“Once an islander, always an islander,” Mia recited, the words as familiar as her own name. “It’s a tough life out here. I think you could glamorize it.”

“Oh, no,” Izzy cut in. “No. No, no, no. This is not glamorous. Do you realize I haven’t been able to feel my right pinkie toe since we stepped off that goddamn ferry?”

Mia grinned. Her partners before Izzy had been varied. Tony Bianchi, the man Izzy had replaced, had been the worst kind of cop. Lazy but smart enough to fake it, ambitious enough that there was always a threat of her getting tossed beneath the wheels of a bus, but not enough to actually work for anything. Throw in a little misogyny and racism, and it had made for an erratic, untenable partnership. The one before him had fallen asleep at her desk regularly.

Izzy was a vast improvement.

“Some people do,” Mia said quietly, the smile fading. Many of the artists who made their home on the island in the summer romanticized the struggles of those who lived there year-round. But winter wasn’t rosy cheeks and marshmallows in hot chocolate. It was worrying about supplies and studying weather patterns in case the plane couldn’t come in.

“Not me.” Izzy shivered, overdramatic clearly for the sake of killing the tension that was coiling in the air. Mia appreciated it, like she had the whole day.

“All right, St. Lucy’s.” Mia glanced around as if she could see the history written in the very walls of the bar. “The Montrose family came over from the mainland in the early 1900s. They built the mansion on the cliffs on the north end of the island.”

“Like the lighthouse on the west,” Izzy said, always so good at holding on to the important things and then dropping them into place.

Mia nodded, though it hadn’t been a question. “There were already people living on the island, but the influx of cash from the Montrose family building the mansion created a small boom that doubled the population from fifty to about a hundred.”

After swallowing the last of her bourbon, Izzy laughed. “You guys have an odd sense of booming around these parts.”

“Doubled,” Mia repeated for emphasis. “When you’re on a small island, that kind of increase is huge. So all of a sudden there was a bar”—Mia gestured to encompass the building they were in—“an actual doctor’s office, a clothing store. It was quite revolutionary, or so the story goes.”

“Wow, a clothing store and everything.” Izzy clutched her imaginary pearls, clearly pretending enthusiasm.

“Before that, people either made everything or had to wait months for shipments from the mainland,” Mia said. “The Montrose family changed the island, some say for worse, some say for better. But for the standards of the time, they modernized it at least.”

Mia took a fortifying swallow before continuing.