A golden glow behind my eyelids wakes me up. Bright. Too bright.
I throw the blankets off in a room transformed by the first visible sunrise since our helicopter touched down.
“Look. Look.” I reach for Poseidon, to wake him up, to show him.
My hand meets nothing but cool blankets.
I’m not sure why I go to the window and look out over the cliffside, down to the beach below. I’m not sure why it shocks me to see him there, head bowed, hands in his pockets while the breeze ruffles his hair. The sunrise is caught there, too.
Poseidon stands at the edge of the water, the sea lapping at his toes.
I’ve never seen anyone look so lost.
After I’ve showered and dressed—after Poseidon disappears from the beach but before he returns to the house—I open the front door and find a package on the threshold.
My name is on it. Ashley Donnelly. It freezes my heart to see my name, printed in neat writing. Someone knew to find me here, but there’s no sign of anyone headed away from the house. I’m alone.
I’m sure I’m alone, but my heart thuds in warning. The hair on my neck rises.
I scoop up the package and bring it inside, abandoning it in the kitchen while I catch my breath. My name and the address of this mansion are the only markings. No return address. There’s no telling who it’s from unless I open it.
It sits in the middle of the kitchen island, a brown-paper interruption in a sea of white marble crisscrossed with rivers of blue veins. Five minutes. Ten. Am I about to open a bomb? It’s not out of the question. My dad did try to have me killed. But a fortune-hunter assassin wouldn’t be foolish enough to blow me up. How would they offer proof of my death?
Besides, now that my father’s dead, there’s no one to pay a reward.
I get a kitchen knife and cut open the packing tape wound around the corners and midlines of the box. Brown paper falls away in layers.
The box itself is made of metal, and I recognize it. My dad used to keep this kind of box inside the safety-deposit boxes he kept at different banks around the city. When I was younger, he would take me with him on the rare occasions he needed to use one. We haven’t visited the bank in years.
A key is taped to the top.
I turn it in the lock with shaking hands. The top pops open with a slight resistance. This hasn’t been opened recently.
What’s inside makes my throat go dry and tears well in my eyes. I know that stationary. I know the handwriting used to write my name on the front. Lifting the letter out feels like prying open another, smaller box, this one welded shut.
It’s my mother’s handwriting. It’s hers.
I trace the letters with a fingertip.
She held a pen cocked a certain way. With her head tilted toward her left shoulder just so. Oh my god, I haven’t thought of that in years, but now I can see it like she’s standing in this kitchen with me. Same dark hair. Same blue eyes. Ashley Donnelly. A pointed swoop for the A and the lifts and loops of the rest of my name.
Moments. I only have moments with this letter before I read it. Right now, before I’ve unfolded the paper, it could say anything.
It could say everything.
Everything my mother never got to say.
I look into the box instead. The bottom glints with loose gemstones and a couple pieces of jewelry. I’ve never seen them before, which means they must be worth a fortune—too much money to keep out in the open. She wanted to save these from prying eyes.
Along with the jewels is a USB thumb drive. It’s one of the old, fat ones. Tech has come a long way since then. What has she put on here?
Because I can’t open the letter, can’t stand to close off all those possibilities, I fold the thumb drive into my palm and go to the den off the living room of the house.
A main feature of the den is a desk tucked into one corner, antique and sturdy. On it sits a sleek Apple computer. It’s shiny and smooth. It even smells new, like the protective film was just pulled from the screen yesterday. It whispers to life and is ready in fifteen seconds, and I settle into the desk chair.
The thumb drive fits into one of the slots on the side. A light on its tip blinks green and turns solid.
I hold my breath.
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.
The error message pops up on a clean, white window. I take the thumb drive out, blow on it, and stick it back in. I must have done that a thousand times in college, going between the computer lab in my dorm to the one in the library. It worked almost every time.
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.
Not this time.
I’m not going to walk away from this without learning something, so I lean back in the chair, take a cleansing breath, and open the last letter I’ll ever get from my mother.
My darling girl,
Two big tears fall out of my eyes and I jerk my head just in time to stop them from falling on the paper. Oh, I can’t breathe, my throat is so closed off with missing her. She always wrote notes this way. She did. How could I have forgotten?
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and keep going.
If you’re reading this, it means I didn’t protect you. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. I trusted your father, but he wasn’t who I thought he was. Now I’m afraid for my life.
The kitchen door cracks open, and the sound has the same sharp quality as that gunshot, tearing across this moment and going wild. I stand up before I know what I’m doing, grab for the thumb drive, and shove it into the pocket of my dress. I can’t hide the letter. I feel caught out in the den and I move toward the kitchen, guilty and still brimming with tears.
Poseidon intercepts me in the living room. “You’re crying.”
“Someone delivered a box for me. It had things in it from my mother. How—” I swallow pain and old grief. “I’m not sure how they would’ve found me. Found us.”
He doesn’t seem concerned. “One of the crew brought it last night.”
“But how did it get here?”
A shrug. “I asked Hades to listen for things like this.”
His brother. “Why?”
“He’s my emergency contact.”
I’m not sure if it’s a joke, but it almost seems like one. “So we’re okay?”
“Yes.”
Do I believe him? The letter makes my ears ring with suspicion. My mother didn’t know who my father was until it was too late. She trusted him, and she ended up dead. How can I trust Poseidon? I’ll end up the same way she did.
There’s another uncomfortable truth. I chose him, and I’m the one hiding something. It burns in my pocket right now. It feels like it could scorch my skin through the thin fabric.
But I don’t take it out and show him.
I chose him, but do I really know him?
He rubs a hand over his hair, looking horribly out of place. Poseidon is not a man who belongs in a cliffside mansion made of glass. He belongs with the sea. A memory from last night tugs at my mind and disappears before I can catch it.
“I’m leaving for the shipyard in twenty minutes.” He’s already moving toward the stairs, already going up. To shower? I don’t know. The fresh-air scent of him makes me think he’s been outside all night. But that can’t be true, because he was sleeping in bed with me. Wasn’t he?