.” Jack’s mouth twists into a self-deprecating angle. “Yeah, that comes with its own stresses, you know.”
“Living up to it?”
“Anna… I don’t know if she even tried. I guess she did, for a while, but… There was an accident, and it messed her up for a bit. It seemed like she was feeling better about things, but then… I don’t know what happened with her. After a while, if she thought it would piss off me and my parents, she’d do it.
“I did the opposite. Dad got sick? Instead of chasing girls, I got a job to help with the bills. I had to drop Anna off at her dance class every week. I cleaned the house after school. Eventually, if you do a thing for someone long enough, they come to expect it of you. Did my best to live up to everyone’s expectations, butman, those things were sky-high. A prison of expectations, I guess.”
“Mr. White Knight,” I murmur. “Driving damsels in distress to the Jersey Shore.”
He opens his mouth, then hesitates.
“What?”
He shifts gears and then glances at me. “With you, I’ve always been able to be a little bit of the bad guy, too. Which is…liberating, I guess.”
I crack out a laugh. “I knew it! You enjoyed being an asshole!”
“You enjoyed it, too.”
“I admit nothing.” My admission is evident in my voice. “I was always justified in my actions.”
“Justified, huh? So what was that brown stuff on my mailbox?”
I shift. “Chocolate.”
“Thank God. And the erectile-dysfunction mailing list you put me on? Justified?”
“I mean, I don’t know for sure, but probably.”
“Well, I didn’t find it funny. My granddad died of ED.”
“Oh no, I—” It takes me a beat to realize that what he’s said makes no sense. I notice his grin, and I smack his shoulder.
He shifts away, laughing, and then his voice becomes a low growl, the bass of which I feel everywhere. “Always wanted to try one of those pills. For recreational purposes, of course.”
We drive along, the banter helping the highway mile markers melt away. But stress has a muscle memory, and I find my teeth clenching harder, my shoulders growing just a little more taut, when we get about twenty minutes out. I call the hospital, but they have no record of Mom being admitted. That’s promising, right? Unless she had to be airlifted to Camden? I look up the number and quickly dial. No record.
We exit off the highway, and Jack looks around as we pass the quiet marina and then head over the shadowed drawbridge into Stone Harbor proper. Without any leads to go on, I give him directions to my mother’s place, and the silence stretches as my fears and worries eat up the scenery in my mind.
We pull into her driveway of white crushed shells, the tires making crunching sounds that feel especially loud, given it’s just after midnight. The house is dark.
We get out of the car. The scent of the ocean hangs heavy in the air, the way it always does. There’s a cold bite to the nighttime breeze. Her house, her block even, feels especially desolate.
I run up the steps and ring the bell, hearing its chime echo through the house. That gets no response, so I start pounding on the locked storm door and peering through windows.
Jack shuffles up the steps behind me.
I pull my phone out and call Monica. The call goes straight to voicemail. I try calling my mother’s number again, and the upstairs lights go on in the house. They’re followed by hallway lights on the first floor. The curtains part.
Mom.
I see her startled face in the window. A mix of relief and an awful, creeping suspicion washes over me.
She unlocks and opens the door, then she’s standing in front of me in her nightgown.
