SUMMER STOOD OUT in Brittlebush. She stood out everywhere on the West Coast, with her bright red hair and pale skin, but here, in this tiny desert town where it looked as though sunblock had yet to be invented, people kept gaping at her, as though she were some alien species. It didn’t help either that most everyone who lived here looked at least sixty and seemed to have known each other since childhood. Summer couldn’t have blended in if she tried.

What Summer normally did when reporting small-town stories was to hang out in one of the local diners, order a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, bum a cigarette off the waitress during her break and get her talking. Summer didn’t even smoke, but she could fake it. And she could talk a good game if she did say so herself. By the end of the conversation, she could have that waitress feeling like her best friend, a Deep Throat–style whistle-blower, a freedom fighter who would go down in history, Quentin’s secret crush—whatever Summer needed her to feel like in order to get the info.

She was a little nervous about doing that here, though, in Brittlebush’s only diner—a place called Heidi’s that looked like Denny’s and IHOP had a baby, shoved it in a time machine, and sent it back to 1983. There were a few leathery old guys in here, sitting at the counter. One waitress, who, despite the perfectly good air-conditioning, looked dangerously overheated in her polyester uniform and didn’t move her face when she spoke, seemingly out of spite.

The booths were a sickly yellow and made of the type of vinyl you stuck to if you sat on it for too long, and everybody in here kept shooting her looks, as though they were daring her to say something stupid.

Summer slipped her phone out of her purse. No bars. Still. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt this isolated. Hell of a place for a second home, she thought. And the fact that Quentin’s mother had loved it here . . . Well, Summer didn’t necessarily know if that was true. Reg Sharkey had been the one to say that Quentin’s mother had loved it here, and he wasn’t the most reliable of narrators.

“Are you lost?”

Summer glanced up to see the waitress standing over her, a look in her eye like they’d drawn straws back in the kitchen and she was the loser.

“No.” Summer tried smiling. “I’m not lost.”

“Your car break down?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Just hoping for a piece of key lime pie.”

“Usually, when a stranger comes here, they’re either lost or broken down.”

“Sounds like the lyrics to a country song.”

The waitress frowned at her. “Key lime pie, huh?”

Summer nodded, the conversation officially over.