If I had to live someplace forever, this certainly wasn’t the worst place to end up. Even so, I felt the frightening pull of the unknown in the pit of my stomach. The sharp heaviness of the truth threatening to crush me if I chose to let it, if I chose to wallow. It had happened to me once before, after my mother died. It had sucked me into the darkest period of my life, a period I refused to revisit. Even now.
“I can’t tell you how difficult it’s been for me, keeping all this from you,” Tristan said quietly, his voice thick. “You mean a lot to me—you know that, right? I can’t wait to share all of this with you.”
My heart swelled. This was Tristan’s life. His world. And he wanted me to be a part of it. He wanted to share it with me.
“So tell me about this whole ushering thing,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “How soon can I start?”
Tristan grinned. “Tonight. Meet me at the Thirsty Swan at nine.”
“Okay, then.” I smiled back. “It’s a date.”
My first
“I still can’t believe you asked me to go out,” Darcy said, hand to her chest as we walked down the hill toward the docks that night. My friend Aaron strolled along next to her, his dark hair spiked up and gelled in the front. He wore a blue-and-white-striped rugby shirt that made his tan look even deeper. “I mean, this is unprecedented.”
“You’ve mentioned,” I said wryly.
Up ahead, the calm water of the bay glittered in the light of a low-hanging moon. A buoy bell clanged, and I heard the faint sound of a boat motor chugging way out in the darkness.
“It’s just, you’re my antisocial sister. It’s been one of the constants in my life ever since you hit puberty,” Darcy said, pushing her fingers into her dark mane and fanning it out over her shoulders. “I’m sorry if it’s taking my brain a couple of minutes to wrap itself around the concept.”
“Try a couple of hours,” I muttered under my breath, crossing my arms.
She’d practically fallen over when I’d gone down to the beach and suggested that we round up Aaron and hit the Thirsty Swan after dinner. Not that I could blame her. She was right. I’d always hated parties. It was practically my motto. But Tristan had told me to meet him tonight at the bar where he worked so he could start walking me through this whole Lifer thing, and while I knew we’d have to do that alone, the very thought of leaving my sister behind stopped me cold. After everything Tristan had told me, I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I would have even brought my dad along if he wasn’t so busy working on the latest draft of his long-ignored novel—and if it was socially acceptable to invite your dad to a bar. There was a real possibility I might not have that much more time to spend with them or Aaron—my one true friend on this island. That soon they might be moving on…forever.
Our feet had just hit the rickety boardwalk, and I reached out to grab the nearest pylon, the wind knocked right out of me.
“What’s wrong?” Aaron asked.
This was why I couldn’t allow myself to brood, to wallow, even to ponder too much. Because if I did, there might be no coming back. I had to believe that they would all become Lifers somehow. Aaron’s life had ended unnaturally, too, after all. Something I had realized after way too much pondering earlier. He’d told me all about it on the first night that we met, although neither of us had realized it at the time. There had been a fire at his uncle’s house in Boston. A fire he’d supposedly escaped unscathed. But now that I knew where we really were, how we’d all gotten here, I suspected that wasn’t exactly true.
“Nothing,” I said with a tight smile, trying not to dwell on whether he’d suffered, whether he’d been scared, whether the rest of his uncle’s family had survived. “I’m fine.”
Aaron reached his arm around my back. “I don’t know about this wallflower reputation of yours,” he joked, holding me close to his side as we caught up with my sister. “I’ve only known Rory for a week, and I’ve seen her at not one but two parties,” he said to Darcy.
When I turned to shoot him a grateful smile, I noticed a tall, solid man strolling along one of the paths in the town square. He wore a standard-issue blue uniform, polished black shoes, and what looked suspiciously like a gun in a holster on his hip. I recognized him instantly. It was Officer Dorn, the man who’d laughed me out of the precinct when I’d reported Olive missing last week. He paused for a second to talk to a man reading the Daily Register, Juniper Landing’s newspaper, under a streetlamp. When the two of them shook hands I could have sworn I saw a flash of white.
“Rory?” Aaron prompted.
I snapped back to the conversation. “Sorry, what?
Aaron nudged me good-naturedly. “I said, isn’t Darcy way too good for Joaquin?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” I said, glancing back at the park. Both the man with the paper and Dorn had vanished.
“God, I hope he’s not working,” Darcy said as we approached the life-size carving of a wooden swan outside the door of the bar. The sounds of drunken laughter, clinking glasses, and loud rock music made the screened-in windows that lined three of the dive’s four walls tremble.
“Why not?” Aaron asked. “You look totally hot and you’re going to flirt with other guys. I hope he is working so he can eat his own heart out.”
Darcy grinned. “I knew I liked you.” She smoothed the front of her glittery top and quickly ran her tongue over her teeth to clear away any residual lip gloss. “Okay,” she said with a nod. “Let’s do this.”
Then she lifted her chin and strode through the door, held open by a pockmarked gray rock at our feet. I expected Aaron to follow her first, but he stopped to pull out his cell phone, holding it up toward the sky. My stomach turned. He wasn’t going to be finding a signal anytime soon. Or ever.
“Still trying to call your dad?” I asked, shoving my hands under my arms.
“Just hoping I’ll catch that fifteen-second window when a satellite happens to fly over this godforsaken rock.” He sighed and pocketed the phone, then slung his arm around my shoulders. “Shall we?”
I swallowed hard, my guilt hot inside my chest.
“We shall,” I said with a tight smile.
The Thirsty Swan glowed with the brightness of a nonstop party and was packed from wall to wall. I tried to get a glimpse of the counter to see if Tristan was working, but the crowd at the bar was three people deep. The girl with the pixie haircut from that morning’s ferry was sitting at the end of the bar, sipping a soda and staring at Joaquin, who was slinging drinks like a pro, that big Cheshire grin of his charming everyone in the room. Darcy strode right past him without so much as a glance and took the empty stool between Fisher and some new guy with curly blond hair, an upturned collar on his polo shirt, and a pair of flip-flops with whales embroidered on the straps. The two of them were working together on a pretty serious shot-glass pyramid, and Fisher’s tongue stuck out as he concentrated on placing the next piece. Aaron was right behind Darcy and instantly started chatting up the prep.
“Rory!” Joaquin shouted, shooting beer into a mug and spraying froth over his hand. “How’s it hanging?”
The pixie girl turned to look at me, and her face fell. I hoped she wasn’t thinking I was some kind of competition for Joaquin’s heart. As far as I was concerned, she could have him. If she wanted the trouble.
“Can I get a Coke?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of being sober?” he asked me, tilting his head as he reached under the bar for a glass.