he was even less mature than me."
Dev stopped rowing for a second. He had navigated them away from the dock and was moving them toward the open part of the lake. "Do I even want to know what that means?"
"We were both na?ve in our own way. He thought he'd wind up like his dad—be some muckety-muck—and that any girl he married would jump at the chance to be like his mom. And the truth is, at first, I did."
It was the first time Shea had owned up to it bluntly.
"What was his mom like?" Dev wanted to know.
There was no elegant way to say it—no way to sugarcoat what it was. Shea answered simply. “Kept.”
She waited for him to say something—watched for his face to change, or for a hint of judgment to creep in. Was there anything more to explain? Did she need to justify to him decisions she'd only recently come to terms with herself?
"It's not what I went there for. I had the same stupid dreams every other small-town girl does when she moves to New York at eighteen. And just like every other small-town girl, I got chewed up and spit out. When I left home, I’d built it up in my mind as my Casablanca—this place I was dying to escape. Every time I saw plane, I wanted to be on it.
“It only took a few months in New York for me to realize how badly I’d underestimated the toughness of the city and overestimated my own grit. The job I went there for—a PA job on a film set—fell through. I thought that since I grew up working for my dad, and working hard, and running parts of his business, it would be easy for me to find a restaurant manager position and work my way through school.
“But I couldn’t even find a job as a hostess, let alone as a waitress or a manager. It was all about your look and I didn’t fit the standard of beauty. I ran out of money; my only stroke of luck was meeting a few friends early on who didn’t let me starve. It was the first time in my whole life I had to worry about money. And struggling like that…it changed me. That was where he came in.”
"Let me guess…” Dev picked up when she got quiet. “The second you met a guy who wanted to take care of you, you forgot all that freedom and independence you wanted. ‘Cause being on your own was just too hard.”
Shea nodded in not-quite-embarrassment, because it had been a mistake but she’d been young. "Don't get me wrong. We really did have chemistry. But some of it was that cliché.”
Dev didn’t say anything for a while, just sat absorbing it all. She wondered whether he would ask any more questions. All this time, she’d resisted discussing anything real. Something to talking about it now was almost nice.
"What did you love about the guy?"
Shea hadn't expected that.
"Honestly? The attention. He doted on me in a way no one else ever had. Up until then, I’d been this…grunt who spent all my time working. Then I meet a guy who wants to take me to the Hamptons and buy me jewelry and treat me like a princess.”
The rhythm of the oars as he rowed them was soothing, as were the faint sounds of the movement of the water. The late summer season meant the sky hadn’t gone completely dark.
“I take it he’s still in New York?”
She nodded. “And I want it to stay that way.”
“City not big enough for the both of you?”
His tone held no humor. If he wouldn’t make light of it, neither would she.
“He’s had trouble accepting my decision...” she began haltingly, “…for us to be apart. The only way for him to really get it was for me to leave.”
She watched Dev’s face as his understanding dawned.
“Keenan—” She realized that was the first time she’d said his name out loud to anyone in Sapling. “—he’s still in love with me. But whatever we used to have together—from my end—it’s gone.’
“Is this guy dangerous?” Dev’s voice was low when he asked it. It sent a shiver up Shea’s spine. Something told her it was more than his civic duty as a deputy that drew out his protective instincts. Her own instincts screamed that he was individually and specifically protective of her.
“Not exactly,” she replied before she could think any better of drawing him deeper. “He’s