Sheriff Spears’s wife hadn’t run off with just anyone. She’d left him for a young male model who had been staying with some friends in the apartment next door to theirs for a single weekend. It had taken him all of two days to convince Mrs. Spears to dump her life with the sheriff, pack a bag, and jump in the car with him and a crew of beautiful nineteen-year-old men. She hadn’t been seen since.

“Siobhan stayed up with me many nights, listening to me talk through my breakup,” Clay said. “She was the best listener. She was endlessly encouraging. We would sit out here in the garden eating slices of pepperoni pizza and looking at the stars and … and she just made me feel like … you all know I’m no George Clooney. But Siobhan told me that I deserved love and that I was a great man, and I believed her.”

Clay sat down quickly, perhaps attempting to get his butt planted before he burst into tears, and the plastic lawn chair beneath him creaked in a concerning way.

I noticed a car drive up to the house and stop with a spray of gravel.

“My name is Angelica Grace Thomas-Lowell.” The third speaker had risen from her chair. Angelica had lived in the house for more than two years, but for some reason she always introduced herself with her full name. “I’m a vegan. Activist. Provocateur. Bestselling author.”

The car at the front of the house was a welcome distraction. I leaned to the side in my chair to see around Angelica, but her thin, veiny arms were in the way. The paper she held looked like a full page of typed notes.

“‘I’d like to announce firstly my sincere appreciation for Siobhan’s constant willingness to act as a confidential sounding board for my ideas,’” Angelica read. “‘The creative process isn’t always straightforward. It’s fluid, magnetic, sometimes chaotic. Though Siobhan’s reading history was firmly located in trash novels, I found her somewhat naive critiques of my works in progress—those few I entrusted to her—refreshing.’”

Nick suddenly stood up beside me. I looked over and saw a woman running from the house toward the gathering. Not a plane crash, gas-leak explosion, or ferocious bear, but something. I stood with him.

I recognized the woman from town. Ellie Minnow. She grabbed Nick by his scar-covered arm.

“Nick, Bill, you’ve gotta help me. It’s Winley.”

“What is it?” Nick asked. “What’s happened?”

“We’ll help.” I grabbed my phone from the table. “Whatever it is, we’ll help.”

Marni was already pouting. I brushed her shoulder in consolation as I passed. “Sorry, everyone, duty calls. Feel free to continue on without us.”

I DROVE, NICK in the seat beside me, Ellie in the back. The gravel road to the Inn became the forest-lined road into town, curving around the marina jam-packed with bright, glossy cruisers and crab boats weeping rust. Nick was giving me the side-eye.

“What?”

“The crew were trying to do a nice thing for you, Cap,” he said.