1
Connor
If there is such a thing as a soul, Julian Jackson owns mine. But that doesn’t mean I want to see him.
Not that I actually believe in that kind of stuff. If you ask me, it’s just a nice idea people made up so they wouldn’t feel so alone. But just because it’s nice doesn’t make it not a lie.
We are alone, and the nicest ideas in the world won’t change that.
The point is, Julian and I have history. But that’s exactly what it’s going to stay. History.
As in, the past. As in, not coming within spitting distance of the present.
As in, me doing my best to get on and off of Summersea, a tiny sea island off the coast of Georgia, without Julian, or anyone else, ever knowing I was there. Easier said than done, when the whole island was the size of a teacup, but I was doing my best.
For starters, I’d ridden the ferry to Palmetto, the biggest city on Summersea, instead of Adair, the town where I’d normally get off. If Summersea was a teacup, Adair was a thimble. A thimble where both of my brothers happened to live. There was no chance of me setting foot in Adair without the entire town finding out.
I rolled my Jeep off the ferry, tires scratching against the sandy grit of the harbor parking lot. The restless swells of the ocean receded in the distance as I pulled away. The mainland lay on the far side of those gray-green waters, the mountains and forests of my cabin in Tennessee even further out of reach.
Roxie, my reddish-brown hound mix, whose talents ran more toward napping and begging for food than hunting of any kind, lifted her head in the backseat as I drove away from the water. I rolled the windows down a smidge. I didn’t want to make myself too visible, but the salty tang of the air tugged at something inside me, no matter how hard I tried to resist.
The tang of truffle-oil French fries tugged at Roxie. She raised her muzzle in the direction of a chic harbor-side restaurant as I drove past, but flopped down again with a disconsolate sigh as I neglected to stop.
Palmetto was only fifteen minutes away from Adair, but it was another world entirely. Adair was gingerbread Victorians, tea shops, and ye olde publick houses. Palmetto was yacht clubs and golf courses and bars that served drinks designed to give you migraines the next day.
It was also home to about seventeen juice bars, one of which was my destination. I just hoped I could get to it unscathed.
I didn’t think either Deacon or Emory would be in Palmetto today, but the only way to know for sure would have been to call them, which would have meant formulating some reason why I needed to know their whereabouts. Besides, I hated the phone.
Deacon was probably over at the Wisteria Inn—the bed and breakfast he’d inherited after our parents died. Deacon was a provider, so running the inn was a good fit for him. Much better than it would have been for a misanthrope like me, or my baby brother Em, who I loved, but who was also a hot mess.
But if Deacon loved providing for people most of all, what he loved second-most was meddling in their business. He seemed to have decided that inheriting the inn meant he’d also inherited the right to tell me what to do in a voice that suggested I was an idiot for not treating every one of his pronouncements like the gospel truth he thought it was. More than a little ridiculous, considering he was only two years older than I was.
Annoyingly, Deacon had gotten married last fall to Mal, who I actually liked. I say annoyingly because it meant I was trying to be nicer to Deacon these days, and ‘nice’ wasn’t something that came easy to me.
Still, I’d made it a policy for the last decade or so to tell Deacon as little about my life as possible, and I saw no reason to change that now. Old habits and all that.
If Deacon knew I was on the island, he’d try to bully me—excuse me, try to lovingly persuade me—into staying longer. Into moving back into the Wisteria and witnessing his and Mal’s sickeningly cute domestic routine. Into pretending that everything was rainbows and puppies and that all the shit in our past had never happened.
Not a chance.
And if I wasn’t planning on telling Deacon I was home, however briefly, I definitely wasn’t going to tell Em. I had no problem telling Deacon to shove it when he got too preachy. He was like that old lighthouse on the eastern end of the island. He could withstand whatever you threw at him and emerge frustratingly, obstinately unchanged.
Em was more like the wildflowers that grew along the dunes. More resilient than you’d expect, but still in need of protection. If for some reason there were no rooms open at the Wisteria, Em would have zero qualms wheedling and pestering me to stay with him and his boyfriend, Tate, in the Gothic mansion Tate was trying to restore.
Em was about as threatening as Roxie at her meanest, which was to say that he’d bark twice before rolling over and asking for belly rubs, but he had those puppy-dog eyes, too. Eyes that would say I was personally hurting him by refusing to sleep in a bed last inhabited by a Victorian-era ghost. Eyes that would silently ask why I still had so many walls up eleven years after our parents had died.
Em didn’t understand that those walls were the only thing keeping me standing. He didn’t know that what lay hidden behind them, ready to jump at the first hint of weakness, was so much worse.
I was my walls at this point, or I was nothing.
So, no. I wasn’t going to tell my brothers I was here, and I wasn’t going to stay. Summersea and I didn’t get along. I was going to go to this meeting, make my excuses, and get back off the island as soon as possible. Back to the mountains. Back home.
Behind me, Roxie snorted gently, and even though I knew it was just chance, I shot her a defensive look.
“What? Tennessee is home. Just because I grew up here doesn’t mean anything.”
She didn’t respond. Obviously. But I could have sworn she was staring at me in the rearview mirror, her soulful eyes refusing to let me off easy. I rolled my windows back up angrily, sealing the salty air out again.
Tennessee was home. Summersea was just a place I’d once thought I belonged. A place I’d left behind—for good.
I would never have come back today if my hand hadn’t been forced. My boss—well, technically my ex-boss, since my position had been suspended due to funding cuts—had set up this meeting. If I didn’t owe her, well, pretty much everything in my life, I would have said no in a heartbeat.
But the fact was, when I’d shown up in the Smokies at age eighteen with a backpack and twenty-three dollars to my name, Hetty had found me a job at the National Park, and a place to live, and it wasn’t her fault her budgets kept getting slashed. Or, I supposed, her fault that the job offer she’d found me happened to be on the very island I’d escaped a decade ago.
At least, I didn’t think that last part was her fault. Hetty did have a bit of Deacon’s meddling gene, so it was possible she thought it was time for me to go home and experience personal growth or some shit, but I’d decided to be magnanimous instead of suspicious.
See? Nice. I could do it.
Sometimes.
So I was taking the interview as a favor, but I wasn’t going to take the job. I just wished that Tom, the man I was meeting, hadn’t insisted on doing the interview on Summersea instead of the mainland. I’d almost choked when Tom had suggested meeting at The Roastery, a coffee shop in Adair that Deacon’s friend owned.