“Not Jax,” I say, and suddenly I understand. This is why I’ve never been afraid of him, why when he showed up—a raggedy fugitive on my back deck—I opened the door without hesitation. “Jax got mad. He felt bad for me.”

“No, he felt sorry for you. There’s a big difference.”

Micah’s words knock me like a slap, even though it’s true. Jax did feel sorry for me that night. I get a lightning-quick glimpse of the look he gave me from behind the wheel of Bobby’s car, the sudden lurch of the car shooting forward only to go nowhere. I hear the laughter, the shouting. I shake my head, trying to string the images together in a way that makes sense, but I can’t. None of it makes any sense.

But still.

If I hadn’t said anything just now, Micah wouldn’t have, either. He would have gone right on acting like he’d never met poor, sad Bobby. He would have gone right on blaming Paul and Jax. The mood changes in an instant, the seriousness of where this discussion is headed settling like a rash on my skin.

“And Paul? Was he there, too?”

Micah nods. “Passed out on the back seat of Bobby’s car.”

And that’s when all the pieces fall into a place, a combination of memory and conjecture.

A secret under water for twenty years.

Paul, almost drowned.

Jax, saving his life.

“Micah, what did you do?”

There’s a breath where I think he’s going to deny it, a pause that hangs heavy in the air. I hear the percussive tick of a clock somewhere off in the kitchen, the smooth hiss of my own breath.

“I got in the car with a drunken idiot who crashed us into the cove. That’s what I did. And you can stop looking at me like that. None of this would’ve happened if Jax hadn’t been such an asshole. Leaning over cliffs, chugging tequila, driving like a maniac. This is his fault. Not mine.”

I imagine it then, the squeal of the Camaro’s tires, smell the rubber burning against asphalt, feel the weightlessness as the car takes flight. A car as solid as Bobby’s would have hit the water and sunk fast. If Jax had just enough time to drag up one person, if he could only choose one, which would it be—the trailer-park drug dealer, or his lifelong best friend?

If this is true, if I’m right, then so was Paul. Pitts Cove was a long-term investment, just not in the way he wanted me to believe. It had nothing to do with rerouting State Road 32 or turning swampland into an exclusive lakeside community. For Paul, buying up Pitts Cove was about keeping old bones buried not just for Jax but for himself as well.