A couple at the next table glanced over. Kit dropped her voice a notch and leaned in. “No, seriously. If there was some guy tied to the Barkers—farmhand, overseer, whatever—there’d be records somewhere. Pay ledgers, work rosters. Selene probably hasn’t gotten through all the boxes yet. We could actually?—”
“Help?” I finished, a reluctant smile tugging at my lips. “Join the coven and solve a hundred-year-old teen pregnancy?”
“Precisely.” She sat back, smug. “Tell me that doesn’t sound more fun than moping around Star Harbor.”
“I’m not moping,” I pouted. But Kit had a point.
My life felt like it had stalled out in my childhood bedroom and on Wes’s sagging couch. The idea of focusing on someone else’s mess—a dead woman’s secrets instead of my own—had an undeniable appeal.
“Fine,” I said slowly. “If there was some mystery man hanging around the Barker farm, and if he was the one she was hiding from or hiding with ... there might be a paper trail.”
Kit’s grin turned feral. “That’s my girl. We’ll pitch it to Selene. She’ll pretend not to be thrilled and then stay up all night reading microfiche or whatever archivists do for fun.”
I laughed, the sound loosening something in my chest. For a minute it felt like old times—me and Kit in some diner booth or crappy bar, spinning stories out of nothing and daring each other to go one step further.
Except this time, there was a ghost, a cursed town, and our brother’s face in a photograph that shouldn’t exist.
I took a long sip of my latte, letting the warmth slide down. “Okay,” I said. “I’m in. On the condition that if we accidentally raise the Lady from the dead, you’re the one who explains it to Mom.”
Kit snorted. “Deal. I’ve survived Dad’s lectures about responsible life choices. I can handle one homicidal ghost.”
The joke landed, but as I set my cup down, a little shiver walked up my spine anyway.
Maybe it was the thought of the Lady, or her scratched-out eyes. Maybe it was the eerie, unexplained resemblance to Hayes. Maybe it was the idea of some scared, pregnant young woman hiding in the dunes and nobody listening.
Or maybe it was just that digging into someone else’s haunting sounded a hell of a lot easier than dealing with my own.
Kit’s eyes slid back to me, sharpening in that way it did when she smelled fresh gossip.
“So,” she said slowly, sipping the last of her latte.
I groaned. “Don’t.”
She ignored me completely, and her grin turned wicked. “How’s life with Mr. Sunshine? Have you two learned to coexist, or is it mostly aggressive glaring?”
Heat crawled up my neck. I suddenly found the latte foam very interesting. “It’s fine,” I said, too quickly. “Awkward. He’s ... Wes, but different.”
Kit’s brows rose. “That was a lot of syllables to say nothing. Hayes made it sound like he’s one bad day away from becoming a full-time hermit.” She leaned in. “Is he really that bad? Missing appointments, shutting people out, refusing help, all that?”
Images flickered through my mind, uninvited—the dent in his couch where he clearly slept more than his bed, the lip into the bathroom that caught his prosthetic every time, the way he’d gripped the parallel bars this morning, jaw clenched as sweat slid down his spine. The stubborn line of his mouth when Jess pushed him, the raw humiliation in his eyes when he’d stumbled.
I forced my shoulders to relax. “He’s doing better than Hayes thinks,” I lied. “He’s stubborn, but he’s ... trying. You know how dramatic big brothers can be.”
Kit frowned into her drink. “Hayes isn’t dramatic, he’s?—”
“Protective,” I cut in, softening it. “I get it. I just don’t think treating Wes like a lost cause is helping.”
Kit frowned again. “I never said ‘lost cause.’”
“You were thinking it,” I said lightly, then immediately regretted the sharpness in my tone.
Her eyes narrowed. “Okay, what’s that about?”
I tapped a fingernail against the ceramic mug. “Nothing. I just ... he’s not a project. That’s all.”
A small voice in my head grated on my nerves.Since when do you care?
Since he let me move in and I saw what it costs him just to get through a day, apparently. Since I watched him work his ass off at PT so nobody could accuse him of not trying. Since I’ve seen enough of the man he used to be to know he’s still in there somewhere.