stop—then I should have accepted him for who he was.
I didn’t want him to change—not really. I just wished he could see himself as worthy of more than the cramped little life he allowed himself to eke out. I wished he could see that he deserved the world.
When my mom got sick, my dad got really into paperback mysteries. He’d read them to her during chemo, and read them to himself when she was sleeping. He wasn’t picky. A pulpy thriller or a cozy mystery with a cat on the cover, as long as there was a dead body at the beginning and justice at the end, he’d read it. And he never threw any of them out, even after my mom went into remission.
After the accident, Deacon had boxed most of them up, but my dad’s collection had been so massive that the guest house was still littered with the things. I’d never seen their appeal before, but I thought I understood it now. There wasn’t much emotion involved in reading them. It was a puzzle for your head that left your heart alone.
And my heart couldn’t take much more these days.
So maybe that was why I was on my eighth mystery in seven days when Em sat down in front of me in the great room of the guest house. I say in front of me, even though I was in a chair in the corner and Em was on the couch several feet away. It was his presence.
The look he gave me was so earnest, he could have been in one of those commercials about saving three-legged, one-eyed puppies. I half expected a Sarah McLachlan song to start playing softly in the background.
“Okay,” Em said. “We need to talk.”
“About what?”
I didn’t set the book down. The sleuth was about to break into a cupcake bakery to search for a crucial piece of evidence, but the cat who usually accompanied her had been kidnapped, so she had no one to warn her that she was about to be caught in the act. It was a critical juncture. I didn’t want to be interrupted.
“About you,” Em said, his voice gentle. “We’re worried about you.”
I flicked an eye over the top of my book. “Who’s we? You and Tate?”
“No, of course not.” Em flushed. “I know you don’t like talking about your stuff. I wouldn’t bring it up with Tate unless you said I could.”
“What stuff?” I frowned. “And wait, if it’s not Tate, then who do you—”
“Alright, I had to dig through mountains of Christmas ornaments and pool toys, but I found the whiskey. Let’s do this.”
Deacon’s voice burst into the room, followed by Deacon himself, and my heart sank. I dropped the book into my lap and wondered if I could make an excuse to get out of whatever this was.
“What the hell is going on? And why do you have Dad’s whiskey?”
“Because we’re having an intervention.” Deacon walked over to the kitchen to grab three glasses, then joined us in the living room. He set the glasses down on the coffee table, then took the other armchair, giving me a hard look. “And don’t even pretend you have somewhere to be right now. You don’t. So no wriggling out of this.”
“I’m not trying to wriggle out of anything,” I protested. Get out of it, maybe. But I didn’t wriggle. “And I don’t even know what ‘this’ is.”
“This,” Deacon said, unscrewing the cap from the whiskey and pouring a generous splash into each glass, “is you explaining what’s eating at you, so we can figure out how to help.”
“Nothing’s eating at me.”
The response was automatic, but Deacon was having none of it.
“Nope.” He handed Em a glass, then plonked another one down in my direction. “Try again.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I insisted, still not picking up my glass.
Deacon shared an exasperated glance with Em, who took a sip of his whiskey and grimaced. He gave me a look that was entirely too sympathetic for my liking.
“Okay,” Deacon said, taking a swallow of his own whiskey. “We’ll do this the hard way, then. I’ll tell you what’s wrong, and we’ll judge how close I am to the truth by how hard you deny it.”
“That’s—”
“One,” Deacon said. “You came home with no warning to work on a project that you’ve demonstrated no interest in before, despite the fact that efforts to save McIntyre Beach have been going on for a while at this point.”