I step into Blake’s office prepared to wait again, except there’s no receptionist.

I’m back to my usual beach clothes. Since I’m camping on the beach, I can’t be motivated to put on a collared shirt and leather shoes.

Coming here—it feels desperate. Desperate for some connection to her. So desperate I’ll talk to another Vandershall. It’s the closest I can get to learning how she is.

Rather than wait, I knock on his office door and stick my head in. “I’m here whenever you’re—”

My words are cut off by who’s sitting in the chair opposite his desk.

Her face is soft, vulnerable, pained.

Penny.

I want to say her name, but it doesn’t come out.

The look on her face is so open, like she’s happy to see me, needs to see me.

I blink fast. That’s wrong. There’s no way she could handle seeing me and all the darkness that lives in me. I lied to myself in thinking she could take it. She can’t. No one can.

She should be revolted, turning the other way, screaming me out of here. The only reason she isn’t is because she’s back to her fake good girl habits.

She’s back to denying everything I told her. She has no reason to believe anything I said to her now.

I hadn’t thought of that until now. Everything that made me so relieved, that felt so good to have her believe . . . it’s gone. I’m alone again.

I can’t school my face. The only thing I can do to keep the pain from showing is replace it with my usual mask: fury. “What are you doing here?”

Her mouth pinches. “I’m here to see my brother. What are you doing here?”

“He wanted to talk to me.”

Blake stands. “Come back in an hour.”

“No.” She holds out her hand. “Why isn’t he in prison?”

Blake answers, “Because there wasn’t any solid evidence to hold him.”

“So he didn’t do it?” Her voice is too tight to decipher if it’s with relief or disdain.

Blake shakes his head. “I didn’t say that.”

She stares at me. I wait for the question. For her to ask me if I killed her father. I don’t know how to answer that, and I’m grateful when she doesn’t ask.

“Call me when you’re done working,” she says to Blake. “We have lots more to talk about.” She turns her glare to me. “Move.”

I’m blocking her exit. I’m glad to see her out. I worried yesterday when her car didn’t leave her house, and she didn’t go to work. I was relieved to see it gone this morning, thinking she had gone to work. Except she came here instead.

“Why aren’t you at work?” I ask.

“None of your business. Out of my way.” Whether she goes to work or not doesn’t matter. She’s angry and doing something, not home and crying.

I step aside but only just enough. She’s forced to brush me with her shoulder as she walks by. I restrain myself from caressing her back. I miss the feel of her next to me, against me, around me.

I catch a whiff of her scent as she walks by. It’s ocean and . . . me. She smells like me.

I’m left staring at the door after she closes it. Why does she smell like me?

“Don’t even think about it, Kane,” Blake warns.

I wipe her from my mind and tell him the truth. “I’m not thinking anything.”

* * *

Seeing Logan, I want to confess it all to him, to share the things my brother told me with him the way he shared his truths with me. I forget he’s not the man of truth I thought he was.

The look of contempt on his face reminds me. Even if what he told me of his sister is true, there are too many other lies about him for him to be the man I thought he was.

But my response is unchanged. His look, the intensity, the brutality of his stare, it could be the first day I met him. I want him to make all the rest of it disappear so there is nothing left but us and what he makes me feel.

I cover it, steel my spine and reject the weakness.

The trek to my car is a slow one.

My brother’s truths about my mother stagger me. She was a victim of my father like Logan’s sister. Blake’s face was contrite. He’s ashamed, as though he were the one who hurt our mom.

I told him it wasn’t his fault, but the guilt on his face and his confession hurt.

He didn’t want me to know. He wanted to save me from it. Like he’s been saving me his whole life. He told me he’s the one who convinced father to send me to boarding school. He’s the one who made sure I always had a summer camp to go to or could visit our aunt in Charleston on school breaks. All to keep me safe from our father.

Blake was a teenager, and he was being a surrogate parent to me.

I could see the fear in his eyes—he’s afraid he’s like our father. But Logan was wrong. Blake cares too much, to a fault, but he could never be evil like our father. There’s too much care in him. His misses our mother, the mother I never knew, too much.

He needs something to do with his grief besides obsess over taking care of me. I never thought about how he moved from Nashville to California to pursue his law practice, just to be near me. He took the bar exam in California just to be with me.

