When she raised her gaze, she saw her parents standing on the beach holding hands with her daughter. She was tired and ready to join them. She’d be leaving Ivy alone, but that girl was the strongest of the lot. If anyone could heal the sins of the past, it was Ivy.

CHAPTER ONE

IVY

Monday, January 17, 2022, 10:15 p.m.

Four hundred and twenty-four. It was the number of miles between New York City and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Seven and a half hours. That was the projected drive time. But it didn’t account for the accident on the New Jersey Turnpike, the gridlock around the DC Beltway, or the new road construction miles before Norfolk. The calculation also didn’t factor in a McDonald’s stop in Delaware (hamburger and large Diet Coke) or the potty break in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Eleven days. The time it had been since Ivy Neale had left home to attend her grandmother’s funeral. It was the post–New Year’s lull at the restaurant, so no one had minded when she’d taken off two days. There was a hurried flight to Charlotte and then back up to Norfolk, followed by a one-hundred-mile drive in a rental to the Outer Banks and then the thirty-minute funeral service. She’d seen friends and family, but the hugs had been quick and the conversations superficial. No time for the ex-boyfriend, the ex-friend who’d slept with him two months after she’d left for New York twelve years ago, their truly precious child, the hundreds of people who had loved Ruth, or a tour of Ruth’s house.

She’d flown back to New York, the sea air still clinging to her sweatshirt, and inquired about an extended leave from her job.

Five seconds. How long it had taken her boss to reject her request for leave. One second for this last straw to break the camel’s back and for her to quit. Three days to cut a deal with her landlord, sell her furniture, and pack up what remained. She had agreed to pay him the remaining two months on her lease once she sold the cottage or was making money again. He’d accepted, knowing money later was better than none at all.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her job or the city. God knew they’d endured a lot together. But it was time to return home and clean out Ruth’s house. She owed this to Ruth.

One thousand five hundred dollars. That was how much the 2005 van had cost her from the used-car dealer. It was green and had worn tan seats and a radio that worked as long as you didn’t hit a pothole, which was a neat trick on nearly eight hundred miles of I-95.

Thirty-one dollars and three cents. It was the cost of gas and a large packet of M&M’S from the gas station before she crossed the Wright Memorial Bridge and left the mainland behind for the Outer Banks, the two-hundred-mile-long chain of barrier islands stretching along the North Carolina coast. They’d been inhabited for a thousand years by native tribes drawn by the fertile waters and since 1587 had been settled by Europeans.