Plot Twist In Paradise
by IAmHerEmma

 

 

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Chapter Seventeen: Smoke, Rum, and My Last Functioning Brain Cell

 

Lyle had outdone himself, and I hated that I had to admit it.

The bonfire wasn't a bonfire. It was an event. The stretch of beach past the pool deck had been transformed into something that looked like a catalog shoot for a resort that charged twice what this one did — which, knowing what this one charged, was saying something. Tiki torches lined the path down from the main building, their flames doing that lazy tropical sway. A four-piece band had set up on a low wooden platform near the water — guitar, bass, keys, drums — already working through something acoustic and unhurried, a versatile resort act that could pivot from island covers to pop ballads without breaking a sweat. There were blankets laid out on the sand, low wooden chairs arranged in loose clusters around the fire pit, and a satellite bar staffed and stocked with enough rum to drown a small nation's sorrows.

The fire itself was enormous. Not dangerously so — Lyle was too organized for genuine peril — but tall enough that the heat reached me halfway down the path, carrying woodsmoke and something faintly sweet underneath — whatever had been used to get it started was still burning off. The whole thing felt curated without feeling staged, which was the most dangerous combination.

I'd spent twenty minutes getting ready, which was nineteen more than I'd planned. The green dress from dinner the other night was too much for a bonfire, so I'd gone with something simpler — a wrap top in a color Sasha would have called "terracotta" and I'd call "reddish," loose linen pants, sandals that I could actually walk in on sand. Hair down because the humidity was going to do whatever it wanted anyway and I'd decided to stop negotiating with it. I looked fine. I looked like someone going to a bonfire. I looked like someone who had absolutely not tried on two other things first.

Milo was already down by the fire when I arrived, because Milo was always already somewhere, existing at full volume before anyone else had committed to showing up. He'd claimed a cluster of low chairs near the fire pit and was sitting with his legs stretched out, a drink in one hand and the other gesturing at Talia, who was cross-legged on a blanket next to Cass.

"You're late," Milo said when he spotted me, as if we'd agreed on a time, which we absolutely had not.

"I'm early for me," I said, dropping into the chair next to him. "What are we drinking?"

"Rum punch. The bartender said it's Lyle's recipe, which means it's either incredible or we'll all be dead by ten." He raised his own drink — served in a coconut shell, because of course it was — and pointed me toward the satellite bar.

The satellite bar was a few steps from our cluster, manned by a guy I hadn't seen before — young, cheerful, already sweating slightly from the fire's reach. He had a row of coconut shells lined up like he'd been preparing for a siege.

"Rum punch?" the bartender asked, already reaching for the ladle before I'd opened my mouth.

"Is that the only option?"

"It's the recommended option." He filled a coconut shell with practiced efficiency. "Lyle's recipe. He gave me the instructions three times and a laminated card."

I took the coconut shell — complete with a tiny paper umbrella wedged into the rim — and walked back to my chair.

Talia spotted the umbrella the second I sat down. "He put umbrellas in the drinks. Tiny ones. I love this man. I want Lyle to plan my funeral."

"You want your funeral planned by an activities coordinator?" Cass asked, without looking up from whatever she was doing on her phone.

"I want my funeral to have themed cocktails and a colour-coordinated schedule, yes."

"Noted."

I took a sip. The rum punch was, annoyingly, excellent. Sweet enough to be dangerous, strong enough to remind you that this was not, in fact, a smoothie. I settled into my chair and let the fire do its thing — the warmth hit differently on a beach at night, softer than sunlight, less insistent.

Emmett was making the rounds, stopping at each cluster of guests long enough to make everyone feel personally welcomed without anyone feeling managed. When he reached us, he put a hand on the back of an empty chair and surveyed the group like a man inspecting something he'd built.

"Talia, that kaftan is spectacular."

Talia smoothed the fabric with both hands. It looked like she'd mugged a very stylish grandmother. "Thank you, Emmett. I've been told it's a lot."

"It's exactly the right amount." He turned to the rest of us. "The band's taking requests tonight, by the way. If anyone has something they want to hear."

Milo sat up so fast he nearly spilled his drink.

"Requests. As in, songs. That they will play. Because I asked."

"That is generally how requests work," I said, already regretting that he'd been given this information.

"This changes everything."

"It changes nothing," I said into my coconut shell.

"It changes the entire evening, Ade. I now have power."

Cass finally looked up from her phone. "Please don't abuse it."

"I will absolutely abuse it."

The fire popped and sent a shower of sparks up into the dark. Other guests had settled into their own clusters around the pit — a couple sharing a blanket and a drink, a group of women who'd been at the mixer, a pair of older men leaning into each other without talking, looking at the fire like they'd earned it. The band had shifted into something slower, the guitar carrying a melody that the bass was content to follow. The whole scene had the quality of a night that was assembling itself without anyone having to force it.

