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WARREN

The kitchen is suspiciously quiet.

Which, on a Saturday morning, can only mean one thing: something’s wrong.

Usually, this place is brimming with energy. Namely, Liam Donovan stomping around like a golden retriever in human form, laughter echoing down the hall, dramatic gasps, lips smacking against other lips. The kind of noise that makes a single man seriously consider eating breakfast in his car.

But right now? Nothing. Just the low hum of the fridge and the sound of my spoon scraping the bottom of my cereal bowl. Weird . Maybe his girlfriend didn’t spend the night for once. Or maybe they ascended to some higher plane of coupledom where they no longer need oxygen. Or noise.

I barely have time to enjoy the peace before he’s strolling in, shirtless, blond hair a mess, grinning like he spent the night dreaming of himself. And he probably did.

My cousin is the effortless, easygoing type. He’s also shamelessly, ridiculously obsessed with his girlfriend, Birdie Collins. Practically worships the ground she walks on, which—whatever. Not my business. But if he ever starts calling her his “baby bird” unironically, I’ll have to stage an intervention.

He stretches, groaning like his body physically hurts from all the affection, then beelines for the fridge. “What’s up, big guy?”

“Nothing,” I mutter around my spoon.

I like Liam. He’s a good guy. Annoying, too chatty, constantly in my space—but decent. I didn’t think we’d ever end up as roommates, but last semester, my old apartment had a mold problem, and I needed out. My landlord was a jackass, my upstairs neighbor’s shower leaked into my bedroom, and I got sick of breathing in possible spores every night.

I suppose I could’ve moved home, but that was never a real option in my mind. Not because it wasn’t available to me—it was. A big, pristine house with polished floors and curated furniture. But I could never really call it mine.

Liam is only my cousin by marriage. Three and a half years ago, my mom married his uncle, Daniel Donovan. She moved us into his fancy house with the kind of furniture you aren’t actually supposed to sit on and a fridge stocked with wine you’re not meant to drink.

I only lasted a single summer there before getting my own place near Dayton’s campus.

And God, that summer was a strange sort of hell. Living in a stranger’s home, walking on eggshells, trying—no, needing —to be liked by this new man in my mother’s life. Not because I gave a shit about him but because I knew it would be easier for her if I didn’t make things worse.

Daniel’s a fine man. A nice man. But I knew from day one we’d never have any sort of meaningful relationship. What grown man is gonna want to bond with some other guy’s adult kid? I wasn’t some impressionable preteen desperate for a father figure—I was eighteen. A pseudo-adult. Too old to be folded into a new family like a lost sock.

So, I left as soon as I could. And I don’t think either of us was particularly upset about that. Maybe my mom was. But she has enough bridges to mend without worrying about the ones I burned.

Still, it makes Liam part of my family, in a way. Not in the way that matters but in the way that’s written into marriage certificates and tax filings. But the two of us are very different people. He grew up with wealth. He benefits from it, even if he rejects it. And that’s the thing about privilege—you don’t have to like it for it to still work in your favor.

Liam’s dad, David, belongs to the art world. My stepdad? Finance. The kind of money that makes more money while you sleep. And yet, for all the ways Liam and I differ, living with him is easy. Easier than I expected, anyway.

“Where you off to this early?” Liam asks, finally looking at me. His brows pinch together, taking in the club polo I’m wearing. It’s stiff, boxy—regulation navy blue with a stitched logo over the chest. A layer I’ll strip off as soon as I’m safely situated on the pool deck.

I sigh. “The club.”

Liam stares, blank as an empty canvas.

“The country club,” I say, slower this time. “The one I’ve been working at all summer.”

He blinks. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. How is he like this? “The Sycamore Club.”

“Oh.” He leans against the counter, eyes flicking up in recognition. “Right. My parents are members there.”

“No shit,” I say flatly. “So are mine.”

He snaps his fingers, pointing at me like that actually just clicked for him. “Right, right. That tracks.”

I shake my head, rinsing my bowl in the sink. “You’ve never been, have you?”

Liam scoffs. “Me? At a country club? What the hell would I even do there?”

There’s golfing, swimming, tennis, brunches. All sorts of ways for a rich, legacy kid to occupy his time. But Liam’s more interested in soccer and Birdie than schmoozing over overpriced mimosas. And I like that about him.

But it still makes him oblivious to half the shit he was born into. Like how places like Sycamore weren’t built for guys like me to work at—they were built for guys like him to belong to.

I don’t dignify his willful ignorance with an answer, just scrub my bowl, set it on the drying rack, and grab my keys. I still hear him rambling behind me as I push out the door and head to work.

I pull out of the driveway and onto the main road, the engine of my dark blue 2008 Toyota 4Runner rumbling under my hands. It’s old, a little banged up, but reliable. The kind of car I don’t have to think about—just turn the key, drive, done.

I bought it when I was sixteen and haven’t had a reason to trade up. That’s the way I prefer things. Trustworthy, reliable. Not prone to sell you out or steal from you at the first opportunity.

The Sycamore Club is only about thirty minutes from campus, tucked into a stretch of rolling green that smells like fresh-cut grass and money. I’ve made this drive hundreds of times, though not in the last two years.