He’s trying to save me the way he couldn’t save our mother. And I was too dense to see it.

I need to do something for him, for us.

If there’s one true thing Logan taught me about myself, one thing I won’t let go of, it’s that I need to do something. I can’t let this news about my mother debilitate me like the death of my father did. I won’t let it.

Action.

It would be easier if I had him with me.

I go to the hospital with no makeup, the first time I’ve ever gone to work without it. It feels good. My value is in myself—not in my looks.

I pass by the pillars he used to watch me from—my distraction. And try not to think about how much more than a distraction he became.

I remember why I wanted to work in maternity. Back when I thought the only tragedy my mother experienced was her death in labor with me, I wanted to help other mothers. But now, that’s changed. Working back in NICU doesn’t seem as vital to me anymore. I want to help in other ways now.

I resign from the nursing staff and stay in the offices to begin research for a new crusade—asking questions, making phone calls.

Nancy Toolen, I learn, didn’t go to the women’s shelter we found for her. She went home to her husband.

I call her. Leave her a message. I’ll pay for her plane ticket home to her family if I have to. I don’t care what she needs, I’ll give it. I have to help her.

My mother had no one to help her.

Louisa had no one to help her.

I have to do something.

Ideas pour from my head. Fifteen million. I don’t need that trust fund. There are far better things for me to do with that money.

The hospital offices close. The sun went down hours ago, and I’m forced to go home, my brain swirling with ideas.

But my body . . . it hurts. Aching and empty. It misses him the way my heart misses him. I’d take him any way I can get him now—evil, dark, caring, light. Just him. Any version of him.

On the drive home, I wish I could go back to the hospital and keep researching. My usual habit of avoiding my lonely condo by going shopping—I have no desire. I need that money for other things now.

It’s dark on the drive, but two blocks from my driveway, my headlights pass over a truck. A familiar one.

Why would his truck be there?

He’s sleeping on the beach again.

My beach.

The one outside my window.

The one he used to watch me from every night.

My heart throbs, labored and heavy, pumping blood to my fingertips to my toes.

He’s watching me.

My skin alive with sensation, as though his eyes are already touching me, I park my car in my driveway and go in my condo. The motion sensor lights come on, but that’s not enough. I turn on every light in the living room and kitchen and the terrace. I want him to watch me and see everything I do.

And I don’t care who else sees.

I wish I could tell him about everything I did today, about all my actions and plans.

He may not exist that way, but I can pretend he does. I can pretend while he’s watching me that he’s the man he made me believe him to be. A man who values truth above anything. A man who makes me face my greatest fears and greatest desires with every touch of his fingers and every word from his mouth. A man who understood the lines between fear and desire, between choice and control, and could walk them with me.

He’s more than those things though. He walked those lines with me, but not with himself. He’s not just a manipulator, he’s a man who killed for revenge. He killed my father, probably.

I choose to let him see me.

I walk out on my terrace and stare down at the beach. The breeze ruffles my hair and I can see nothing but the lights in the other houses on the shore. The sand and anyone on it is too dark to see. But I know he’s there.

Fear binds my lungs, and it’s ecstatic. He’s more dangerous than I even suspected. And though it shouldn’t, it makes me want him more.

I pretend I’m looking at him. I pretend he’s seeing me.

I turn my face to the stars and let him watch me stand there. But I don’t see the sky, I only see his face and how his eyes are when he looks at me. How I’m only a thing of desire to him. How he looks with the hunger in his eyes that devours me before he even touches me.

How I used to fear he would destroy me, fuck me, or both. Were the hands he used to make me feel such desperate things the same hands that he used to kill a man?

I go back inside and do the unthinkable, again.

I unlock my front door and disarm my security system.

My addiction to fear, it’s not the same as before. I don’t crave it to feel alive. Because I am alive. But I crave it because I crave him.

I turn off the lights in my living room and kitchen and go to my bedroom. I open the drapes as wide as they’ll go and turn on every light. And I undress. In front of the window.

Perhaps it’s desperate. Anyone could be watching. No one could be watching.

He might not even be there.

I could’ve mistaken it for his truck. Maybe it wasn’t even his.

I stand naked in front of the window and let the hole that opens in my chest swallow me.

When I’m convinced he’s no longer out there and I imagined the whole thing, I turn out the lights, cuddle into bed and try to forget him.