"Where's Renee?" Milo asked, scanning the path.

My eyes went to the torchlit walkway before I could redirect them. Empty.

"She'll be here," Talia said.

"You talked to her?" I asked.

"We saw her at the pool this afternoon. She swam, like, forty laps. I'm not even exaggerating — Cass counted."

"I counted twelve before I stopped caring."

"Which in Cass math is basically forty," Talia said, waving it off like a minor detail.

So Renee had been around today. At the pool. Swimming laps. While I'd been at the desk sitting with Maribel's words and the empty path outside my window and a vague, unexamined awareness that the morning felt quieter than it should have.

I took another sip of the rum punch and let that one go.

"More importantly," Milo said, leaning forward with the expression that meant someone was about to have their evening derailed, "Nico is coming tonight."

Talia's head snapped toward him. "What?"

"Off duty. Not working. As a guest." Milo was vibrating at a frequency I hadn't seen before, and I'd seen some frequencies. "Emmett gave the bar staff the night off for the bonfire. He told me twenty minutes ago and I've been processing it ever since."

"How are you doing with the processing?" I asked, watching him squeeze his drink hard enough to threaten the structural integrity of the coconut shell.

"Terribly. What do I do with my hands?"

"The same thing you always do with your hands."

"I don't know what I always do with my hands, Ade. I've never thought about my hands before in my life and now they're all I can think about." He held them up and stared at them with genuine distress.

"Wrap them around your drink," Cass said. "Stop talking about them."

"What if he comes and sits near us?"

"Then you say hello and act like a person," I said, like I was explaining something to a very bright child who had momentarily forgotten how society worked.

"I don't think I can act like a person tonight. I think tonight I'm going to be slightly worse than a person."

"You're going to be fine," Talia said, though her grin suggested she was mostly looking forward to watching him not be fine.

He wasn't fine. Nico appeared about ten minutes later, coming down the path with the unhurried ease of someone who had no idea he was being monitored by four people and a growing sense of communal investment. He'd traded the bar uniform for a fitted dark henley, sleeves pushed to the elbows, and dark jeans. He looked, objectively, like someone who had put in minimal effort and achieved maximum result, which was either infuriating or magnetic depending on your relationship to the situation.

Milo's relationship to the situation was immediate cardiac arrest.

"Oh no," Milo breathed, sinking lower in his chair like he could somehow become invisible through posture alone.

"Oh yes," Talia said, already leaning forward like she was settling in for a show.

"He's wearing a real shirt. That's a real shirt. That's not a uniform, that's a choice he made."

"It's a very good choice," I said.

"I'm going to die. I'm going to die at a bonfire in a pineapple shirt and they'll have to ship my body home."

"Your shirt is fine," Cass said, rolling her eyes, which only made Milo look down at himself with renewed horror.

"My shirt has pineapples on it, Cass."

"Pineapples are festive."

"Pineapples are what you wear when you've given up on being taken seriously as a romantic prospect."

Nico had paused at the bar to get a drink — which, given that he was usually on the other side of one, had a certain satisfying symmetry — and was now scanning the clusters of chairs with the mildly evaluative expression of someone deciding where to sit. His gaze passed over our group, moved on, and then came back like he'd changed his mind about something. He picked up his drink and walked over.

"Room for one more?" His voice sounded different outside the context of the bar — still quiet, still economical, but without the professional buffer.

"Always," Milo said, and then immediately looked like he wished he'd said literally anything else.

Nico took the chair on the other side of Milo and settled in without ceremony. He didn't say anything else, and the fact that he'd chosen this cluster, out of every cluster on this beach, was doing all the talking.

Milo's face was a masterpiece of controlled devastation. I glanced at Talia and she caught my eye immediately, her expression already saying do not intervene, this is the best thing that has ever happened.

And then Renee was there.

She came down the path without hurry, wearing a simple black tank and shorts, her hair down and still slightly wavy. She stopped at the satellite bar first, exchanged a few words with the bartender, and came back with a drink. Then she looked around, clocked our group, and walked over.

"Hey," Renee said to the group, and settled into the chair next to mine.

"Hey," I said back, sitting up slightly straighter before I could stop myself.

The simplicity of it made my earlier hyperawareness of her absence feel slightly ridiculous, which it had been, and I was choosing not to examine that further tonight.

"You missed the Nico situation," Talia stage-whispered to Renee, tilting her head toward the chair where Nico was sitting approximately eighteen inches from Milo.

Renee looked. Assessed. "He chose that chair."

"He chose that chair," Talia confirmed, nearly vibrating on her blanket.

"Good for Milo."

"Milo is currently not breathing."

