I was so absorbed in their interplay that I didn’t notice until it was too late that Lily had pulled her arm away from mine. She walked like a sleepwalker into the fray.

“What you have been through?” Lily asked.

“Lily.” Uncle J.D. tried to cut in, but Lily shut him up when she swiveled her dark brown eyes to him.

“Hello, Daddy.”

The next second seemed to stretch into an eternity, and then a man appeared at Uncle J.D.’s side. I recognized him as Boone’s father—one of the four men I’d once thought might be mine.

“J.D.,” Thomas Mason said lowly. “You should go.”

Lily’s father looked past his old friend to where Aunt Olivia was standing, Julia Ames beside her, and Charlotte in front.

“So this is how it’s going to be?” J.D. asked.

The only answer he—or those of us watching—got were the same words, repeated. “You should go.”

LABOR DAY, 3:28 AM

“This is me crouching. This is me standing. This is me realizing how deep this hole is.”

“Do you have to narrate everything you’re doing?”

“This is me trying to give myself a boost… Oof!”

“Sadie-Grace.”

“I’m sorry! It’s just really hard to give yourself a boost.”

SIX WEEKS
(AND TWO DAYS) EARLIER

CHAPTER 38

“You haven’t talked about Ana in a while. Or her baby.” Nick trailed his thumb across my jawline. “Or the Lady of the Lake.”

We were at his place—an aging, single-bedroom houseboat he’d acquired alongside The Big Bang. This was my third time here in two and a half weeks.

I was starting to get comfortable.

“I didn’t think we were the kind of friends who talked.” To drive home the point—to myself as much as to him—I brought my lips to his. Kissing Nick wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t nice or easy.

Each moment of contact was rough and raw and real in a way that should have sent me running. It hurt in all the right ways—more, even, when his touch was light and gentle.

“Right,” Nick said, pulling back from the kiss just far enough to speak, his lips still brushing featherlight over my own. “We don’t talk. You escort me where I need to go, and we . . .”

“Count to seven?” I suggested.

Thinking, flirting, getting physical—as long as I could sound as sardonic as he did every time he opened his mouth, I knew I’d manage to stay on the right side of the line.

He bared his teeth in a shark’s smile, then brushed his lips against my neck, right where he could have placed his fingers to feel my pulse. “You could,” he murmured. “Talk to me, the way you did on Fourth of July.” His teeth nipped lightly at my skin.