“Just attempting to right a wrong,” I say, and briefly tell her what I’m trying to do to pay for the window. When I look back up at Levi Summers and Mr. Phillips, I catch sight of the third man at the table. I should’ve introduced myself to him. Maybe it was rude not to have done so. “Hey, Evie? Do you know who that man with the ponytail is, sitting next to Levi Summers?”

She scrunches up her face to squint at the darkening pier. “Oh, him? That’s Desmond Banks.”

Desmond Banks … Bright red FOR RENT sign, darkened door. Next to the hand-dipped candle store that smells like Christmas. “The private investigator?”

“Former,” Evie corrects. “Or more like disgraced. He used to run his own agency in South Harbor, a couple blocks from the Nook.”

“I’ve seen his office.”

“Well, a few years back, his files got hacked by some anonymous Golden and ten years of everyone’s miscellaneous dirty laundry popped up in a Golden Academy forum. People’s bank records, photos of affairs—all that kind of stuff. It was only up for an afternoon, and he recovered most of it when they busted the kid who did it, but who wants to hire a dumbass PI who was stupid enough to get hacked by a nerdy teen? The damage had been done to his reputation, and after trying in vain to keep it afloat, he finally shut down for good this past winter and is now ‘retired.’ ”

All at once, several bells chime in my head, tiny thoughts all lighting up and connecting.

The private detective that my grandmother hired to investigate my father years ago.

My mother’s nude photo.

“What’s the matter, cuz?” Evie says.

“Did you ever ask Adrian where he got the photo of Mom?”

“Yeah,” she says, “in his car, right before our wreck … He was coy about it. Said something smug about a trove of secret pictures that some of the Goldens keep on people around town. Decades worth of photos, or something. And when I told him that was super gross, he just said he was joking. I guess after the accident, I sort of forgot about it.”

Oh my God.

I’m going to be sick.

Of course Lucky wasn’t Adrian’s source for the nude photo.

It was Grandma’s bumbling private detective. If I had only taken one stinking minute out of my self-centered life to ask Evie about this. Communication breakdown number five-thousand-eighty-seven. Why didn’t I ask her?

“Cousin?” Evie says, placing a steadying hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing … I mean, so, hey? Question for you … What do you do when someone specifically asks you to trust them, and instead of doing that, you babble a bunch of emo nonsense at them and make wild accusations?” I say, feeling as if my knees might give out. “Basically, you’ve screwed up beyond repair.”