"I can see that." Renee took a sip of her drink. "He'll figure it out."

The fire had settled into its rhythm — the initial roar burned down to something steadier, warm enough to lean into without flinching. More guests had arrived. Lyle was circulating with the energy of a man whose life's work was being validated in real time, pointing at the fire, pointing at the band, pointing at things that didn't need pointing at but were getting pointed at anyway. Emmett intercepted him at one point and said something close to his ear that made Lyle beam, which was like telling the sun to be brighter.

The rum punch was doing its job. Milo on the other hand had gone dangerously quiet. He was staring at the fire with the fixed concentration of a man who had forgotten how to begin a conversation and was hoping the universe would handle it. The universe, as usual, had other plans.

Nico handled it instead.

"So how long are you here for?" Nico asked, shifting slightly in his chair toward Milo.

"Another week," Milo managed, with the confidence of a man defusing a bomb he'd never seen before.

Talia made a sound into her drink.

"Give or take," Milo added, as if precision might save him. "We got here a few days ago, I think. Time does a weird thing at resorts. Everything kind of blurs."

"It does," Nico agreed easily. "You like it so far?"

"The resort? Yeah, it's — yeah. The beach is great. The water is very..." Milo gestured vaguely toward the ocean. "Wet. Blue. Both."

I took a long sip of my drink.

"The drinks are incredible, though," Milo added quickly, and then seemed to realize who he was talking to. "Which — you already know that. Because you make them. Obviously."

"I appreciate the review," Nico said, something warming in his expression that he didn't seem in any hurry to hide.

"Five stars. I'd give you five stars. If there were stars. For bartending."

"There are, actually. There's a review board in the lobby."

"There's a review board?"

"No."

Milo stared at him. Nico's expression broke into an actual smile — small, but real — and Milo laughed, too loud and too sudden, startled by his own delight.

This was the moment Talia decided to help.

"So Nico," she leaned forward on the blanket with the energy of someone about to conduct a job interview, "Milo was just telling us earlier how much he loves the bar. Like specifically the bar. The actual physical bar and everything behind it."

"I did not say that," Milo cut in immediately.

"You said, and I'm quoting, 'the bar is the best part of this resort.'"

"I said the drinks were good. That's different from declaring a personal obsession with a piece of furniture."

"You also said—"

"Talia." Milo turned to her with his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle working. "Thank you. For your input. Which I did not ask for."

"I'm just saying you're a fan," Talia said, settling back on the blanket.

Nico looked between them, reading the table the way he probably read every table — quickly, accurately, and with quiet enjoyment. "It's nice to hear," he said, turning back to Milo. "Most people don't notice the bar itself. I helped Emmett pick the wood for it, actually."

Milo's entire body rotated toward him. "You did?"

"He was renovating last year and wanted something that fit the space. We went back and forth on different finishes, looked at samples for weeks. He's particular about the details."

"That's — I mean, that makes sense. The bar feels like it belongs there. Like it grew out of the floor." Milo paused. "That sounded less weird in my head."

"No, I know what you mean," Nico said, and the ease of it — no rush to fill the pause, no polite redirect — made Milo's shoulders drop about two inches.

"You'd think he studied architecture," Cass said, without looking up. "He's a nurse."

It landed so casually that it took a beat for anyone to register she'd said it at all. But the precision of it was pure Cass — she'd waited for exactly the moment when Milo couldn't pivot the conversation toward anything real about himself, and she'd done it for him, clean and without fanfare.

"Yeah?" Nico turned back to Milo with what looked like genuine interest. "Where?"

"Emergency department." Milo rubbed the back of his neck. "It's less glamorous than it sounds. Mostly it's people who've googled their symptoms and arrived convinced they're dying of something they saw on a podcast."

"That does sound like bartending, actually."

Milo grinned. "People telling you their problems at two a.m.?"

"People telling me their problems at two a.m.," Nico confirmed. "Except mine have had six margaritas and want me to agree that their ex was the problem."

"Mine have had no margaritas and want me to agree that the rash is not cancer."

"Is it ever cancer?"

"It's never cancer. It's always contact dermatitis or anxiety." Milo was leaning toward Nico now, just talking, two people who'd stumbled into a frequency neither of them expected. "But you can't say 'it's not cancer, you're just stressed,' because then they want to speak to your supervisor about your bedside manner."

"I get that with cocktails. Someone orders a martini dirty with extra olives and then sends it back because it tastes like olives."

"People are insane."

"People are completely insane," Nico agreed, and they looked at each other for a second that lasted slightly longer than it needed to.

I glanced at Renee. She was watching them with that quiet almost-smile, and when she caught me looking, she raised her eyebrows just slightly — a wordless well, would you look at that — before turning back to the fire.

