Krista answered, wearing her blue-and-white gingham general store uniform. “Hi, Rory!”
I smiled, Krista’s ever-upbeat attitude instantly squelching what was left of my uneasiness.
“Hey!” I said. “Going to work?”
“Yeah. I was just heading out,” she said, slipping past me onto the porch. “Listen, I wanted to ask you…I’m having this big party on Friday night, and I was wondering if you’d want to be on the planning committee.”
I blinked. “The planning committee?”
She smiled and blushed, smoothing her bangs off her forehead with her fingertip. “Yeah. It’s my one-year anniversary on the island,” she explained, tilting her head and biting her bottom lip. “It’s kind of a big deal, so the other girls are helping me plan it.”
I fiddled with the end of my braid. Party planning was definitely not my thing. But she looked so hopeful.
“Sure,” I said. “When do you need me?”
Krista squealed and grabbed me into a hug. “That’s great! We’re meeting here, Wednesday morning, at ten sharp.”
“Okay. I’ll be here.”
“Cool. If you’re looking for Tristan, he’s up in his room. Just go upstairs. It’s the second door on the left,” she said as she jogged down the porch stairs.
“Thanks,” I called after her.
She lifted a hand and hustled around the corner, out of sight.
I took a deep breath and walked inside, closing the door behind me. The foyer was huge and silent, lit dimly in the morning sun. The floors were a dark, polished wood, and matching wainscoting reached halfway up the walls. The decor was impeccable but impersonaclass="underline" the nap of a deep red Turkish rug was all swept in one direction, as if recently vacuumed. One perfect orchid in a gold vase sat atop a gleaming hall table. The walls were a warm, creamy white, bare of any photographs or portraits, aside from a landscape painting of Juniper Landing’s town hall.
A tall, banistered staircase stood to my right, but before I could move, a floorboard creaked somewhere nearby. I saw a shadow under the edge of a door on the far side of the foyer. It hovered there, as if listening.
For a long moment, I just stood there, vacillating somewhere between an instinct to run and my yearning to see Tristan. Finally, the footsteps receded and a door slammed shut at the back of the house. Unfrozen, I took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, looking into each doorway until I saw Tristan. He was standing with his back to me at a drawing table, which was set up to face a bay window overlooking the ocean, and he was holding something in his hands. Suddenly he tossed the heavy item into the bottom drawer of a storage cabinet under the desk, locked the drawer, pocketed the key, then turned around before I could come up with a good excuse for my hovering there.
“Hey!” he said, his eyes lighting up at the sight of me.
My heart warmed and I instantly relaxed. “Hi.”
He was wearing an aqua T-shirt that made his eyes stand out, even from across the room. There was something about seeing him there, in his own space, that made him seem vulnerable. He glanced around at the messy bedspread, the open trunk at the foot of the bed—filled with sneakers and flip-flops and what appeared to be a pair of fuzzy bear slippers—and the nautical-themed mirror with a crack in the right-hand corner.
“Um, welcome to my room,” he said. Then he scratched the back of his neck, smiling sheepishly, and quickly whacked the trunk closed.
“Thanks,” I said. “Krista let me in.”
“So, are you ready for your tour?” he asked.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, smiling.
“I’m glad you’re still excited about all this,” Tristan replied, picking at the carved edge of his bed’s footboard. “Especially after last night. Sometimes when the first ushering doesn’t go smoothly, new Lifers have a tendency to…”
“Freak out?” I supplied.
“To put it mildly,” he replied with a chuckle. “I should’ve known you’d be different.” He held my gaze for a long moment, so long I started to blush.
“So, where’re we going?” I asked finally.
“Follow me,” he said, heading for the door. He paused and looked back over his shoulder with a heart-stopping grin. “You’re gonna love this.”
Anywhere but here
“I knew it!” I shoved Tristan with both hands. “I knew someone was watching me that day!”
Through the gleaming window I had a perfect view of the room across the street—the room Olive had occupied in the Freesia Lane boarding house last week when she was here. I’d gone looking for her there when she stood me up for breakfast, and I could have sworn someone was spying on me from this very room.
“Yeah, that was Lauren,” Tristan said, holding the blue brocade curtain back. “She told me later that she was sure you’d spotted her over here. She had such a panic attack about it that Krista let her reorganize her closet to calm her down.”
“That’s calming?” I raised an eyebrow at Tristan.
He threw up his hands. “It is for Lauren.”
“I saw the blinds move, but I didn’t see who was behind them.” It was weird, staring out that window, imagining my own curious face peering in from the other side.
“With practice, you get really good at not being seen,” Tristan told me. His words hung in the air for a long moment, and I had a feeling he was thinking the same thing I was. He hadn’t done such a great job of not being seen by me.
Tristan cleared his throat. “So, what do you think of the behind-the-scenes tour so far?”
I chewed on my bottom lip and glanced around the room. The wood floors were old and creaky, and the fraying lawn furniture haphazardly placed around the room left something to be desired. It had been like this in every “lookout” Tristan had taken me to—the library attic, which afforded a perfect 360-degree view of the town from its windowed rotunda, the widow’s walk above the surf shop overlooking the ferry dock. Even the upstairs apartment at the Crab Shack had offered nothing more than a vinyl couch and a cracked cooler. Whatever Lifer life was like, it wasn’t glam.
“Don’t you guys ever want to, you know, get comfortable?” I asked.
Tristan laughed and leaned against the window, the sun illuminating his handsome face and highlighting the lines of his chest. I blushed and glanced away, focusing on the sidewalk outside. Fisher and Kevin walked by, in the midst of an intense conversation, and Fisher checked over his shoulder three times in the space of five seconds. Then they disappeared from view. I stepped closer to the window next to Tristan, to see if anyone was following them, but the street was empty.
“We’re never in one place for very long, I guess,” Tristan said. “But if you want to make any changes anywhere, feel free. You’re one of us now.”
He gave me this look that sent a warm glow through my chest, like he was glad, relieved, even, to finally be able to say that.
“Noted,” I said, my heart rate skipping all over the place. “So, what’s next?”
Tristan hesitated. He shifted almost imperceptibly from one foot to the other. “Well, there is one more place you should see.”
It was clear that whatever it was, he didn’t exactly want to show it to me. Intrigued, I followed him down the stairs and out into the bright sunlight. It didn’t take long for me to figure out where he was taking me, and my pulse started to thrum as we stopped outside the gray house across the street from my own. Tristan had told me that his grandmother lived out there and that she liked to watch the world go by. That was how he’d explained away the moving curtains, my constant feeling of being watched, and the fact that he always seemed to be hanging out there. I glanced over my shoulder at Darcy’s window, hoping she wasn’t looking out. The house stared back at me, its two upper windows and double front door forming an accusatory face.