“Are you getting serious with Faith?” His mom’s pleading eyes met his. “You haven’t brought anyone home since . . .”

“Laura. Since Laura, you mean. You can say her name. I won’t go up in flames.” Alec drew in a breath. Released it. His mom wasn’t to blame. “And Faith and I can’t be anything more than this. I’m going back to the city after the wedding.”

“Oh. I figured, you know, since . . .” Mom shook her head. “Never mind.”

Jake leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. Anger seethed in his eyes. “Nice, man.”

He shrugged. Let his brother stew. No way would he lie to Mom. That kind of hurt was worse than the pity in her eyes.

Christ. He wanted out of here. This too-cozy little shindig was grinding his very raw nerves to dust, only reminding him of what couldn’t be.

He dug his toes in the grass. In the silence that hung, it dawned on him how long Faith and his father had been gone. Alone in the house. With God knows the kinds of things his father would say . . .

“I’ll be right back.”

He tossed his bottle in the trash and walked through the kitchen to the living room, where their voices rose over the sounds of the Braves game. Worry pinched his gut until Faith laughed. He stopped in the doorway, unseen as of yet.

“What book are you on now?”

“Just finished the last one. Nightmares, I tell you. This is why I stick to baseball memoirs or true crime.” Dad barked out a laugh. “But, hey, my son wrote it.”

The air left his lungs in one fell swoop. The edges of his vision grayed. He pressed a palm to the wall to stay upright.

His dad had read his books? His dad, who joked every chance he got that his son got paid to daydream?

“You must be so proud of them both. Jake’s done an amazing job with Lacey’s property. It’s magical. The wedding will be lovely.”

Dad nodded. “Jake was the easy one. Always getting dirty, digging a hole. Typical boy mischief. He shares my eye for landscaping. Alec was always off in his own head. Couldn’t hear a thing you said or follow a rule to save his life.”

Faith grinned. “I hear the creative types are hard to raise. But you know, he probably got that from you. Gardening is an art, too, just a different form.”

Dad laughed. “Miss Armstrong, are you saying I gave myself this headache?”

“Afraid so.”

Alec had heard enough. He turned and strode through the kitchen, pushed through the back door with shaking hands. He glared at his parents’ postage-stamp yard. The trim grass, strategically placed flowers in varying heights and colors, the mature birches. But the pounding in his head wouldn’t abate.

Jake stood. “Alec?”

He looked at his mom. “He read my books?”

Mom pressed a hand to her chest, her eyes panicked and wary at his tone. “I—”

“Twenty-five bestsellers and all I ever got was laughed at. Don’t you think you could’ve told me? Given me some measure of peace that I wasn’t a total joke to him?”

Faith and his father stepped around the house, coming into the yard from the front.

“What’s this about, son?”

The pounding in his skull amplified, until he couldn’t see through the haze. He never doubted his father’s love. His respect, maybe, but never his love. But over time, the thoughtless things his dad said, over and over, had grated at his patience until fury boiled. “It’s about you telling my girlfriend how goddamn proud you are, when all you’ve ever done is make fun of me.”

Jake stepped forward, his hand extended. “Alec, calm down.”

Calm down. Calm down?

“What the hell for?” He rounded on Jake. “That’s what I do, right? Get irrational and go off the deep end? Except I’m not the one who went off the deep end that night. Laura did.” A sharp jab pierced his chest. His voice rose, until the shouting in his head matched his tone. “Maybe I should’ve tried to stop her, but I didn’t. How could I have known what would happen? Huh? She got in that car drunk and she crashed it. Her, not me. And I’m the one paying for it. I’m the one living with it. It wasn’t my fault!”

His voice raked, until it was like roaring through broken glass. A pulsing, violent vibration ripped through him. Perhaps he was losing his tact gene, too. Like father, like son.

And then he realized what he said.

He froze. Stumbled back into the screen door. Agony clawed his chest. His breath heaved in and out. His hands fisted. Shook. His insides felt torn to shreds.

Who knew? He was alive after all.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said again, a whisper for his ears only, as if trying the words on for size.

“That’s right, Alec. It wasn’t.”

Her mermaid voice washed over him, filled him with a measure of warmth. The sweet scent of her soft skin teased his nose. He looked up into amber eyes. Kind, understanding eyes. Too kind for him.

The images of Laura drifted away. Her broken body. A shell hooked up to tubes and wires. The antiseptic smell he’d always associate with her. With that night.

“I have to get out of here.”

Faith reached out for him, but he brushed her off. He couldn’t have her touch him right now, couldn’t stand it. He’d fucking shatter.

The others stood in the yard, jaws slack and eyes round. Frozen. No one moved. No one spoke.

He shoved off the door and strode away on legs that barely held him upright.

*   *   *

Jake walked up to the base of the deck stairs and rammed his hands in his pockets.

Alec blinked and turned his attention back to the ocean. Stars littered the sky. The water was a black ribbon in the distance, the waves rhythmic against the shore. Only the slight breeze made the humidity bearable after a brief thundershower had swept through an hour before. He’d sat through the downpour and was still soaked through.

“I drove Faith home, in case you were wondering.”

Alec closed his eyes and sighed. Shit. “Thank you.” He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice. His throat was still raw from screaming. “Is she upset?”

Jake turned and sat next to him on the step. “She took it in stride. You should go check on her yourself.”

He planned to, but he needed to get his head on straight first. Running to her every time he had a problem had to stop. In a couple of weeks, they’d be over. He couldn’t keep depending on her.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Jake said. “And Mom. Dad went into the house and never came back out.”

Alec had scared the shit out of himself, too. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. I think I pushed you too hard.”

“You didn’t. It’s just . . .” He ran his hand through his hair. “I can’t do the right thing for both of them, Jake. I can’t leave Laura in the state she’s in, and I can’t give Faith the hope that I will.” Most of all, he couldn’t forgive himself and move forward. His knee bounced, the nervous energy starting anew. “Let’s take a walk.”

Instead of turning left, Alec veered them right, away from the houses and to the abandoned area on the other strip of the shore. There was a half mile between the Covingtons’ private beach and the foreclosed house he’d driven by earlier in the summer. The sand was dotted with broken shells and seaweed. Eventually, the dunes gave way to rocky bluffs, a dark wall lit by the half-moon.

Alec stopped at the rotted, broken steps of the empty house. Two stories up, the mini-mansion stood dark. He could write a book about the look of the place alone.

“You could buy it.”

He looked at Jake. “I could ride a purple unicorn over the ocean, too.”

Jake crossed his arms. “You have the money. You could hire a team of carpenters to fix the place. Or level it to the ground and start over. The point is, you could.”

Alec rubbed the back of his neck. He’d never tear the house down. It had character, and in this day and age of cookie cutters, that said something. The roof had an A frame–like slant, the exterior a log cabin feel. There was an upper and lower deck for each story, and the entire eastern face was windows. He remembered from when his dad did the landscaping that it had four bedrooms and two baths. The living room was a wide-open floor plan with ceiling beams and a redbrick fireplace. There was a small office of sorts, off the den. The kitchen had needed help, even back then, but it was roomy. Let in a lot of light.