Talia was the one who spotted her. "Alina!" She waved with both arms like she was flagging down a rescue helicopter. "Get over here, why are you standing by yourself?"

Alina looked over from the satellite bar, surprised and then amused, and made her way to the group with her drink. She settled cross-legged on the edge of the blanket Talia and Cass were sharing.

"You know everyone?" Talia asked, already moving past the question.

"I think so." Alina gave the group a quick scan, her gaze doing that thing it did — landing on each person just long enough to take a reading before moving to the next. She caught my eye and smiled. "Hey, Adrianna."

"Hey."

"No notebook tonight?" Renee asked.

"Night off," Alina said, and raised her glass. "Even the observing gets exhausting."

She said it lightly, but I noticed she didn't put her phone away. Not that it mattered. Not that I was keeping track.

"So how did you all end up here together?" Alina asked, looking around the group. "You don't seem like a package-deal kind of crowd."

"We met here," I said. "Different rooms, different reasons. Milo was the one who started pulling everyone into orbit."

"That's because Milo has no boundaries," Cass said, not looking up from her drink but timing it perfectly.

"That's because Milo has excellent instincts," Milo corrected from across the cluster, briefly resurfacing from whatever Nico was saying to him.

"And what about you two?" Alina turned to Talia and Cass. "How long have you been together?"

"Eight years," Cass said, her hand still resting on Talia's ankle like the number was nothing remarkable.

"Married for five," Talia added. "But if you count the six months she pretended we weren't dating, it's closer to nine."

"I wasn't pretending. I was being cautious."

"She told her mother I was her friend. Her friend."

"You were my friend. At that point in the timeline, that was accurate."

"I was sleeping in your bed four nights a week, Cassandra."

Cass took a very measured sip of her drink. "Those things aren't mutually exclusive."

"Please tell me there's a story here," Alina said, and she'd made a mistake, because you did not ask Talia for a story unless you were prepared to receive one in full and with commentary.

"Okay, so our third date," Talia said, holding up her drink for emphasis. "I had planned the entire thing. Italian restaurant downtown, candles, the works. I had made a reservation three weeks in advance. I wore the blue dress — you remember the blue dress, babe?"

"I remember the blue dress," Cass confirmed.

"So I show up and she's already there, which — first red flag. Who arrives first to a date they didn't plan?"

"Someone who's punctual," Cass said flatly.

"Someone who's trying to establish dominance."

"I was fifteen minutes early because I took the wrong bus and ended up in the neighborhood ahead of schedule," Cass said. "There was no dominance strategy."

"There's always a dominance strategy. Anyway, she's already there, she's ordered water — not sparkling, still water, like a serial killer—"

"You're comparing me to a serial killer over a water order," Cass said, looking around the group like she expected someone to object.

"Babe, still water at a restaurant is unhinged. You know that, right? You can get still water at home. From a tap. For free."

"I also got still water because sparkling water makes me burp."

"Oh, she's making it worse," Milo announced to no one in particular. "She's actively making it worse."

"How is that worse?"

"Because now you're a serial killer with a burping problem," I said, and Milo nearly fell off his chair.

"I don't have a burping problem. I have a carbonation sensitivity."

"Put that on the dating profile," Talia said, slapping the blanket. "'Cassandra Morgan. Enjoys still water. Carbonation sensitive. Will arrive early and sit with hands folded in total silence.'"

"I wasn't sitting in total silence. I was reviewing the menu."

"She ordered in ninety seconds," Talia told Alina, grabbing her arm. "Ninety seconds. The waiter hadn't even finished the specials."

"I knew what I wanted."

"Serial killers always know what they want," Milo said solemnly, and Nico, who had been watching this entire exchange with the quiet fascination of an anthropologist, laughed — a real, full laugh that made Milo's face do something I was going to remember for a very long time.

"Anyway," Talia said, wiping her eyes and pulling herself back into the story. "So I sit down, I open the menu, and the first thing she says to me — the first thing — is 'I should tell you I don't do well with long menus.'"

"What does that even mean?" Alina asked, looking genuinely delighted.

"It means she panics after eight options and starts making decisions based on font size," Talia said.

"It means I prefer a focused culinary vision," Cass said, with complete seriousness.

"So the waiter looks at me like I've been abandoned. And Cass just sits there, totally calm, sipping her still water, and says, 'Take your time.'"

"I was being considerate."

"You were being terrifying." Talia took a sip. "But somehow, by the end of the night, I was already thinking about date four. She walked me to my car and I asked if she'd had a good time and she said—"

"I said 'I think I'd like to keep doing this,'" Cass said, and this time she was looking at Talia instead of the group.

"And I didn't know what to say back. Which has literally never happened to me." She took a sip of her drink. "So I did what any rational adult does when they're speechless. I went home and called my mom."

