As a kid, he’d always been whiny when anyone challenged him, but now his voice had a calmness she didn’t like. “What I believe is that a leopard doesn’t change its spots.” She struggled to get the wheel out of the rut. “I want you to stop using Toby to try to get to me.”

He pushed her aside, took the handles, and steered the wheelbarrow toward the driveway. “Myra said your ex-husband left you for an eighteen-year-old.”

Scott’s supposed soul mate was nineteen, but correcting him wouldn’t exactly help her save face. “That’s what happens when you marry the wrong man,” she said.

He stopped the wheelbarrow. “You don’t still believe David was the right one, do you?”

He was a lot more perceptive than he used to be, and anger coursed through her. “I won’t talk to you about David.”

“He never would have married you. You intimidated him.”

Despite Mike’s surface changes, he was as clueless as ever. David, with his blazing intellect and boundless self-confidence, had never been intimidated by anyone, let alone an ordinary girl like herself.

“The WASP princess and the kid from the ghetto …” He slipped his thumb under the gold bracelet on his wrist. Either he’d forgotten to put on his cologne or he’d taken her criticism seriously because he smelled like peppermint gum. “David was fascinated by you, but that’s all it ever was.”

Her hand itched to slap him. “Stop acting like you knew him.”

“Who do you think he talked to after he married Star and settled on the island?”

“You want me to believe you were David’s confidant? After what you did?”

“Living in the past is never a great idea,” he said, with an air of compassion she didn’t believe for a moment. “It makes things harder than they need to be. I can help you.”

“The only way you can do that is to leave me alone.” She abandoned the wheelbarrow and strode toward the house.

“You’re barely hanging on,” he said, not raising his voice. “What are you going to do when the tourists leave?”

“Get off the island like everybody else.”

“And go where?”

Nowhere. Her brothers loved her, but they didn’t want her living with them—not by herself and definitely not with a twelve-year-old boy tagging along. She had no place to go, something Mike seemed to know.

She could hear him coming closer, his even stride so much more confident than her fast, furious steps. “You’re going to need a friend here,” he said as she reached the front step. “Myra’s gone. David and Star are dead. And you don’t seem to have a long list of pals.”