Right now, though, I wish I could turn around and go home. The sun is setting, but it’s still so warm out that I’m sweating in shorts and a navy-and-white striped shirt. Just when I’m as miserable as I can possibly get, I spot an interesting group of people sitting around an outdoor café table at the worst-named best casual seafood restaurant on the edge of Goodly Pier: the Juicy Clam.

And inside my head, rusty wheels begin turning.

“What’s happening here?” Evie says, wiggling a finger in front of my face.

I glance at Mom, who has wandered off to convince the egg roll truck and the cookie truck to join forces and deep fry cookies wrapped in egg roll skins while we wait for Grandma and Aunt Franny to show up.

“Stay here,” I tell Evie. “I’ll be right back. I need five minutes, tops.”

Before she can argue, I push through the crowd and race up the ascending walkway onto Goodly Pier, maneuvering sideways on the outside of the ropes that section off the café area of the Juicy Clam. Stacks of wooden crab traps and fat dock ropes decorate the patio that overlooks the harbor, and everything smells of garlic butter. A couple of diners glance up at me sidling past their tables, surprised. Yeah, I know. Not supposed to be here. Super rude. But I have a backup plan.

A strategy. A plot. A scheme.

“Mr. Phillips,” I say, stopping at the table I’d seen from the walkway below.

“Josie? Why, hello.” He looks confused. “Ready to get back to school?”

“Just about. It’s been a strange summer,” I admit. Two other men are dining with him. One I don’t know—an old man with a balding crown and a long ponytail in the back—but the other I know vaguely from childhood and most certainly after he was the cause of me losing the magazine internship at the beginning of the summer.

I most definitely am acquainted with his son.

Levi Summers, the king of Beauty.

Extraordinarily tan, piercing blue eyes, dark hair and beard shot through with a healthy amount of white and gray. I think he’d be what people would call a silver fox. He’s also pretty much my enemy right now. But that’s okay. I try to remind myself that he isn’t Adrian.

And this isn’t about either one of them, anyway.

It’s about doing the right thing.

I stick out my hand. “Hello,” I say, “I’m Josie Saint-Martin, Diedre’s granddaughter.”

One brow lifts, but he accepts my handshake. “I’m well acquainted with your grandmother. A lot of your family, actually.”