"And your mom said?" Alina asked, leaning in like she was watching the finale of something she'd accidentally gotten invested in.

"She said 'marry her.'"

"Your mother barely knew me," Cass said, but she was smiling now.

"My mother is never wrong." Talia kissed the side of Cass's head with the ease of someone who'd done it countless times. "Fourth date she cooked for me. Burned the chicken, undercooked the rice, and the wine was too cold. I was in love by the appetizer."

"The appetizer was cheese and crackers," Cass said. "I can't take credit for that."

"You arranged them on the plate, babe. You arranged cheese on a plate and I thought, this is the woman I'm going to marry."

The laughter that followed was easy and warm — two people who genuinely adore each other telling a story they've told before and still finding each other funny in the telling. Renee was smiling beside me, that subtle half-smile she gave when something landed with her but she wasn't ready to show how much, and I realized mine was doing the same thing.

The laughter settled. The fire crackled. And into the quiet, Milo spoke.

"I want that," Milo said. Simply. Looking at the fire instead of at anyone. "I know I joke about it — the universe owes me a man, the whole thing. But before this trip I was—" He stopped. Started again. "I went to a wedding in April. My friend Marco, good guy, he married this woman who laughs at literally everything he says, even the stuff that isn't funny. And I stood there during the ceremony and I was happy for him, genuinely, and then I went home and I heated up leftover pad thai and I watched three episodes of something I don't remember and I thought — okay. So this is what it's going to be. Me, in my apartment, eating pad thai, forever."

Everyone went quiet. Even the fire seemed to settle for a second.

"Coming here felt like the last stupid thing I could try," Milo said. "Like if the universe was ever going to do something about it, maybe it needed a change of scenery."

Nico, sitting next to him, didn't say anything. But he didn't look away either. He was watching Milo with an expression I hadn't seen on him before — something that had actual attention behind it, stripped of the bar-counter composure. Like he was listening to someone he'd decided was worth listening to.

Talia reached over and squeezed Milo's hand. He squeezed back, and then the moment broke with his own self-rescue — "Also the brochure had a photo of a guy doing yoga at sunrise and I thought, at minimum, I'll come back with better triceps" — and the laughter came back, warmer this time, carrying something underneath it.

Alina, who'd been quiet through most of the group conversation, leaned forward. "Can I ask something? Does anyone else find it hard to be somewhere you actually love without — I don't know — starting to frame it?" She looked around the fire. "Like, I'm sitting here, this is beautiful, and part of my brain is already writing the sentence about it. The fire, the music, the whole thing. And the second I start composing, I stop being here."

It was a good observation. Articulate, specific, and easy to nod along with because you recognized the feeling. And I might have just nodded along with it, except I caught the way her eyes moved while she said it — a quick sweep of the group, landing briefly on Milo, on Talia's hand still near Cass's, on Renee beside me, cataloguing the reactions the way you'd take notes without a pen. She was doing the thing she did. Turning a real moment into content, smoothly enough that you'd miss it if you weren't looking for it.

I was looking for it.

"No. I'm literally just sitting here drinking rum," Talia said, looking genuinely baffled. "That's the whole experience for me."

"I think everyone does that sometimes," I said, and my voice came out more careful than I'd meant it to. "The framing thing. But there's a difference between noticing it and building a career out of it."

Alina's gaze settled on me. Something flickered there — awareness. She knew I'd seen her scanning. "Fair. Though you could say the same about fiction writers."

The comment landed with a precision that I didn't think was accidental. She smiled after she said it, warm and easy, and the moment moved on. But something about the exchange stayed with me — the quickness of her comeback, the way she'd watched the group while pretending to share something vulnerable. I didn't trust it. I didn't trust her.

Beside me, Renee shifted in her chair. Something in her posture had stiffened, and I could tell she'd been listening to every word.

"Where were you today, by the way?" Talia asked, turning to me. "We were all at the pool and you vanished."

"I had a call with my editor. We were just going over some stuff I'd written." I said it like it was nothing, which was my first mistake.

"Stuff you'd written?" Milo swung back toward the group conversation. "As in new stuff? As in you're actually writing again?"

"Something clicked," I said. "Whether it clicks into an actual book is still very much an open question."

"Wait, hold on," Talia said, sitting up on the blanket. "You're writing again? Actually writing? Why are we just hearing about this now?"

"It's just—" I looked at the fire. "I spent three months staring at a blank screen before this trip. Three months of nothing. And people loved the last book — I mean really loved it — but when you can't write a single word for three months, you start thinking, what if that's it? What if I had one good book in me and I already used it? What if everything after that is just me trying to sound like the person who wrote the first one?"

The band played something low and wandering. I hadn't planned to say any of that, and the rum was only partly to blame.

