Chapter 9

They took Celia first, in her wedding dress, and she went with her chin up, calling me a thief the whole way down the steps.

Grant went the other direction.

He broke loose in the crowd and ran for the boathouse, and I knew exactly where he was going, because I had known that coastline since I was six. The runabout. The sea gate. The only channel deep enough to get out at low tide.

I went down the bluff path behind Tessa's cousin's barn with the wet leaves sliding under my borrowed heels and the locket slapping my chest, and I got to the boathouse ahead of him.

Milo caught up at the corner of the building. "Evie -"

"Get the gate," I said.

Grant was already in the runabout, engine coughing, untying the bow line with hands that would not work. He looked up and saw me standing in the light of the open doors and stopped moving.

"Evelyn," he said, and he made my name sound like an apology, and it was worse than anything else he had done to me.

The gate winch was chained to the wall under the workbench where the recorder had been. Milo got the chain off and cranked the handle, and the heavy wooden sea gate came down on its track across the slip, boom-first, into the water, and the runabout's stern swung and knocked against it and stopped dead.

Grant jumped out onto the dock, and there was nothing on the other side of that dock but six feet of cold river and a herring gull.

He kept talking all the way to the deputies. About the debts he had inherited, about how the orchard money was already gone, about how he had only ever wanted the estate to stay in the family, and I stood aside and let them walk him past me, wet to the knees in a tuxedo, because I could not think of a single word worth spending on him.

Then a deputy put a hand on Milo Vance's shoulder.

"I cut the fuel line," Milo said, before anyone asked him. He held out his wrists. "Two years ago. I'm not making them come find me."

I watched him get cuffed and helped into the second car, and when he looked out the window at me I put my hand flat on the glass, and he put his against the other side, and that was the whole bargain between us, finished and not finished.

I stood on the dock in the fog for a long time after the cars went up the drive, holding my mother's locket in my fist, listening to this house settle, waiting for it to decide whether it still belonged to me.