Page 69 of Carry on Wayward Son

She’d been on the beach for the better part of an hour. A figure on the sand below the dune line, moving through the slow, deliberate practice of forms, though I couldn’t say which particular martial art these were from. Each movement flowed into the next, graceful, purposeful. The kind of thing you did to remind your body of what it knew, to stay inside your own skin when the world kept trying to pull you out of it. The wind off the Atlantic had tugged hair loose from her braid. Her breath made small clouds in the cold air.

Koa sat at the top of the dune path and watched her with steady patience.

I had my own work to do. I did it badly for forty minutes, getting up twice to look out the window for no good reason, before I gave up and headed to the deck to watch her. It was as much attraction to her competence as compulsion to protect her. And maybe a part of me wondered if her solo training would have the same impact as our sparring sessions.

My phone rang. I dug it out of my pocket and stared at my father’s name on the display.

In the category of last person I wanted to talk to…

I answered anyway because he wouldn’t call unless he wanted something, and I was better off knowing what he was angling for than stonewalling.

“Jace.” His voice was warm, the way it always was, the warmth sitting on top of something else the way a good paint job hid the defects in the wall beneath. “I heard you’ve been home for a stretch. I should’ve called sooner.”

We both understood why he hadn’t, and we weren’t going to discuss it on a weekday afternoon, spitting distance from Christmas, which was another thing we both understood. “What’s going on, Dad?”

“I’m coming in for New Year’s Eve. A colleague of mine is hosting a party on the island. Going to be quite a gathering, from what I hear. Seemed like a good chance to see you.” The pause had the timing of a man who’d spent decades learning exactly how long to let things breathe before he continued. “It’s been too long.”

Too long since I’d pulled back after finding out the truth about him institutionalizing Willa and lying about it. Too long since I’d joined the Navy and spent the bulk of my career on one undercover op after another. Too long since he’d had me under his thumb.

“Who’s the colleague?”

“Fellow named Ashmore. Edmund Ashmore. You remember his son, Halston, from school. Old Virginia family, good connections up and down the coast. He’s already sent you an e-vite. Check your email.”

I pulled the phone from my ear and opened the app.

The name sat in my inbox like it had been waiting. Edmund Ashmore. The e-vite was formal and warm, the kind a man sent when he understood that the guest list itself was part of the message. A New Year’s Eve gathering at his Hatterwick Island property, black tie encouraged, a who’s who of coastal money and connections. My father’s name was presumably already on it, which meant Edmund Ashmore and John Hollingsworth had the kind of relationship that warranted a holiday invitation, which meant they’d been moving in the same circles for long enough to have built something worth maintaining.

Ashmore Holdings LLC. The property on the island. The name I’d handed to Dax two weeks ago and hadn’t heard back on yet. No harm in doing my own recon since the opportunity was falling into my lap.

I put the phone back to my ear. “I’ll be there.”

The pleased note in his voice told me that I’d given the answer he wanted. We did a few more minutes of the performance. How long he was staying, whether I’d seen Willa, all of it navigated with the careful precision of two people who had plenty to say to each other and had agreed without discussing it to say none of it on the phone. I kept my end of it clean and brief and got off the call.

I sat with the phone in my hand and looked at the Atlantic.

Edmund Ashmore. On this island. Hosting a New Year’s Eve party my father was attending as his guest.

My father, who had development interests up and down this coast, who had spent years pushing my grandfather to sell the north end of the island before Willa inherited it and settled the question for good. My father, who moved in financial circles where a man like Edmund Ashmore would be entirely at home, who had spent his whole career cultivating exactly the kind of connections that got you invited to a black tie party on a barrier island in December.

Early on, I’d considered Layla’s question about whether my father could be connected to any of this, and I’d come back to probably not, because whatever my father was—and I had a clear-eyed view of that—there were lines he drew. He was vain and self-serving and had failed his daughter in ways I was still working through, but he drew lines.

Except I’d have said the same thing about having Willa institutionalized. About lying to her face for two years about what was real and what wasn’t. About the specific kind of damage that kind of thing did to a person and whether someone who claimed to love her could knowingly do it. I’d have said he’d never do that, and I’d have been wrong.

The wind off the ocean had teeth in it. I’d been sitting on the step long enough that the cold had worked through my jacket and settled in, and I hadn’t moved because moving required deciding something about what I’d just learned, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

On the beach below, Layla finished whatever she’d been working through and stood still for a moment at the waterline, her hair loose around her face, looking at the water. Then she turned and started up toward the dune path.

I watched her come. She moved across the sand with an unhurried stride, and she was already reading my face before she’d made it to the steps. I could see it in the way she adjusted, the way she took the steps without hurrying but without the ease of someone arriving somewhere uncomplicated.

She sat down beside me on the top step without asking if she should. “What’s wrong?”

I sucked in a breath. Let it out again. “My father called.”

On a noncommittal hum, she laced her hand with mine, offering silent support.

I’d given her pieces of the picture over the past weeks. Enough that she understood the shape of it without having every detail. She didn’t need more than the shape right now, and she knew that, so she let it be what it was.

That was the thing about Layla. She’d had plenty of opportunities to press on the parts of my life I hadn’t offered up voluntarily, and she hadn’t taken any of them. Not because she wasn’t curious—I’d watched her be curious about things for weeks, the way her attention sharpened when something caught it—but because she understood the difference between what was hers to ask and what wasn’t. She’d built that understanding the hard way, and she extended it to other people without appearing to think about it.