"I've started something new here," I said, and the words kept coming even though the smart move was to stop. "And it feels different than anything I've written before, and I don't know if different means good or if it just means I'm lost in a new direction instead of the old one. I don't know what it is yet. I don't know if it's anything."

The fire crackled and nobody rushed to fill the space after it.

I hadn't looked at Renee while I'd said any of it. Something in me knew that if I looked at her while talking about the writing, I'd see something in her face that I wasn't ready to see. Not yet. Not here.

But Renee was the one who spoke first.

"That doesn't sound like someone who has nothing to say." Her voice was quiet and unhurried. "That sounds like someone who knows exactly what she wants to say and is scared of what happens if she actually says it."

The group went still. A collective settling, like everyone had exhaled at the same time without planning to.

I looked at Renee. She looked back. Her expression was steady — she'd said what she meant and wasn't going to qualify it or walk it back or add a joke to make it easier to digest.

"Maybe," I said.

Renee held my gaze for another beat, and then she looked back at the fire, and the moment released its grip on the evening and let it breathe again.

Milo, bless him, broke the silence by turning toward the band and shouting a request that none of us were prepared for.

"Do you guys know 'Steal My Sunshine' by Len?"

The guitarist looked at the bass player. The bass player shrugged.

"By who?" Talia asked.

"Len. The band is called Len."

"That's not a band name, that's somebody's uncle," Talia said, already looking at the rest of us for backup.

"It's a real band," Milo insisted, straightening in his chair. "They had a huge song in the nineties."

"You just made that up," I said, grateful for the pivot and not caring if it showed. "You made up a band called Len and a song called 'Steal My Sunshine' and you're hoping nobody here is old enough to fact-check you."

"It was on every radio station in 1999!" Milo threw his hands up, nearly launching his drink into the sand.

"Milo, I was alive in 1999 and I have never once heard of a band called Len," Talia said.

"You were also seven."

"I had taste at seven," Talia said, crossing her arms on the blanket.

"It's real," Nico said quietly, and every head turned. "My older sister used to play it in the car. It's a real song."

Milo pointed at Nico with the vindication of a man who had just been acquitted of all charges. "Thank you. Thank you."

"Nico confirming it doesn't mean it's good," Cass said.

"Nico confirming it means I'm not a liar, which is all I needed tonight."

The band, who had clearly never heard of Len either, launched into something else entirely, and the night moved forward.

"I can't believe they didn't know it," Milo said, still staring at the band with the wounded expression of a man whose cultural contribution had been publicly rejected. "It was a number one hit."

"Was it though?" I asked, not even trying to hide the doubt.

"It was top five. Top ten at minimum. The point is it existed and they should know it."

"Milo, they're a resort cover band," Renee said. "They know 'Wonderwall' and 'Hotel California' and whatever people request at weddings."

"'Steal My Sunshine' gets requested at weddings."

"It absolutely does not," Talia said, looking at him with genuine pity.

"It would if people had taste."

"You could always sing it yourself," Cass offered. "Give the people what they want."

"Don't tempt me, Cassandra. I have been told I have a lovely singing voice."

"By who?" I asked, already regretting the question.

"By me. I told myself. In the shower. And I was very convincing."

"That tracks," Renee said, taking a sip of her drink.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're your own biggest fan, Milo," I said, nudging his arm with my elbow. "And honestly, that's not the worst quality in a person."

"Thank you, Ade. At least someone here appreciates me."

"I said it wasn't the worst quality. That's not the same as appreciation."

Talia laughed and leaned back against Cass on the blanket. Cass's arm came around her without thinking about it, pulling her closer, and for a moment they just sat like that — Talia tucked against her wife in the firelight, easy and unhurried about it. Talia turned her head and kissed Cass softly, and Cass kissed her back like it was nothing, like it was just what you did when the person you loved was right there and the fire was warm and the night was good.

My eyes went to the fire, to my hands, to everywhere except Renee.

A few minutes later, Cass shifted on the blanket and stood up, brushing sand off her legs.

"Be right back," she said to Talia, squeezing her shoulder once before heading up the path.

I watched her go — and maybe I was the only one who noticed, but she stopped near the band's platform between songs, leaned toward the guitarist, said something brief, and then kept walking.

"I think the band might actually be four session musicians who've never met," Milo said, watching them fumble through the start of a new song. "I think Emmett just hired them individually and hoped for the best."

"That would explain a lot," Talia said, tilting her coconut shell toward the platform.

"They're fine," Renee said, though her expression was doing the opposite of selling it.

"'Fine' is the most devastating thing you can say about a musician," Milo said, wincing like he'd been personally insulted.

"Maybe they're called Len," I said, and Milo pointed at me with deep appreciation.

