Page 48 of These Summer Storms

She swallowed her panic. “And? What did you tell him?”

“That I was around if he needed a ride.”

She laughed, the sound a little hysterical.

“Greta. Honey. It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”

The words made her feel drunk—not the soft, misty kind of drunk that came with too much champagne at the company holiday party, but the whirling, everything out of control kind of drunk that came with too many vodka tonics before getting into your brother’s Porsche Boxster in the Hamptons and being unable to stop him from driving it directly into a dune.

She had five days.

She pressed her hand to Tony’s at her cheek. “I don’t like him.”

“Jack?” he said, an edge of surprise in his tone. “I don’t think anyonelikeshim. Well, except your dad.”

“Why did Dad like him?”

“Loyalty.”

He hadn’t liked Greta, though. Hadn’t she been loyal? Too loyal. “Like you,” she said.

Tony pressed his full lips together but didn’t disagree. Instead, he nodded. “I guess so.” The words filled his throat and the sound, garbled and rough, summoned Greta’s tears—the first she’d shed in company.

She dashed them away as Tony cleared his throat and said, “Anyway. Jack’s complicated, but he’s not a bad guy.”

“He’s not family.”

“Neither am I.”

Her eyes snapped to his. “But you—” Herare,along with its insistence that he was wrong, stuck in her throat, refusing to come. Because of course, Tony wasn’t family. If he were family, she wouldn’t be here, tucked away in a secret place in a secret place in a secret place, keeping him as far from the house as possible on this island that would never let any of them free.

He shook his head and leaned toward her. “Greta. It’s okay.”

He kissed her, soft and warm, lingering like comfort. Greta sighed and gave herself up to it, her hand falling to his chest, where his heart beat in slow, even rhythm. Like he belonged there.

Like she did.

He’d always been able to make her feel that way—as though there was something beyond this little world, full of her mother and herfather, and her responsibility to it. Something that wasn’t shared. Something that belonged to Greta.

Don’t do it.

Alice’s words, from earlier, whispering through her.

She broke the kiss and searched his eyes, deep and dark brown and full of the understanding she would never have. “Why doesn’t it bother you? That we never welcomed you? Thathenever welcomed you? You were by his side for twenty years. You could have gone anywhere. Been anything.”

“You sound like him,” Tony said. “He pulled me aside not long ago and told me the same thing. That I could leave. Offered me a retirement package. A great one.”

She sat up. “You didn’t take it.”

He shook his head. “Of course not.”

“You dedicated your life to him.”

A pause, and then, “Not only to him.”

The words weren’t light, like they should have been. They weren’t easy, the way they might have been a week ago. Instead, they seemed urgent, as though everything had changed, and now he had something to say.

Or maybe she had something to hear.