That was what hurt the most, because Justin had betrayed her. He’d shut her out of what was happening to him and what he was doing. He’d gotten killed. She couldn’t bear the loss of him, but even more than that, she couldn’t bear not knowing why. It was not drugs. It was something else. Something he couldn’t share with her.

Why?

Peach stood on the sand and stared at a four-story apartment building on the other side of the strip of beach, fifty yards away. The building was stucco, painted a fading color of red that got worn each season by the salt and wind. Balconies and picture windows, one above another, jutted over the dune. Wooden steps led down from the rear door. It wasn’t a new building, but the condos were expensive. Everything was expensive here.

Justin’s place.

This was why she’d come here. This was why she’d escaped from Annalie’s car. She needed to see his apartment again. She needed to find out what he’d been hiding from her.

Peach trudged up the sand. She passed an old woman sprawled in a white plastic lounger under the shade of an umbrella. She had brown wrinkled flesh. Spanish music played from an old battery radio beside her. Peach knew her, because she was Justin’s neighbor, a widow who lived one floor above him. Mrs Jabohnne. The old woman’s eyes slitted open at the noise of Peach’s footsteps, but she made no sign of recognition.

At the top of the beach, among flowers and long grass, Peach wandered under the shade of the first-floor apartment deck. Sand leached into the building’s covered parking lot. She saw a faucet, and she turned on the water to wash her feet. When they were clean, she shoved her damp feet back into her sneakers. She still had Justin’s key to let herself inside.

The building smelled musty. Bugs clung to the walls. She waited for the elevator, listening to it hum, and then took it to the second floor. Outside, in the open-air hallway, she turned right and opened the metal screen door. She let herself into Justin’s apartment, which was stifling. More than eighty degrees. The apartment was dark, with the lights off and the vertical blinds in the living room mostly shut, letting in narrow cracks of sun. It still smelled like him. Justin loved scented oils, and the aroma of cherry blossoms permeated the space. She expected him to wander from the bedroom, towel knotted around his scrawny waist, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette.

He didn’t.