"See? She gets it."

Cass reappeared and settled back onto the blanket next to Talia without a word. Talia gave her a look. Cass gave her nothing back.

And then the band finished a song and the guitarist leaned into his mic.

"This next one is a special dedication," the guitarist said. "From Cass — to Talia."

Talia's head turned so fast I thought she might have injured something. "What?"

Cass was sitting beside her on the blanket, expression so precisely, aggressively neutral that it could only mean she'd been planning this for a while.

"Did you—"

"Emmett said they were taking requests," Cass said. "So I made a request."

The opening notes of "You and Me" by Lifehouse drifted across the beach, and Talia's face did something I'd never seen it do before. She went completely still. Her eyes were bright, and for a second the woman who always had a response didn't have one.

"Tal," Cass said, standing. She held out her hand. But the way she looked at Talia while she did it — like they were the only two people on this beach, like the fire and the music and the rest of us had been arranged specifically so she could stand up and offer this woman her hand — that was the thing.

Talia took it. She stood without saying a word, which might have been a first, and let Cass lead her toward the open stretch of sand where a few other couples had already started swaying to the music.

I watched them. Cass's arms around Talia's waist, Talia's forehead against Cass's shoulder, both of them moving slowly and without any of the self-consciousness that usually comes with dancing in public on a beach. They'd been together eight years and married for five and they danced like people who had found the one thing that made sense and were smart enough to hold onto it.

Renee was watching too. I could see her in my peripheral vision, her face lit by the fire, her expression open in a way that she usually kept under better management.

"What?" I asked, because she was smiling and I wanted to know why.

She turned to me. The smile didn't change. It just stayed there, warm and unguarded and directed at me.

"Nothing," Renee said softly, still smiling.

The song played. The couples danced. Milo had gone quiet, watching Talia and Cass with the particular tenderness of someone whose own want was very close to the surface. Beside him, Nico was watching the fire — but every now and then his gaze drifted toward Milo, and he didn't seem in any hurry to pull it back.

The water beyond the fire was dark and still. The sky above it had that dense, star-thick quality you only see when you're far enough from a city to remember it looks like that. I turned the coconut shell in my hands and said nothing.

"Do you want to take a walk?" Renee asked, as casually as if she were asking me to pass the salt.

"Yeah," I said. "I do."

We stood up and drifted toward the path. Milo noticed — his eyes tracked us for a second, and something crossed his face that was equal parts knowing and kind — but he didn't say anything.

The path away from the bonfire curved along the edge of the water, tiki torches thinning out until the only light was the moon and the distant glow of the fire behind us. The music faded to something you could feel more than hear, a vibration in the sand under your feet. The air was warm and held that particular quality of late tropical evenings where time stops pretending to be in a rush.

We walked. Not fast, not slow. Side by side, close enough that our arms brushed once and neither of us adjusted the distance.

"Cass surprised me tonight," I said, because someone had to start and the silence, while comfortable, was starting to develop its own gravity.

"She's full of surprises. You'd never guess it because she leads with all that composure, but she pays attention. More than anyone I've met."

"You two talked today?"

"At the pool. She's easy to be around. You can just sit with her and not have to fill every second with conversation."

"High praise from you."

Renee glanced at me sideways. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you don't seem like the kind of person to hand out 'easy to be around' to just anyone."

She laughed. Brief and unguarded, and her shoulders dropped with it. "That's fair. I'm told my vetting process is extensive."

"I'm pretty sure I failed the first three rounds."

"You definitely failed the first three rounds."

We walked a little further. The fire behind us had shrunk to a bright point, the sound of the band just a suggestion carried on the breeze. Ahead of us was dark sand and darker water and the patient sound of waves deciding where to stop.

"Can I ask you something?" I said, bumping her shoulder with mine as we walked.

"You're going to anyway."

"Why physical therapy?" I paused. "And I know what you told me before — the patients, the work, the sitting with people. I mean the actual reason. The one underneath that."

Renee was quiet for long enough that I thought she might not answer. We kept walking. The sand was cool under my sandals.

"My mom had a bad knee," she said finally. "Before she got sick — this was years ago, I was in college. She tore her ACL doing something mundane, I think she was carrying groceries and stepped wrong. And the PT she worked with was this woman named Diana who was — I don't know how to describe it. She wasn't warm in the way you'd expect. She wasn't gentle with my mom. She'd say 'this is going to hurt and you're going to want to stop and I'm not going to let you.' And my mom, who argued with everyone about everything, was never able to argue with Diana."

Renee looked at the water. "I watched my mom get something back that she thought she'd lost. Not just the knee. Something about herself — the confidence that her body would do what she asked it to. And I thought, that's what I want to do. Not the medical part, necessarily. The part where you help someone trust themselves again."

