next to me. He handed me a beer, keeping a water for himself. Marcus came in and sat down. I hadn’t called him, but I assumed Avery had. Colton got up and came back with a second beer for his other brother.
Marcus leaned forward. “What do you want us to do to him?”
SUMMER
Caden…
A voice whispered his name in the back of my mind. Bits and pieces came back to me. Caden said he loved me, and I remembered going to see Kevin after that. Then the big fucking hole that I’d covered over since my mom’s passing ripped open last night, and there was no closing it again. I broke down. There was no other way to say it.
Summer Stoltz had taken a cruise to Insanity Sea, and now I was docked back on land. And I felt the shit. I was the shit. Shithead Summer—that was my new name. I groaned, catching my head in my hands. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
“He was here, wasn’t he?”
Avery was here with me. Shell. And I think Claudia, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. I still wasn’t a fan of the bitchy pit bull who never apologized for her wrongdoings. I sat on the floor of a bathroom. I guessed it was Kevin’s because of the towels with an embroidered K on them.
I scrambled up from the floor. “I have to go.”
“Wait. Where are you going?”
“He told me he loved me, and then I broke down. I have to make it right.”
I was out the door when I heard Avery ask behind me, “Kevin did?”
“He’s not here.”
The shed was empty, so I went looking for Caden in the house. I followed a guy to the kitchen and out to the backyard.
“What do you mean he’s not here?”
He dumped the bag of ice he’d been carrying into a cooler and shrugged. “I mean he’s not here. He took off for a bit.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Carl,” another guy yelled, sticking his head out the door. “Fill that up and just stay there. We’ve got the drinks coming. I need you to man the bar. Got it?”
“Got it.”
The guy at the door stared at me before he slipped back inside. I frowned. What had that been about? It didn’t matter. I needed to make everything better, explain my feelings. That’s what mattered.
I folded my arms over my chest. “We were talking.”
He frowned, glancing at me. He had to stay put to man the bar, so that meant I had him cornered.
I wasn’t above tapping my foot like a five year old. “Spill it.” Caden was their unofficial leader. They always knew where he was.
“Look, you should go talk to Phillip. He had front row seats for what went down.”
“So something did go down.” Victory flared up in me. “What happened?”
He narrowed his eyes. “You been to your stepbrother’s room yet?”
“No. Why would I?”
“So you don’t know he got kicked out?”
“I was in the bathroom for an hour.”
“Shit went down in that hour.”
I gazed around with new perspective. Carl was only manning one cooler. There were four others around the yard, along with a new bonfire pit and two tables getting set up for beer pong. A sick feeling began to develop deep in my gut, and I didn’t like it.
I asked, feeling faint, “Is Kevin here?”
“Nope.”
Caden wasn’t here.
Kevin wasn’t here.
A buzzing started in my head. “You said Phillip was there? When whatever happened?”
“Yep.”
I cleared my throat, my hands becoming sweaty. “Where’s Phillip?”
“He’s the one who just told me to stay here.”
“Lovely,” I murmured to myself. That guy didn’t like me. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be too forthcoming.
Still, I headed back inside and asked the first guy I saw. “Where’s Phillip?”
“Downstairs.”
Oh, crap.
My knees grew weak, and my hands trembled as I made my way down the same stairs I’d been up not long ago.
I moved forward, the hallway suddenly looming. One room had a closed door, but the other two stood open. I couldn’t look away from my stepbrother’s room.
It was completely bare. Even the sheets had been stripped off the mattress. Two guys were moving around in there, one picking up garbage and the other vacuuming. They finished as I watched, then grabbed all the cleaning supplies and packed them away. They moved past me on their way out, and I gulped. Within moments they came back with new bedding and made Kevin’s old bed.
Avery, Claudia, and Shell came to stand in the bathroom doorway. One of the guys reached behind them and grabbed