Chapter 6
Caleb didn’t come back. Days passed, then a full week. Tania stayed on the island with nothing but her laptop, her sketches, and regular calls to Dr. Jeff to track her numbers.
She was working on a new design one evening when her phone buzzed. A message from the detective.
Photos. Blurry, old, clearly copied from some old case file. Caleb’s mother, lying at the base of a building, her body twisted at an angle that made Tania’s stomach turn.
The official report said heart attack. But the detective’s message went on. The autopsy noted bruising on her wrists that didn’t match a simple fall. There was a sixty percent chance, in his words, that someone had pushed her.
Tania set the phone down and stared at the wall.
If someone pushed her, was it her own mother? Was that the sin the diary meant?
A second message came in an hour later, this one from Jordan.
I found someone who remembers your mother. She didn’t get abducted, Tania. The old-timers in Millbrook say she packed a bag and left in the middle of the night. On her own.
Tania read it three times. Each time, it made less sense than the last.
• • •
Tania didn’t sleep that night. She sat with the news until her mind wore itself out, circling the same question over and over.
Had her mother pushed a woman to her death, then run before anyone could catch her? Or had her mother left for some other reason entirely, something no one had bothered to explain to a five-year-old left behind?
She thought of her father instead. The way he used to talk about her mother, always soft, always sad, never once angry. He had waited by the window for years. A man like that didn’t wait for a murderer.
She needed to go to Millbrook herself. She messaged Jordan and asked for his father’s old friend’s contact information, someone who might remember more than rumors.
Then she packed a small bag and asked the island staff to arrange a boat back to the mainland.
The staff member at the door didn’t move. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Wilson. Mr. Wilson owns this island now. No one leaves without his permission.”
Tania stood there for a long moment, the bag still in her hand.
She had thought, somewhere in the back of her mind, that Caleb forgetting about her for a week meant she was free. She understood now that she had only been free to walk the beach. Nothing more.
• • •
Gabriel found her on the shore a few days later, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest, watching the water.
He sat down beside her. “I keep coming back. I know I shouldn’t.”
“Then don’t.”
“I can’t help it.” He took her hand gently this time, no force in it. “Tania, let me take care of you. I’ll protect you. You don’t have to be afraid of him.”
She pulled her hand back, but softer than before. “I can’t, Gabriel.”
“Why not?” His voice cracked slightly. “He tortures you. He humiliates you. Do you still love him? Don’t you regret ever falling for him in the first place?”
“No,” she said quietly.
She thought of the fire. The smoke, the heat, the way a stranger’s hand had found hers in the dark and pulled her out before the ceiling came down. She had loved Caleb since that night, long before she understood what love even was.
Lost in the memory, she let her head drop onto Gabriel’s shoulder without meaning to. He wrapped an arm around her from behind, careful, like she might break.
A shadow fell over both of them.
Tania looked up. Caleb stood over them, perfectly still, his face unreadable in a way that was somehow worse than shouting.
• • •
Caleb moved before Tania could even stand. His hand closed around Gabriel’s throat and lifted him half off the sand.
“Caleb, stop!”
He didn’t look at her. He reached into his jacket instead and pulled out a gun, pressing it to the side of Gabriel’s head.
Gabriel went still. Tania screamed and grabbed at Caleb’s arm, begging him to let go, but it was like pulling at stone.
Caleb couldn’t stop seeing it. Her head on another man’s shoulder. Another man’s arm around her waist.
He lowered the gun at the last second, and instead, twisted Gabriel’s arm behind his back until something snapped. Gabriel’s scream cut through the air.
Tania’s legs gave out. The last thing she saw before everything went dark was sand rushing up to meet her.
• • •
Tania woke up in the villa bedroom, Caleb sitting beside the bed. The moment her eyes opened, he gripped her chin.
“What am I supposed to do with you?” he said quietly. “You always find a way back to him. I’ve run out of ways to stop it.”
“What did you do to Gabriel?”
He didn’t answer.
“What did you do to him, Caleb?”
Still nothing. Something in her cracked wide open, and every angry word she’d swallowed for months came pouring out at once, names she never thought she’d call him, wishes she never thought she’d say out loud, wishing he would just kill her already and end it.
By the end, she was crying too hard to keep shouting. She collapsed against his chest instead, her fists still weakly pressed to his shirt.
“Just let me go,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Can’t you see,” he said, his voice rough, “that you’re the only one I love, you idiot? Why do you make me destroy everything around you?”
She looked up at him, and whatever answer she meant to give dissolved the moment his mouth found hers.
Neither of them spoke again for a long time.