Page 80 of Everything You Hate
“So are you.”
She goes back to scrubbing. “Somebody did this around four. Bev’s security camera caught a shadow. Couldn’t make out the face.” She stops scrubbing to frown at the words. “They didn’t even spell it right.”
That grammatical crime seems to upset her just as much as the actual crime.
I grab a rag out of the bucket at the foot of the ladder and climb up the rungs on the opposite side of her. I scrub at the FS in “THIEFS”. The red comes off in smears. Underneath, the display window is intact—children’s books arranged in a rainbow, a hand-lettered sign that says SPRING READS, a stuffed animal rabbit wearing tiny spectacles.
“This is my favorite place,” Piper says. She doesn’t look at me. “I opened it three years ago. Saved for five. Every book inthere I picked. Every shelf I built. Well, Colter built, but he did it exactly how I wanted them. The paint color I mixed myself because the swatch wasn’t right.” She scrubs harder. A fleck of red flicks onto her cardigan. She doesn’t notice. “Somebody stood here at four in the morning and decided I deserved this because of something my great-great—however many great-grandfather might have done.”
My throat closes. “Piper?—”
“It’s not your fault.” She says it too fast, like she’s been rehearsing. “You didn’t spray the paint. You’re just telling a story.”
“I’m the reason they’re here to hear it.”
She stops scrubbing and looks at me with sad, angry eyes. “Yeah. You are. But the people who did this were already looking for a reason.” She tucks a curl behind her ear. Her hand is shaking. “The island’s been like this forever. The feud. The sides. People pick one and hate the other because that’s what people do.”
A tourist walks by with a phone raised and captures the graffiti before we can finish cleaning it. Piper flinches at the shutter click.
“Is that part of the treasure story?” The woman lowers her phone. She’s in her mid-twenties, wearing a Patagonia vest and Oakley sunglasses. “The graffiti? Is it, like, a clue?”
Piper’s mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
“It’s vandalism,” I snap, and throw my rag into the bucket. “Somebody spray-painted hate on a small business at four in the morning. It’s not a clue. It’s a crime.”
The woman blinks. Backs up a step. “I was just asking.”
“Don’t.” I climb down from the ladder and step between her and the window. “Don’t take pictures of someone’s pain and call it content.”
She walks away fast, head bent over her phone, thumbs moving fast over the screen. I watch her go, my heart hammering against my ribs. She definitely recorded that, and it would be all over the internet in a few hours.
Piper is still on the ladder behind me, rag dripping pink onto the sidewalk.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she says.
“Yeah. I did.”
We finish the window in silence. The red comes off in streaks, then smudges, then nothing. The glass is clean. Piper climbs down, folds the rag with mechanical precision, and tucks it into the pocket of her cardigan like she’s putting away evidence.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Piper—”
“Don’t.” She pushes her glasses up. “Just don’t, okay? I can’t do the thing where you apologize and I make you feel better. Not this morning.” She picks up the bucket and walks toward the front door of her shop, but pauses before going inside. “Come by for book club Thursday. We’re doing romance novels with terrible covers. It’s my favorite night.”
The bell chimes as she shoves the door open and disappears inside.
Main Street is worse at eight than it was at seven. The shops are opening. Tourists line up outside Wick and Wave, Brine and Bean, the Driftwood still fifteen minutes from unlocking its doors. I pass a family arguing with Fish Monroe outside The Tangled Net. The father has a metal detector propped againstthe doorframe. Fish stands with his arms crossed, his face the same flat, unreadable neutrality it always is, and says nothing while the man explains, at volume, that the north shore is public land and he has every right to search it.
“It’s private property,” Fish says. Three words. His entire contribution to the conversation.
“The Havens don’t own the whole island.”
“North shore’s theirs. Has been since the 1890s.”
The father keeps arguing. Fish stares at a point six inches left of the man’s face and waits for him to run out of oxygen.
I keep walking. The guilt I’ve been carrying since the Rosen cancellation has a new weight now. Heavier. Sharper. It sits under my sternum like something with teeth.
