But Louisa wasn’t just any girl. He’d loved her for as long as he could remember.

“What’s going on?”

Cody’s sigh was heavy. His heart felt like a brick stuck in the center of his chest. He unloaded the whole story, and of course, his father responded calmly, the way he always did.

Some guys had parents who took up their offenses for them. Cody wasn’t one of them. Instead, Daniel Boggs put on his practical cap and tried to talk Cody off the ledge.

“You and Louisa are young,” he said. “Maybe a little time apart would be good for you. Maybe she needs to figure out how she feels, and maybe you need to give yourself a little space too.”

“Space for what, Dad?”

He shrugged. “Lots of fish in the ocean.”

“That’s so dumb. You know how I feel about her.”

His father stilled. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know why she did this, and I know it hurts. I have a feeling she’s hurting pretty good right now too.”

“Are you kidding? She deserves to feel hurt. She did this to us.”

“Stop shouting,” his father said, still calm.

Cody spun around. “I need to get out of here.”

“Where are you going?” His dad followed him into the hallway.

“For a walk.”

“The winds are strong tonight,” Dad called down the stairs. “Stay out of the water.”

Now Cody blinked back tears as he tossed aside a stack of printed emails and pages of documents with numbers on them. It would take some time to sort through everything, but he’d give it a shot. He didn’t have anything better to do.

Three hours later, after combing through many pieces of paper that made very little sense, he found a bank statement dated three weeks before his father died. It looked like all the other bank statements he’d already sifted through, but this one showed something out of the ordinary—three large cash withdrawals from his parents’ joint savings account, all within a few days. Oddly, these withdrawals were for uneven amounts. Instead of $50,000, he’d withdrawn $52,675. Instead of an even $25,000, Daniel had taken out $25,382.

His father was used to dealing in large sums of money, but it was strange, Cody realized, that he’d made the withdrawals from the personal account, leaving it nearly empty. Worse, there was no paper trail to indicate where the money went. Only withdrawals for cash.

Cody picked up the card he’d found affixed to the cross and turned it over in his hand.

Miss you, Danny. IOU.

Was JoEllen Chambers somehow connected to these cash withdrawals? Was she the one who’d left this note? Warren was on the island, which meant his wife likely was too. And this crisp white card looked brand-new.