I didn't say anything for a moment, because anything I said was going to be less than what she'd just given me.

"That's a good reason," I said quietly, still walking.

"It's the real one." She paused. "What about you? The writing. Not the publishing, not the career — what does it actually do for you? When it works?"

I thought about it. Not the practiced answer, not the interview version, not even the Sasha version. The real one.

"It makes me less alone," I said, and the words surprised me even as they came out. "I know what people see when they look at my books — the covers, the genre, whatever. And that's fine, I'm not precious about it. But underneath all that, underneath the heat and the plot and the things I assembled for people to consume, I'm just trying to write two people who actually see each other. Two people in a room being real with each other, and neither of them is pretending. And someone, someday, is going to read it and think, yeah, that's what it feels like. And for that one second, we're not strangers."

The waves were the only sound for a moment.

"You sell yourself short, you know that?" Renee said, looking at me like she was stating something obvious I'd somehow missed.

We'd stopped walking without deciding to. The path had curved into a small cove that I hadn't seen before — a stretch of sand sheltered by rocks on one side, the water closer here, the moonlight making the wet sand look like something you weren't supposed to walk on.

"Can I tell you something?" Renee said, turning to face me.

"Depends on what it is."

"When I met you at the airport — when you came around that corner with your luggage and your attitude and that look on your face like the world owed you an apology—"

"It did owe me an apology."

"—I thought, this is the most exhausting person I have ever encountered. And I have dealt with patients who fake their way through physical therapy."

I smiled despite myself. "That's touching."

"And then on the plane, when you were trying to write — slamming the keys like the laptop had personally wronged you — I watched you delete everything you'd written and close the laptop and I thought, she's miserable. Not annoyed-miserable. Actually miserable. And I didn't know what to do with that because I'd already decided you were just difficult."

"I am difficult."

"You're difficult," Renee agreed, and the way she said it made it sound like something she'd made peace with a while ago. "But that's not all you are. And it took me embarrassingly long to figure that out."

We were standing close. Not touching, but close in a way that felt deliberate — like the distance between us was something we were both choosing to maintain and both choosing to notice.

"You want to know what I thought when I met you?" I said, holding her gaze.

"I'm not sure I do."

"I thought you were the most controlled person I'd ever seen. Every word measured, every reaction managed. And I thought — who does that? Who walks through the world that carefully all the time? And then at the railing that first night, when you said 'that's a shame' and walked away—"

"You're still thinking about that?"

"I'm still thinking about that. Because that wasn't controlled. That was you saying something you actually meant and leaving before you could take it back. And that was the first time I thought maybe the control wasn't the whole story."

Renee was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read — or maybe I could read it and I just wasn't ready to say what it said. The moonlight was doing something to her face that the fire hadn't done, something that stripped away every excuse I'd been making not to stare, and I stopped trying.

"What changed?" I asked, and my voice was quieter than I expected. "Between us. Something changed and I don't know when it happened."

"I don't think it was one thing," Renee said. "I think it was a lot of small things. The kayak. The reef. The way you talk to Milo — like he matters, not like he's entertainment. The way you sat on that boat and cried and didn't try to explain it."

"You noticed that."

"I noticed everything." She said it simply, without weight, like she was reading a fact off a list. "I tried not to. It didn't work."

The space between us had gotten smaller. I hadn't moved and she hadn't moved and somehow there was less air between us than there had been thirty seconds ago, which meant either the beach was shrinking or one of us was a liar about not having moved.

"Renee."

"What?"

"I don't know what I'm doing."

"Neither do I."

And then she leaned in, slow enough that I could have stopped her and fast enough that I didn't want to, and we met somewhere in the middle — in the space that had been narrowing for days. Her mouth was warm and she tasted like whatever she'd been drinking — something with lime, something clean — and her hand came up to the side of my face and it wasn't careful. It wasn't measured or controlled or any of the things Renee usually was. It was just her, kissing me, and my brain did the only sensible thing it had done in months and shut the hell up.

I pulled back. Not away — just enough to see her face, to look at her, to make sure this was real and not something the rum and the moonlight and the fire had conspired to invent. Her eyes were dark and steady and looking right at me, and whatever she saw in my expression made her smile — wide and unmanaged and warm and aimed entirely at me.

This is real, I thought. This is actually happening.

I leaned back in. Slower this time. On purpose. With my eyes open until the last possible second, because I wanted to see her — wanted to see the moment she stopped being careful, the moment the last wall came down, the moment Renee Miller stopped deciding and just let something happen.

She met me halfway.

Less surprise, more certainty. Her hand slid from my face to the back of my neck and I felt myself step closer, closing whatever distance was left between us, and the sound of the waves was still there and the music from the bonfire was still there but none of it was as loud as this.