“He was my best friend,” Mia said, warm, as if it were a familiar vow. “He was kind of a scrawny kid, had bad asthma and allergies. But, God, he never backed down from a dare.”

Most of Mia’s face was covered by her scarf, but a smile had tucked into the corners of her eyes, the lines there thin but noticeable.

“Did you guys ever?” Izzy let her voice go suggestive so she didn’t have to spell it out.

“No.” There was no wiggle room in the denial. But Mia was also a good liar, so Izzy didn’t trust it. “I was with someone else.”

Izzy thought back to the darkened hallway from earlier, the pictures. “Big jock guy?”

A gurgle that was an almost laugh swallowed. “Cash Bishop. We were all friends since we were babies.”

“And then Asher started dating Monroe Bell,” Izzy filled in. To be young and riddled with hormones. Izzy wondered how those dynamics had played out. Not well, if the end result was any indication.

“People thought I’d be jealous.” Mia nudged them toward a side street. Up ahead at the end of the lane was a one-story house, like most of the island seemed to be, its windows bright, welcoming. “But we weren’t like that, Asher and me.”

“Then he was okay with you and Cash?” Izzy asked.

“I thought so,” Mia said quietly, but she’d turned inward now, the wall between them thick and impenetrable.

The part of Izzy that made her good at cold cases, the one that found the out-of-place nugget of information and didn’t stop questioning until it made sense—the one that her mother had cursed as her bulldog stubbornness—wanted to dig in, root around in whatever messed-up relationships had been going on in a way that would leave everyone emotionally bruised and bleeding in the process. The part that realized she’d been asking mostly to suss out Mia’s current mental state whispered that she needed to focus on the reporter.

Izzy bit back any further questions as they climbed the stoop to the fishermen’s house.

Greg Lawson had only an inch over Mia, and the ruddy, chapped skin of someone who worked outside. He smiled, affable and welcoming, when he saw them, and the fondness that lingered in his expression as he invited them inside told of a kind soul.

Brandon was his visual opposite, a tall, thin whip of a boy, who was the kind of skinny where you could see his frame, the sharp points of his collarbones, the jut of his wrists and knuckles. He was not as welcoming, hovering in the doorway of the living room, all angry eyebrows and suspicious frowns, as Greg settled them into an overstuffed yellow couch.