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I studied him without making it obvious. He was sitting there in his black T-shirt, eating pasta I had cooked, and talking about his life as if he were a piece of architectural hardware. He didn’t see himself as the hero. He saw himself as the necessary background.

"Frames are important," I said softly. "Without a frame, the picture curls up. It gets damaged. It fades."

He stared at me, his expression guarded. "And you? Was the cage of being a celebrity that bad? Seems it must have some benefits too."

"It wasn’t a cage at first," I put my fork down to choose my words. "It was a pedestal. Nash put me up there when I was nineteen. He told me I was special. He told me I was fragile. He handled everything—the money, the schedule, the food, the decisions." I lifted my glass of water toward him. "Until I crashed my car into that ditch. When you looked at me, and you didn’t see the asset. You saw a woman with a sprained ankle who needed help."

Ben stopped chewing. He held my gaze across the small table, the silence stretching between us, but this time it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was electric. It was the feeling of being stripped bare and realizing you weren’t ugly underneath.

"I see you." His voice dropped to become low and intense. He leaned forward slightly, his hand resting on the table, inches from mine. "I see the woman who argues about Fleetwood Mac. I see the woman who tries to peel garlic with her fingernails. And just for the record," he added with a touch of a smile raising his lips. "I like her a hell of a lot more than the one on the magazine covers."

I became still. The air in the room contracted, pulling us toward the center of the table. The desire I had felt during the cooking lesson flared up again, hotter and brighter, fueled by the realization that I didn’t want to leave this cottage. Not because I was scared of Nash. Not because of the press.

I didn’t want to leave because of Ben.

"I like her too," I murmured. "I think I’m finally starting to know who she is."

We sat there as the rain picked up outside, the world narrowing down to the circle of light over the kitchen table, neither of us willing to break the moment. Both of us knowing that the safe, platonic distance we were trying to maintain was eroding faster than the coastline in a hurricane.

Chapter Eleven

BEN

The walk-in cooler at Tidal Hops was kept at a steady thirty-eight degrees, a temperature that was always a relief after a day in the humid Florida heat. I hoisted a half-barrel keg of Reef Saver IPA onto my shoulder, the aluminum biting into my deltoid, and navigated the narrow aisle between the fermentation tanks and the stack of empty shells waiting to be cleaned.

Outside the heavy steel door, the brewpub was roaring. It was Sunday afternoon, which in Dove Key meant the locals were clocking out and the tourists were waking up from their midday naps, creating a buzz of clinking glasses, scraping chairs, and the low-frequency thrum of a classic rock bass line vibrating through the floorboards.

I kicked the door open and stepped into the humid warmth of the loading dock, swinging the keg down onto the dolly with a metallic, satisfying clang. Normally, physical labor grounded me. It was physics—mass, gravity, leverage. Today, my brain was several miles away at a dead-end gravel road.

Sutton and I had spent the last forty-eight hours sealed inside the cottage. Since the dinner where she laid her ex-husband’s threats bare on my kitchen table, the atmosphere between us had irrevocably shifted. Yesterday, I had offered to take her into town—suggested she put on the brown wig and we hit a quiet store down in Marathon so she could buy clothes that didn’t swallow her whole.

She flat-out refused. She didn’t want to risk the disguise or test the perimeter. She wanted to stay inside.

And the truth was, I didn’t want her to leave.

I was getting used to the second coffee mug drying on the rack. I liked finding my old 5K T-shirts folded neatly on the arm of the couch. I liked the soft humming coming from the yard while I worked on my truck in the driveway. The quiet isolation I had cultivated for so long was officially ruined, replaced by a domestic gravity that pulled at me every second I was away from the house.

"Easy with the merchandise, brother," Braden called out, glancing up from a clipboard near the tap lines and frowning at the keg still rocking as it settled. "That’s the new batch. It’s got Citra hops. Treat it like a newborn."

My brother Braden looked like he had been genetically engineered to sell beer. He had the Coleridge jawline, but on him, it was usually framed by a smile that could charm the wallet out of a nun. He was wearing a Tidal Hops T-shirt that was tight enough to show he worked out but loose enough to look business-like, and he was currently holding court with two distributors from Miami who looked ready to sign whatever paper he put in front of them.

"It’s beer, Braden, not nitroglycerin." I wiped a sheen of condensation from my forearm. "Where do you want it?"

"Line four. The tourists are drinking us dry."

I wheeled the dolly through the back-of-house maze, dodging servers carrying trays of conch fritters and fish and chips. I’d always enjoyed lending a hand here. While Braden was the face of the operation, the visionary who turned our family’s old storage shed into a destination brewpub, I was the guy who fixed the compressor when it died at 2:00 AM and moved the heavy things when the delivery guys called out sick. In return, he’d kept a booth in the dining room solely for my use for studying while I was in school. He had an uncanny sense to understand when my brain had been about to explode, and he’d drop a fresh cup of coffee in front of me and offer a few minutes of distraction. His recent rekindled relationship with marine biologist Tessa Donovan hadn’t changed anything fundamental between us. I’d had my doubts about those two, but I was glad to be wrong.

My phone buzzed against my hip, a double vibration that sent a jolt of anticipation straight through me. I abandoned the dolly near the tap wall and pulled the phone out, shielding the screen from the prying eyes of the bar.

It was a text from the burner number I had memorized two days ago.

Sutton: The heron is back. He is staring at me through the sliding glass door. I think he knows I have the generic peanut butter. He is judging my lifestyle choices.

I stared at the screen, and the noise of the bar—the ZZ Top, the laughter, the crash of ice into a shaker—faded into white noise. A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. I could picture her perfectly, sitting on my gray couch with her legs tucked under her and having a silent standoff with a bird while eating toast.

I thumbed a reply, my fingers clumsy on the small screen.

Ben: That’s Chester. He’s a freeloader. Don’t give him any toast or he’ll never leave. And the peanut butter builds character.