Page 73 of Everything You Hate
“You’re thinking it loud.”
“I told you to keep her away from the family.” Bodhi tips his bottle toward me. His tone isn’t unkind, just tired. “Not date her.”
“It’s not a date,” we say together, then grin at each other. Well, I grin. He smirks.
Knox snorts a laugh.
Bodhi looks at us a moment longer, and whatever he sees there makes him let it go.
“Admit it, Knox,” Colter calls over. He’s still romping around in the sand with his daughter, but he’s been keeping an eye on us, too. “You came home because you missed us.”
“Missed the free beer.” Knox drains his as Shea joins us. “Hey, Shea. How’s the B and B?”
She wipes her hands on a dish towel tucked into her waistband. “Booked solid through June. Half of it’s your doing. You keep talking the place up to your Montana friends. You have to stop telling them to ask for the Knox discount, though.”
Knox grins.
She shakes her head and opens her mouth like she’s going to say more, then hesitates. Then, gentler: “Speaking of Montana. Any word from Hollis?”
That easy grin drops. “No. Called every hospital in a three-state radius. Filed a report. Hired a guy. She walked out of Haven House the night Haven House burned, and nobody’s seen her since.” He turns his empty bottle in his hands. “She was director of a place for four years, kept hundreds of women safe, and the one time she needs somewhere safe to go, she vanishes instead of calling me.”
“You don’t know for sure that she didn’t want to call you,” Piper says from her blanket, having obviously been eavesdropping rather than reading.
“Yes, I do. If she wanted me to know where she is, she would have called.”
Nobody argues that one.
“She’ll turn up,” Knox says, more to himself than anyone else. “She’s the most capable person I’ve ever met. She’s not— she’s fine. Somewhere. She’s fine.”
“Of course she is,” Shea says and touches his shoulder, and although her tone is comforting, there’s an undercurrent of doubt.
“Anyway.” Knox scrubs a hand down his face and hauls the grin back into place. “Somebody get me another beer before I get maudlin. Dean, have you told Scarlett about the goose?”
“She’s met the goose,” Dean mutters and takes a swig from his bottle.
“But I bet you haven’t told her about the time he pantsed you…”
The night goes on like that, with the Haven siblings teasing Dean and each other.
The food is good. Shea’s foil packets hold salmon and potatoes and herbs from the bed-and-breakfast’s garden,charred at the edges, steaming when opened. Wren has brought blueberry hand pies that collapse into warm, jammy messes the second you bite into them. Henry produces a thermos of something that smells like apples and cinnamon and burns all the way down.
I eat standing up, plate balanced on my palm, watching the Havens move around their corner of the beach like people who’ve been doing this for decades. Colter herding Hazel toward a blanket. Piper arranging desserts on a folding table, lining them up like she color-codes her bookshelves. Bodhi checking his phone every ninety seconds, then forcing himself to put it away.
And there, in the shadows: Zade.
I hadn’t noticed him at first. He stands apart from the family cluster, just out of reach of the fire’s light, back to a driftwood log, arms crossed, a beer untouched beside him. Coast Guard T-shirt gear under an unzipped jacket, his posture military-straight even at rest. He watches the fire like he’s reading something in the flames the rest of us can’t see.
Dean follows my gaze. “Don’t take it personally if he doesn’t talk to you. He doesn’t talk to anybody.”
“He talks to Mimi,” I say. At dinner, she was the only one he seemed completely comfortable around.
“Yeah, he does. They understand each other. Don’t ask me why. Some people just speak the same language.”
I want to ask what language that is. What Zade and Mimi have in common that the others don’t. But Dean is already moving, drawn toward a commotion at the cooler where Knox and Colter are engaged in what appears to be a very serious debate about the proper way to open a beer bottle without an opener.
I let him go and circulate. I find Corey Merrick at the edge of the Haven territory, which is either brave or stupid given thefamily history, standing with a red cup and a fleece pulled tight against the chill.
“Hey,” she says when she sees me. “You survived the storm.”
