Page 81 of Carry on Wayward Son

Everyone waited.

With a trembling hand, Layla reached into the pocket of her workout pants and came out with a contact lens case. Carefully, she opened it and slowly popped out a contact from each eye. Even from here, I saw the dark brown of the lenses as she placed them in the case. She blinked for a moment as her eyes adjusted.

Then she looked up with hazel eyes, and I understood exactly how much of a disguise those contacts had been. Because even with the slight modification of eye shape from the tattooed eyeliner, those eyes were unmistakably and achingly familiar to anyone in this room who’d spent time looking at Madden Reilly’s face.

For a long moment, I worried it wouldn’t be enough. That they wouldn’t understand. But even as I watched, something shifted in Layla’s face, the release of some sort of mask. And I saw the subtle emergence of Gwen in those features. I didn’t know how. Couldn’t even comprehend the level of fine muscle control it took her to avoid exactly this. But suddenly I saw what had been there all along.

A ripple of confusion moved through the others. A collective processing of something that didn’t immediately compute. Then eyes began to shift from Layla’s face to Madden’s and back again, the resemblance suddenly visible in a way that had been hidden before, the bone structure and the coloring that had been there all along underneath the dark contacts and the hair dye and the tattooed makeup and the time between.

Willa made a sound.

It wasn’t a word. It came from somewhere far deeper than words, from the place where years of grief and searching had been stored, and she was on her feet before it finished leaving her, moving forward with her hand outstretched like she needed to confirm with her fingers what her eyes were telling her.

“Gwen?” Her name was barely a whisper.

The corner of Layla’s mouth moved. Barely. The kick of something real underneath everything else, the smile of the girl who had known Willa since before either of them knew what the world was going to do to them. “Hi, Wills.”

And then Willa’s arms were around her and my sister was crying with her whole body, holding on the way she’d wanted for all these years because she’d just been given something to hold.

Gabi shot to her feet but stopped two steps away, her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide and wet. I watched her fight the impulse to rush forward because some part of her brain was still asking the question her heart had already answered. “How do we know it’s really you?”

Layla—Gwen—pulled back just enough from Willa to look at her. “You have a scar on your right butt cheek from scaling the playground fence in the fourth grade because Bobby Downy said girls couldn’t climb. You could climb just fine, but he pushed you, and you slipped. And you didn’t want anyone to tell the teacher because you didn’t want the school to notify your dad.”

Gabi made a sound that was almost a laugh and had nothing of laughter in it. “Oh my God.” She was already moving, already crying, stumbling forward into the hug that was still happening, and now there were three of them holding on in the middle of Willa’s living room. The room around them held a silence that was full of fifteen years and grief and the stunned quality of a miracle that nobody had let themselves believe in.

I looked at Madden.

She sat perfectly still, her hand in Rios’s, as she stared at the three women with a look that told me she was simultaneously processing something at two speeds. The fast layer that understood what it was seeing, and the slower, deeper layer where the full weight of it hadn’t finished arriving. Gwen was her cousin. Her blood. The girl whose disappearance had irrevocably marked her, whose case had brought Madden back to this island. Gwen was alive. Had been alive. Had been sitting at their table, going through files with them, sitting across from Miles in a prison room. Had known the whole time and said nothing.

All those layers landed, and I watched Madden do the thing I suspected she’d done as a prosecutor holding something complicated without letting it hold her instead. Rios’s hands tightened around hers because he saw it too.

Around the room, the others were having their versions. Ford standing with both hands in his hair. Bree’s hand on his arm. Sawyer with his hand on Willa’s back even through the hug, his face doing something private that he wasn’t going to put into the room. Daniel quiet the way he was quiet when something mattered.

The hug loosened eventually. Not broke. They stayed close, the three of them recalibrating something that had been long fractured and was in the early stages of becoming whole again.

Rios let the room have what it needed. Then he did what Rios did, which was to bring it back with quiet authority and an understanding that feeling and moving forward were not mutually exclusive.

“Tell us what we’re dealing with. Something changed tonight for you to bring this up now. Because you never planned to, did you?”

Color moved into Layla’s cheeks. The involuntary flush of someone caught in a truth they hadn’t meant to be standing in. “No.” She sucked in a bracing breath. “But since the man I thought I killed to escape was hosting the party tonight, we’ve got bigger problems.”

Forty-Two

LAYLA

In the thrumming silence that followed, it occurred to me that perhaps I’d crossed some line admitting to attempted murder in front of the current Chief of Police. On top of the reveal that I’d only been soap-opera dead, maybe that was too much for all of them to process.

“Who?” The trembling growl came from Gabi. Sweet, soft-hearted Gabi, who seldom lost her temper, but when she did… Her voice held an edge I’d never heard from her before, and her eyes had hardened in a way that made the family resemblance to Rios suddenly obvious.

“Halston Ashmore,” Jace said. “Son of Edmund Ashmore, who has his fingers in financial operations up and down the coast.”

Gabi turned to her brother. “Arrest him.”

Rios opened his mouth, but I was already moving to cut this off before it built momentum. “It’s not that simple. Right now it would be my word against his about what happened. Rios can’t march in there and arrest a man like Halston Ashmore without evidence. It would get thrown out before it started, and we’d have shown our hand for nothing.”

“She’s right.” Rios leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “First things first. Did he recognize you?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so. I’m older, with different hair, the colored contacts, the permanent makeup to change the shape of my eyes. None of you recognized me. But⁠—”