The last noise I heard before I stepped outside and welcomed the damp air on my skin was the ping of gold striking the wood beneath my feet.

* * *

I rode with the windows down the entire drive to Dogwood Beach. I reveled in the clean scent of grass and earth, the sweet warmth of a May evening. Everyday things, beautiful things that would normally calm my restless mind, but not tonight. I kept the music off and just let myself think, piling on sign after obvious sign I had been too stupid or too disconnected to notice over the past three months.

It was all so clear now. Every color of our corrosion.

The naive veil had finally been lifted, and the longer I drove, the more I hated myself for becoming one of those women who allowed deceit to slip past them. Who stayed too detached and okay with little changes that should’ve been red-hot alarms, blaring with an incessant warning.

Our growing silence with each other, leaving our only conversations to be ones we needed to have, not ones we wanted to have. The indifferent way he began to look at me, or the late nights when he’d claim he was too tired to drag himself to bed and instead chose to camp out on the couch.

A couch I knew from experience wasn’t the best for sleeping on.

I regretted every whispered word I uttered into the dark late at night when I wrapped myself around a cold pillow and reached with a seeking hand for a body I knew wasn’t next to me.

What was I reaching for?

And why? Why didn’t I see it? Where had I been?

Tori’s questions from earlier became a mantra.

Was I that blind? How stupid was I?

With each passing minute, my hands formed tighter to the wheel until a crack of pain shot up my forearms. I adjusted and readjusted, flexing until my shoulders began to shake. I was a bottle of pent-up aggression, a warrior in a cage, watching as a threatening figure inched closer … closer until I saw the intimidation radiating off them in heated waves. Until I felt it on my skin. The warm bite of hunger scratched the back of my throat. I wanted to bare my teeth and sink them into flesh. Draw blood. I couldn’t remember ever feeling this alive before, but I was ready.

Ready to release my anger onto someone who truly deserved it.

It was after nine when I finally arrived, parked my car behind Tori’s Volvo, and grabbed my duffle, leaving my other bags in the backseat.

The smell of salt water soaked into my lungs as I climbed the stairs to the porch, and for a brief moment I thought about how peaceful my new life was about to become.

Living at the beach was a fairy tale to me. A pipe dream that was about to become a reality …at least I was hoping it would.

I was showing up at my friend’s house, unannounced, seeking refuge.

Bag in hand, I held my breath and knocked three times.

Seconds passed before the door swung open.

Tori stood before me in her pajamas, a pair of pale blue linen shorts and an oversized T-shirt that hung off her shoulder.

Her jaw hit the floor as she looked me over with wide, startled eyes.

“Syd! What are you …” She paused, gaze lowering to the duffle in my hand. “What’s going on? Where’s Marcus? Is he with you?”

She glanced behind me in the direction of the driveway.

Explanations were in order. This was the boldest move I had ever made in all of my twenty-four years, aside from getting married straight out of high school.

I never visited Tori without planning out my trip, and she always knew about it well in advance.

This wasn’t simply a visit, though. This was a permanent relocation.

But explanations could wait. I had to deal with something, or someone, to be specific, before I revealed anything.

I pushed past her and entered the house.

“No, he’s not. And he won’t be joining me either. I hope that offer you made me last year still stands. I know you were just joking about us ditching our men and starting a lesbian life together, but as long as we keep it purely platonic, I could swing it.”

I tossed my bag on the couch in the large sitting room and spun to face a very, very confused-looking Tori.

Rightfully so.

She tilted her head, motioning around the room as if the house, and not the woman standing in front of her, had just magically appeared.

“What’s going on here? What are you doing?”

“I need that asshole’s number. Let me handle this first, and then I’ll explain everything. I promise.” I tugged my phone out of my back pocket. My hand shook ever so slightly. “What is it?”

She slowly inched closer.

“Who? Wes? Why? You’re not going to call him, are you?”

“Tori,” I growled. “Give. Me. His. Number.”

My words, and the tone behind them, acted like a fire lit to blaze under her ass. She gasped, then moved with purpose through the tiny but lavish beach house.

Tori came from money. Her family came from money. You didn’t live this close to the water and in digs like this without either having connections or a stacked bank account.

“Okayyy.” She spoke with uncertainty, her tongue clinging to the word as she walked back into the room. “Okay, um, seriously, I have no clue what’s going on right now, but I’m almost afraid you might choke me if I don’t do what you say. You’re a bit scary right now, Syd.”

If I’d had it in me, I would’ve smiled at that.

But I didn’t have it in me to smile.

Tori dug the heel of her hand into her eye while her other scrolled through the contacts on her phone.

Her long blond hair was haphazardly pulled back into a loose pony, with several pieces falling onto her shoulders and curling there.

She looked unkempt and exhausted, but still unbelievably gorgeous, because she always looked unbelievably gorgeous no matter how unkempt or exhausted she was.

Tori was a natural stunner and the definition of small-town beauty queen. She grew up in the pageant circuit, won every competition she ever entered without even caring enough about them to try, it was all her mother’s doing, putting her in those pageants and exploiting her daughter’s beauty, and Tori went through the motions to make her mother happy, but that didn’t mean Tori didn’t know when to put her foot down and that occurred when she was approached by some agency to do shampoo commercials when she was fourteen.

My best friend wasn’t interested in the kind of attention appearing in a shampoo commercial would bring a fourteen-year-old who had developed a lot earlier than the rest of her peers.

So that offer was the end of Tori’s pageant days and, subsequently, the beginning of her mother’s descent into the world of plastic surgery.

If her daughter wasn’t going to bring her attention, Mrs. Rivera would find her own way to grab it.

I watched another strand of hair fall out of Tori’s messy yet still utterly perfect pony.

I imagined after she destroyed God knows how many breakables in the house, she probably tossed about in her bed, praying for sleep and dreams involving Wes’s unfortunate but highly deserved demise.

Bastard.

Keeping her eyes on her phone, Tori shook her head then finally spoke.

“He probably won’t answer you. That’s his thing. But whatever. Ready? It’s 919-555-6871.”

I opened up the keypad on my phone and moved my thumb furiously over the numbers.

He would answer. I’d hit Redial until my fingers bled if needed.