The house feels wrong as soon as Rhys and I walk in. Too quiet. We head for the kitchen, but there’s no sign of anyone.
“Where is everybody?” he asks, checking the clock above the stove. “They should be back by now.”
“I’ll check the guesthouse for Jules and Bianca. Can you see if Dane and Livia are upstairs?”
He nods. I go through the patio and out the side gate. The guesthouse is empty. I knock anyway, then send a message to the group asking where everyone has gone. On my way back, I find myself at the top of the stairs that lead down to the shore.
Dane is sitting on the rocks. The sun catches in his dark hair, and the wind lifts the collar of his jacket. I make my way down, calling to him. He looks back once, then turns to the water again.
“Where’s Livia?”
He shrugs. Something in me sinks. I sit beside him and stretch my clay-marked legs toward the water.
“Rhys and I are sorry we didn’t tell you,” I say. “We should have.”
“You should have,” he agrees. “But I should’ve come to you as soon as I saw Rhys’s message.”
A white boat drifts toward one of the small islands. “I hope you can forgive us eventually.”
He glances over. “Mara, you’re already forgiven. You’re like a sister to me. You’re family. I’ll always forgive you.”
My chest tightens. “I thought family meant you got unlimited time to hold a grudge.”
“Maybe in some families.” He puts an arm around my shoulders. “Not ours.”
“If you’re not sitting here thinking about how badly we let you down, what’s with the tragic stare at the ocean?”
A smile crosses his face and disappears. “Livia and I fought. She walked out.”
“Oh, Dane. I’m sorry. This is my fault. I’ll call her—”
He takes his arm away and turns toward me. “It isn’t. If I’m honest, some part of me has expected her to leave ever since we got engaged. Her life was coming apart when she said yes. I thought she needed something solid, an anchor. Whatever she told me, I kept thinking she’d change her mind and run.” He looks down at his hands. “We argued last night. She went downstairs to cool off. When I woke up, she was gone. She hasn’t answered all day.”
“She’s scared.”
He scoffs. “Livia? She’s never scared of anything.”
I search for a way to make him hear me. “You just told me we’re family. Right?”
He nods.
“For you, Bianca, Rhys, and Jules, maybe family means you can fight and still come back to each other. It wasn’t like that for Livia or me. Her father would rather get divorced than apologize. At my house, when people argued, everyone left. No one fixed anything. The hurt just stayed there.”
“What are you saying?”
“She didn’t leave because she doesn’t love you. She left because she’s afraid that, when it matters, she won’t be worth coming after.”
Dane stares at me. I watch the thought land. “Shit.” He pushes himself upright. “We have to find her.”
“We will.”
• • •
By the time we get back to the house, Bianca and Jules have returned from their massages. Neither has heard from Livia. We all call and text until it’s clear we need to look for her.
“You two were supposed to spend the morning together,” Bianca says. “What had she planned?”
“I don’t know. She arranged everything and never gave me the details.”
“Not even an address?” Rhys asks.
Dane looks at him. “Yes, there was an address, but how could that possibly help?” His voice is dry. “No, nothing. She could’ve left in the middle of the night. She could be in a hospital bed for all I know.”
“We’ll find her,” Rhys says. “Don’t jump to the worst conclusion.”
“It’s my fault,” Dane says. “I was angry about last night and blamed her, as if I hadn’t wanted the same thing. I did. I was all in. Then everything went wrong, and I acted like it was her doing. Now she’s gone.”
Bianca’s gaze goes distant while she thinks. “We need to be logical.”
“You’ll hate this,” Rhys says to Dane, “but should we call her family?”
“There’s no way she went to them. She barely tells them anything. My family’s already planning a huge wedding, and hers doesn’t even know we’re engaged.”
“Then we search around town,” Bianca says.
“We’ll find her,” Jules says, rubbing his shoulder.
“We should split up,” I say.
Rhys and Dane take the Land Rover. Bianca and I go in her station wagon. Jules stays behind in case Livia comes back.
We check the downtown places we usually visit, then the beaches, parks, and nearby towns. The café is packed with people enjoying the sun and Crab Week. Part of me had expected to find Livia on its patio, drinking coffee and watching gulls squabble over breakfast scraps.
“We should ask the host,” Bianca says. “Maybe they saw her.”
They haven’t. The streets are thick with tourists wearing face paint and carrying ice cream, enough people that Livia could disappear into the crowd.
At the Roxy, we ask the ticket-taker, who’s wearing a porkpie hat, whether he’s seen her. He answers with a shrug. We buy tickets and check both theaters separately. Nothing.
We search the mystery bookstore, the wharf, and the crab shack, including its graffiti-covered bathrooms. We even look in the tattoo studio in case she’s staging some small rebellion and getting a local tattoo. She isn’t there. The next call goes straight to voicemail.
“Her phone must’ve died,” Bianca says.
“That’s not like her.”
“Do you think she lied about the hotels being full? Could she have checked in somewhere?”
I search for open rooms nearby. There isn’t a hotel, motel, inn, or hostel with a vacancy.
A message arrives in the group chat, and we both jump. It’s Rhys. I’ve unblocked his number again.
Any luck?
None. You?
Dane’s worried, he writes. He’s going to call hospitals. Just to be safe.
My stomach turns. Keep us posted, I type.
You too.
Bianca studies our list. “That’s all the usual places. She wouldn’t be reckless enough to take a boat out alone, would she?”
“She’s a confident sailor,” I say. “And being on the water is her happy place. It reminds her of her mom and when…”
“Mara?” Bianca turns to me. “What is it?”
“Her mom.”
“What about her?”
“It may be nothing. But there’s one more place we should check.”
• • •
“Stop the car!”
I shout with enough force that Bianca slams on the brakes in the middle of the road—or what the GPS calls a road. It’s really a wooded lane. A parking area might be somewhere ahead, but I don’t care about that now. Through the trees on our right, I can see a little open-air chapel. A cherry-red Jaguar sits on the dirt shoulder.
Bianca pulls forward and parks. We look inside the car; it’s empty. Then we climb over a low stone wall and hurry up the hillside.
The damp woods open onto a tended garden. At its center stands a gray stone pavilion, ivy climbing one side. Butterflies drift above the flowering shrubs along the steps. Beyond them, waves break somewhere out of sight.