Her face went pale. “Of course not—I couldn’t have lived a single day if something happened to you.”

“Then maybe you should be grateful to him. Maybe we should be grateful instead of angry. Maybe we should be looking for ways to honor him with our lives, instead of letting the past hold us prisoner like it has.”

She crossed her arms over her chest.

“We’ve got to let it go,” he said. “We’ve got to move on.”

She brought her eyes to his. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Cody felt like he was a tire and someone had just slashed him. She wasn’t listening. He wasn’t getting through to her. Did she know what it was doing to him to be apart from Louisa? Did she know that this wasn’t the kind of sacrifice his father wanted them to make—at least not for these reasons?

He saw her body turn rigid as she returned to the pot on the stove. He saw her jaw tense as she reflected on their exchange. He saw what anger could do to a person once it turned bitter.

And he wanted no part of it.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

A FEW DAYS AFTER MR. HOLBROOK dropped his money bomb on Cody and Louisa, she finally found the courage to cash the check.

She’d been mulling over the lawyer’s words to her—“Maggie said you’d know just what to do with it.”

Louisa wondered how. How would she know what to do with it? Maggie had left no instruction in her letter, as if she trusted that Louisa would figure it out on her own. She’d spent hours thinking about it every day, and while most people would probably want to celebrate with a great trip somewhere, Louisa already lived in a vacation destination—she didn’t need to escape Nantucket.

Unless it meant escaping the haunting ghost of a nonexistent Cody Boggs.

While she would never admit it, she’d tried to put herself in the places she knew he might go—Bartlett’s Farm (he loved their sandwiches), the Handlebar Café (he loved their coffee), the beach by his father’s memorial. Twice she’d even found legitimate reasons to visit the station at Brant Point.

She hadn’t run into him once. She was beginning to think he’d vanished again. The thought of it made mincemeat of her already-broken heart.

When she finished cleaning out Maggie’s house, she texted him to let him know. He never responded. The silence was worse the second time around. What would she do if she had to wait another decade to see him again?