Jackson didn’t acknowledge my words. He simply began walking to the door. I turned and followed, only glancing over my shoulder once at the hunched shoulders of the man in the wheelchair.

We were striding down the hall, not speaking, when I cracked. “Why is he in a wheelchair?”

Jackson shook his head. “Not my story to tell.”

Bro code. I nodded. I hadn’t really expected an explanation, but naturally I had to ask anyway.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

Jackson stopped walking. He turned to face me. He studied me for a long moment. “Don’t let him retreat.”

“Meaning?”

He opened his mouth, looking like he wanted to say more, but he shook his head. He opened his mouth again and then snapped it shut. Clearly, he was sitting on the horns of a dilemma. It would have been unkind of me not to help him out.

“I can’t help him if you don’t give me a clue,” I said. “You don’t have to break his trust just help me to understand.”

Jackson nodded. “Fair enough. Nick’s shut himself off from the entire world. No friends, no family, no visitors, no one gets on the estate. Until you rented the guest house, it was just the four of us—day in and day out. I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t disappear because of this. Be a presence he can’t ignore; that will help him.”

That was it. He strode forward, leaving me to follow in his wake, as if I were a dinghy trailing a yacht. He reached the back door and held it open for me to pass through.

“See you around, Annabelle,” he said. He sounded hopeful.

“Later, Jackson.”

“I hope you mean that,” he said.

I slipped through the open door, clutching my skirt together. There was no sign of the Guzmans, for which I was grateful. I walked across the yard, through the citrus trees, to my own patio. I had the sensation of being watched, and I desperately wanted to turn around and see if Nick was looking out the window, but then I wasn’t sure I could handle it if he was.

I turned my time with him over in my mind. He was devastatingly good looking. He had charm and he was clearly successful. But something had happened to him, something had caused him to lose the use of his leg. An accident? A disease? What? I was obnoxiously curious about it.

I thought about how he’d swooped in and grabbed me when I might have been flattened by the weights coming down on me. I stopped walking.