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She worked with the police. She told them about Annabeth’s “friend,” and felt vindicated when the father who hadn’t wanted to recognize his own daughter while Rebecca was alive found himself embroiled in the scandal of her death.
She was sure that a man like Rebecca’s father, a well-known lawyer with local political aspirations, would have sharks for attorneys who would keep him out of the prison Annabeth was going to. But the scandal would hurt him. His “frail and needy” wife announced her intention to file for divorce. His children denounced him.
That wasn’t happiness, of course. But it was certainly satisfying.
Once her apartment had been taken care of, she spent a lot of her time explaining herself to all the friends she’d ignored over the past month. And her older brother, Jason, who hadn’t been too pleased that she’d stopped answering his calls and resorted to texts with precious few words. She’d lost a lot of things when that bomb had gone off, it was true. And she’d learned that she could live without most of them. The people she loved, on the other hand, she treasured and had treated badly.
There were a lot of tears. A lot of apologies on Everly’s part.
And a lot of opportunity to ask herself the same question her friends and family did: Why hadn’t she called? Why hadn’t she asked for help?
Why did she think she had to go through something like that all alone?
Charles had continued to reach out to her, and some three weeks after she’d quit, Everly walked back to her old office and sat down with her former boss. He’d told her they didn’t want to lose her expertise.
And Everly had told him that she had no interest in returning to the office but would be happy to work remotely, doing more of the creative work she enjoyed and less of the things she hated, like the interoffice politics.
To her surprise, Charles had agreed to let her work freelance.
Enthusiastically agreed, in fact.
And she’d had to wonder why it had taken losing everything to make her understand that if she never asked for what she wanted, that was exactly what she’d get.
That was why she’d come back to Grizzly Harbor. And not in panicked desperation this time.
When the ferry docked at the pier, the villagers came out to meet it and help unload supplies. Afterward, she took her time walking up the hill, into the town proper, and finally to the Water’s Edge Café. The village was just how she’d left it, except the fog that clung to the mountains and wound through the streets didn’t look as if it would burn off today. The mountain up behind Grizzly Harbor was moodier than she remembered. She squinted up at it, solemn and forbidding even shrouded in clouds, and couldn’t believe she’d ever pointed a rental car in that direction and then driven over it.
It just went to show that when Everly really wanted something, she found a way to get it.
She was holding on to that.
She pushed her way into the restaurant and had thestrangest sense that she... fit. Right there amid the bright walls with the cheerful pictures on them.
And she was unduly excited when Caradine looked up from her place on the stool at the counter and stared at her. Unsmiling.
But not actually scowling.
“Back again,” Caradine said. “We still don’t have a menu.”
Everly grinned, because for some reason, that surly couple of sentences felt like the biggest welcome she’d ever received.
“I want coffee,” she said. “And something to eat, whatever sounds good. Oh, and a place to stay, if you know of anything.”
Caradine eyed her from across the restaurant floor. There was no one else inside at this hour of the afternoon, not that Everly thought that a crowd would have altered Caradine’s behavior in any way.
“Tourist season is over, thank the Lord.”
“Good thing I’m not a tourist, then.”
“Is this the part where montage music plays?” Caradine asked after a moment. “And we, what? Braid each other’s hair and talk about boys? I’m going to pass on that.”
Everly grinned wider. “Coffee. Food. Maybe a place to sleep. Braiding hair is optional but actually pretty creepy, if you ask me.”
“I don’t do friends.”
“You know, I’m going to share something with you, Caradine.”
“Oh joy.”