Flynn squeezed the pillow in his lap harder, and the silence between us swelled like the belly of a blood-fat tick. Something about him was still making me anxious. I couldn’t suss out what it was.

“Ned’s got a great gig with us—job security, total creative freedom. That’s far from guaranteed if he goes somewhere else. I only want the best for him. He doesn’t understand that,” said Flynn.

Because he doesn’t feel the same way. All at once it was perfectly clear, and I couldn’t believe Flynn didn’t see it, too. It was Flynn who’d stacked those wallets on the bedroom dresser. Flynn wanted Ned to stay with Sinclair Fabrics. He thought that by arranging Ned’s life to match his own he could keep the man for himself. Preserving the company brand might have factored into his desire to keep Ned on the job, but that wasn’t what made Flynn so desperate to hold on. Everything he’d implied about the differences between the men’s looks and status and age was true. Flynn didn’t think he deserved Ned. He was afraid when Ned left the company, he’d leave Flynn, too.

“Did you and Jasper argue with Ned yesterday?” I asked. “About his desire to quit?” An imminent breach of contract and the inevitable legal fallout, an office romance, two brothers and an unpredictable element they needed to control, and now Jasper was gone . . . the scenario spelled trouble.

“I told you,” Flynn said, “I barely saw Jas yesterday.”

“So it was you who did the arguing, then.”

Flynn sighed aggressively. “Look. Ned came to the island without me. When I confronted him, he refused to talk about it and gave me the silent treatment for the rest of the day. I was pissed, okay? We didn’t fight—I just didn’t feel like being social. My in-box was flooded with messages, and work was a convenient excuse for me to be alone, so I dropped in on Nana, took my laptop to the library, and shut everyone out. If I had to guess, I’d say Ned was with Jas and Abby all afternoon. I didn’t see any of them again until cocktail hour.”

The babble of the others lured him to the parlor then. When he stepped into the room—the same room where his family now waited while Flynn, from the comfort of his bed, walked me through the previous day—he discovered Norton was already serving drinks. Everyone was there. Bebe Sinclair (Flynn and Jasper’s sister, the middle Sinclair child) who’d opted to keep the family name. Her husband, Miles Byrd. Miles’s daughter, Jade, the teen I’d seen downstairs and the product of a previous marriage, sat on the floor by the fire (Jade Byrd: the name sounded more like a Chinatown trinket to me than a kid). Jasper, Abella, Camilla, and Ned rounded out the group, and everyone was laughing with abandon. It was something Jasper said that set them off; Flynn knew this instinctively. Storytelling was as natural as breathing to Jasper, according to Flynn.