His Horizon - Con Riley Page 0,12

of her nose. “Staying in touch is so easy, even someone as challenged as you could do it. I’ve heard it works right the way around the planet.” He held his phone up for a second and then typed a few words. A photo of Jude’s face now filled the screen with the words “I’m a thoughtless dick” as a caption. Rob’s voice dropped. “I’m not saying I expected dick pics from you, but I wouldn’t have minded knowing that you were still alive and kicking.”

Jude was thrown by Rob sounding wounded. “I’m sorry.”

“No need.” Rob shoved his phone into his pocket. “We had a one-time thing. Not even that. One kiss. That’s nothing, is it? It’s not like we were dating. I got over you just fine.”

That wasn’t what Louise had said last night unless she’d been talking about someone else Rob had been involved with during the contest, but surely Rob couldn’t have kept his mouth shut if he already had a partner? Somehow, imagining that stung like seawater in a small cut—sharp and unexpected. Jude made himself continue. “You’re right. I should have found some way to talk to you, but…” Finding the vocabulary to explain took everything that he had, draining him as he admitted, “I-I don’t know if you can imagine what it was like to get the news that we did. There was so much to take care of, and nobody had any answers.”

“I would have helped.” The wind almost blew Rob’s next words away before Jude heard them. “I would have wanted to. But that was before you ghosted me. I get it, even if I thought ghosting was only for randoms—for hookups you regretted rather than for someone—” Rob huffed and then strode off, picking up speed once he got past the last of the treacherous rock pools.

Jude hurried behind him. “Rob…”

“Forget about it,” Rob insisted, clambering up the headland. “I have.”

“So why are you still here?” Jude followed, taking Rob’s outstretched hand near the top.

“Because of this,” Rob said as he pulled Jude up the final steep step. He then stood next to Louise, both of them watching as Jude took in the view of the beach for the first time.

Rather than a glorious cove, all he saw was devastation, not a single grain of sand left.

Instead of a campsite behind low dunes, ravines gouged the landscape.

Gone was the beach that had attracted families year after year for generations, eradicated so completely it might have never existed.

If Jude had sailed home in full daylight, he would have noticed its absence. Now, from the vantage point of the headland, it looked like the coast bled, ferrous-red soil bloodying the seawater as if the land were wounded. The lane that linked the main road to the campground was empty, no way for tourists to traverse the fissures at its entrance. Even if they could, there was nowhere left to pitch their tents, and no safe way for them to reach the coast path that would bring them to the Anchor.

“Th- that storm…” Jude stuttered. “That storm you showed me, online…”

“Yes,” Louise said simply. “That storm changed everything here, overnight, and with no warning, just like the typhoon that took…” she left the rest of that sentence unspoken. “Jude,” she said, much quieter. “Jude, it was the storm that broke the Anchor, not me.”

“Almost broke it.” Rob’s voice carried the kind of confidence that could make a whole kitchen listen. He sounded so like his dad at that moment that Jude almost said so until Rob looked right at him. “There’s no way to fix this aspect.” He gestured to a scene of devastation Jude could hardly stand to look at. “There’s no way to beat nature, or to magic back the Anchor’s old customer base of low-budget campers.”

He was right. “There’s nothing here for them now.” Jude took his sister’s hand in his. And this had all happened shortly after he’d left? “Why didn’t you…?” He choked on his words, imagining Louise waking up for a second time to disaster so soon after their parents had gone missing, and this time he hadn’t been here for her to lean on. “How did you…?”

“Manage?” Louise offered, bleak and teary for the third time since he’d returned. “I didn’t. Couldn’t. Not on my own. I couldn’t manage any of this.” She gestured to where the beach had once curved, now cordoned off like a crime scene. “But I knew that you couldn’t either. There was