Chapter 3

Gianna's POV:

The sun hadn't even set, and the town was already suffocating me. At the grocery store, Mrs. Higgins wouldn't look me in the eye as she rang up a gallon of whole milk.

She muttered under her breath that her nephew had just been hired as a gardener at the Phillips estate, at twenty-five dollars an hour. In less than twelve hours, the whole town had been bought.

When I pulled back into the Anchorage Motor Inn, my uncle Clement was sitting on the wooden steps of the front office, smoking a cheap cigarette.

Clement was my father's younger brother.

Over the past twenty years he had churned through a failed bait shop and a used marine-engine business, chasing a quick fortune and losing every cent. He looked up at me, his watery eyes full of greed.

“Gianna, Jadon's lawyer came by my dock this afternoon,” Clement said, tapping ash onto my gravel drive. “Says you've been kicking up a fuss about the Garner arrangement. Making trouble all over town.”

“Go home, Clement.” I didn't look at him; I walked straight for the door.

“He also told me Phillips wants to buy this lot for a private marina,” Clement said, following me inside. “Says if I can talk you into signing over the deed, there's a finder's fee in it for me. You still owe me fifteen thousand from when your roof caved in three winters back.”

I stopped in the middle of the cramped lobby. The neon VACANCY sign in the window hummed faintly. My parents bought this place in 1985.

I spent my whole childhood here — painting shutters, polishing pine floors, staring out at the fog rolling in off the bay.

Jay and I spent two whole weeks carving a new wooden sign for the drive out of a single slab of driftwood cedar. We cut the letters together, stroke by stroke: ANCHORAGE MOTOR INN — GIANNA & JAY.

“You want this inn, don't you, Clement?” I turned on him, my voice cold.

Clement froze, his cigarette halfway to his mouth.

“What?”

“I'll sell you the deed tonight,” I said, my voice without a trace of warmth. “Fifty thousand in cash. You take over the thirty-thousand mortgage still on the bank's books. We drive to the county office now and drop the transfer in the night box.”

Raw greed lit up Clement's eyes. To a developer, the lot alone would be worth two hundred thousand.

“Fifty?” He squinted at me. “Where am I supposed to find fifty thousand in cash at eight o'clock at night?”

“You've got forty thousand from that yacht insurance payout hidden under your floor,” I said flatly. “And ten in the safe at the tackle shop. Cash, now. Otherwise I burn the deed and walk away.”

Clement didn't waste another word. He tore out of there like a madman, terrified I'd change my mind before he got back with the money.

I went into the little living quarters behind the front desk and pulled a canvas duffel out of the closet. Three wool sweaters, two pairs of jeans, my mother's silver locket, five pairs of warm socks. I took nothing Jay had touched. The flannel shirts he'd worn stayed on their hangers; the wooden seabird he'd carved stayed on the windowsill; the leather tool belt he'd bought with his first paycheck from odd jobs stayed on its hook.

At a quarter past nine Clement was back, carrying a battered metal toolbox packed with twenties and hundreds. We signed the transfer papers at the kitchen table under a bare bulb.

Clement's hand shook the whole time, sure I'd come to my senses any second and realize how much I was losing.

“Girl, you've lost your mind,” Clement muttered. For a moment he only stood there holding the deed, and his voice came out thin and strange. “This was my brother's place. I never had any right to it.” Then he folded it into his pocket and would not look at me. “Jadon would have paid you millions.”

“Go take the sign down,” I said, zipping the duffel. “Tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because no one named Jay ever lived here,” I said.

I tossed the toolbox onto the passenger seat of the pickup and walked out the back door. I took out my phone and dialed a number I hadn't called in three years.

“Courtney?” I said when she picked up on the fourth ring.

“Gianna?” Courtney Walters's voice came through, crisp and competent over the noise of a distant city. “God, Gianna! Why are you calling this late? Is something wrong?”

Courtney had been my roommate at Bangor Community College before she moved out west. Now she was the general manager of a luxury boutique hotel downtown Seattle.

“I have to leave Maine,” I said calmly. “Can I crash on your couch for a week?”

Courtney didn't ask what had happened. She didn't ask why my voice sounded so hollow.

“I've got a spare room in my Capitol Hill apartment,” Courtney said at once. “And our night auditor just quit yesterday — you can take the job Monday. How are you getting here?”

“Tonight,” I said. “I'll call you when I reach Portland.”

I hung up and drove straight to the commercial freight docks north of the bay.

I knew Captain Vance. He'd been a friend of my father's, and twice a week he ran an unregistered little freighter between our peninsula and the Canadian border.

He carried lumber, machinery, and whatever was in season. And he never checked the passenger list. I parked the pickup behind a row of rusted containers at Pier Four.

By then the rain was coming down in oily sheets. Captain Vance stood by the loading ramp of his steel-hulled freighter, checking the lashings on the cargo.

“Vance!” I shouted, pulling up my hood.

The old man turned, the swinging halogen work light cutting across his weathered face.

“Gianna Mercer? What are you doing out here in this storm?”

“I need passage, Vance.” I pulled ten hundred-dollar bills off the fold I had taken from the toolbox before I left the inn and pressed them into his hand. “Take me to Saint John. Tonight.”

Vance looked at the money, then at the single duffel over my shoulder.

“The Phillips family has the bridge on Route One blocked,” Vance said under his breath. “An hour ago Sheriff Miller went to the harbormaster's shed himself. He had your photo. Said you were having some kind of mental breakdown, that you were a danger to yourself, and you weren't to leave the county.”

For a moment I could not make my hand let go of the money.

Jadon had closed the roads already.

“I'm sane, Vance,” I said, leaning in and lowering my voice. “You knew my father. You know I'm not crazy. If I stay here, they'll force me to marry a man I don't want.”

Vance stared at me for a full three seconds. He spat a bit of chewing tobacco into the water, looked at the money for a long moment, and took it. “Your father would be ashamed of me,” he said, and jerked his chin at the gangway.

“Get down in the engine hold, under the cover plate,” Vance said roughly. “Behind the generator housing. We sail in fifteen minutes.”

Before I could set foot on the steel gangway, two blinding high beams ripped through the dark and swept the whole dock.

A black Cadillac Escalade plowed through the flooded potholes and screamed to a stop sideways at the mouth of Pier Four.

The doors flew open.

Jadon came striding down into the downpour. He wasn't even wearing a coat. The wind and rain soaked through his white shirt in seconds, plastering it to his chest.

Behind him, two armed bodyguards in tactical jackets stepped onto the wooden pier.

“Step away from that boat, Gianna.” Jadon's low command cut clean through the howling wind.