I worked there the first summer my mom and I lived with Daniel. He got me the job. Said it would be “good experience,” a way to earn my own money instead of “sitting around the house.” Not that I had any intention of doing that. I was already itching to get out of there, to stop feeling like a guest in what was meant to be my own home.

So, I took it. Lifeguarding is easy enough. Made sense, given I’d been swimming my whole life.

I don’t come from the same world as most of the club’s members, but I can hold my own in the water. My old coach used to joke that I was born with gills, the way I moved through a pool. But the truth is, swimming is one of those things that quiets my brain. The rhythm of it, the repetition. The way you can push yourself to exhaustion without saying a single word.

The Sycamore pool isn’t like the ones I train in during the school year. Those are cold, cracked, built for grind. The club’s lap lanes are practically spa-like. Heated, clean, surrounded by umbrella-shaded loungers and expensive sunglasses. Everything here is meant to look easy. Effortless.

I didn’t work at the club the last two summers, though. I needed space. Last year, I stayed in Dayton to train and knock out a few summer courses, and the year before that, I did construction with my uncle—long hours, shit pay, but honest work that kept me away from here.

But I came back this year. Needed the money. One last stretch before senior year starts. Four more weeks of shifts before I head back to school.

The drive is smooth, the kind where you don’t have to think much. It’s early enough that the sun is still working its way up the sky, but the heat is already pressing down—thick, humid, the kind of North Carolina stickiness that turns asphalt into lava and melts a popsicle in under ten seconds.

I don’t mind it.

Some of the staff complain, but I’d rather bake under the sun than be stuck inside. Sitting there with my sunglasses on, silent, scanning. It’s meditative, in a way. Letting the world move around me, being still, being watchful.

When I pull into the club’s parking lot, it’s already filling with luxury cars—Range Rovers, Mercedes, the occasional Tesla. I park in the staff lot, away from the pristine lineup of the members’ “weekend toys.”

The walk from the lot to the staff entrance is lined with white rosebushes and perfectly manicured hedges. I push through the side gate and into the employee check-in area, where a handful of other lifeguards are already gathered, some sipping coffee, some staring dead-eyed at the time clock like they’re willing it to fast-forward.

I swipe my ID, clock in for my shift, and then head toward the pool deck.

There’s an Olympic-sized lap pool on one side and a more casual family pool on the other, complete with a waterslide, a shaded splash pad, and a shallow end where toddlers scream like they’re being actively murdered.

I grab my rescue tube from the equipment shed and make my way to the lifeguard stand. The seat is high, perched over the pool like a watchtower. I climb up, settle in, push my sunglasses down over my eyes.

From up here, everything looks smaller. The members, the kids, the perfectly laid-out lounge chairs, the expensive umbrellas shielding people from a sun they paid good money to vacation under.

It’s still early, so the crowd is light. A couple of kids paddle around in the shallow end. A woman in a wide-brimmed hat is reading a paperback by the cabanas, her toes perfectly pointed like she practiced the pose before sitting down.

At the far end of the lap pool, a guy in his forties is doing a slow, methodical freestyle. Probably someone who used to be an athlete and refuses to let it go. I can see it in the way he moves—determined, stubborn, not ready to surrender the rhythm.

I could see myself like that someday. Still swimming laps at eighty, chasing the calm of the water even when everything else starts to fall apart.

I watch his form out of habit, noticing the inefficiencies, the drag, the way his elbows are just a little too low on his stroke. He’d get smoked in a real race, but there’s something admirable about the effort.

A few other guards are stationed around the deck, chatting in between scanning the water. The job is equal parts boredom and hyperawareness. You spend ninety percent of it waiting for nothing to happen and ten percent responding the second something does.

Most of the time, it’s nothing serious. A scraped knee, a kid who forgot they don’t actually know how to swim. But the second you let yourself get too comfortable, you miss something.

So, I keep scanning. One side to the other, slow, deliberate. The heat wraps around me, but I don’t move. Silent, still. Resting asshole face in full effect. Some might call it brooding; I call it waiting.

A kid in floaties clings to the edge of the shallow end, his dad scrolling his phone instead of watching him. A group of teenagers splashes each other, pretending to flirt while pretending not to flirt. A woman in a high-cut one-piece and a floppy hat orders a frozen cocktail from the poolside bar, tilting her sunglasses down to scan the deck like she’s looking for someone worth noticing.

I keep scanning. Keep watching. Keep not thinking.

And then I double take. It’s like my brain glitches for half a second, like the sun presses down a little heavier, and something in me short-circuits.

Standing near the entrance to the pool deck is Quinn Rose.

Long dark hair spills over poised shoulders, skin sun-kissed, glowing like she’s absorbed every second of the summer. But it’s the uniform that gets me most. The navy polo, the khaki shorts, the visor hooked to her bag. The same caddy uniform she wore that first summer we met.

She’s got a towel slung over her shoulder, a water bottle in one hand, her bag in the other, and a permanent scowl on her face. A bit of a warning wrapped in a hell of a first impression.

Quinn has always been the most magnetizing force in any room. The kind of person you feel before you see. Even now, people glance at her as they walk past, like they can’t help it, like something about her demands it.

She’s a force. A storm. A reckoning.

It’s been over two years since I’ve seen her, nine-hundred-something days since I told her I never wanted to again.