Chapter 1

He’d heard the stress of moving was like dealing with death, but since Evan Downey had dealt with a lot of death, it was with a fair amount of authority he called bullshit.

There wasn’t anything particularly fun about packing, selling, and leaving behind the house. He and his wife, Rae, had purchased it together when they first got married—it was the only home their son had ever known.

The house had been a place of love and promise, but now painful memories poisoned the good ones. He’d would miss the doorframe where he and Rae had scribbled Lyon’s height onto each and every year. Their walk-in closet where Evan had laid Rae down and made love to her the day they’d moved in.

What he wouldn’t miss was the hallway where she’d staggered, hand on her chest, and collapsed, never regaining consciousness despite his and the 911 operator’s attempts to keep her heart pumping until the paramedics arrived.

Moving didn’t compare to the living nightmare of losing someone he’d expected to be around when he was old and gray.

At the very least until their son entered elementary school.

As he watched the house dwindle in the side mirror of the family SUV, he calculated he should be rounding the acceptance stage of grief right about now.

About damn time.

“Bye house,” his son Lyon, aged seven going on seventeen announced from beside him. Gone was the Superman action figure he’d clung to last summer. Now his sidekick was his iPad. He had one earbud stuck in his ear and one dangled onto his chest, as per their agreement that Lyon not completely shut him out. Though the music wasn’t up loud enough for him to hear—another of their agreements— Evan knew it was tuned into classic rock.

Definitely his kid, he thought with a smile.

1417 East Level Road behind them, he turned his attention to the city that lie ahead; the city he’d called home since he’d married one beautiful, sassy woman named Rae, the curvy black girl who’d busted his balls about nearly everything since they were teenagers.

God, he missed her.

She’d built a life alongside him, settling into her nursing career while he’d set up his tattoo shop.

Before striking out on his own, he’d been under the tutelage of tattoo master, Chris Platt; a hippie to rival all hippies, with a heart of gold and a head full of titanium. By the time Evan had packed up his things and gave notice, Chris let him know under no uncertain terms he’d believed in him and his abilities. And that he’d succeed.

He had.

“Bye, Woody,” Lyon piped up.

Evan turned his head as they drove by his shop where Woody had worked for years, and as of three months ago, had purchased outright. Woody had stepped in the year Rae died, when Evan’s concentration revolved around breathing in and out, and keeping a three-year-old boy alive. It was no small feat and, at the time, had taken everything he’d had.

“Will you miss it, Dad?”

He threw a glance into the rearview, but there was no need. He knew the shop’s façade as well as his own face. The crack on the sidewalk out front that sprouted dandelions every spring, the brick crumbing on the southeast corner. The black marquee done up to look like an old-fashioned apothecary that read Lion’s Den. Rae’s idea, and in honor of their one and only offspring. Save for the fact that their lion was a Lyon, which she’d insisted suited Evan’s rebellious, go-against-the-grain demeanor.

She was right.

An image of her shining brown eyes, huge smile, and that horribly ugly sea foam green bathrobe she insisted wearing on her days off, popped into his brain, and he felt his smile turn sickly.

“Dad.”

“Yeah, buddy,” he finally answered, his throat dry as he watched Lion’s Den grow tiny in the rearview. “I’m gonna miss it.”

What he wouldn’t miss were the memories of his late wife assaulting him everywhere he turned in this city.

“What about Leah?” his son asked as they pulled onto the highway. Evan ground his back teeth together.

Leah had been one of his, for lack of a better term, “friends with benefits” for the majority of the year. And though he’d arranged to keep his dates secret from his son, she’d “stopped by” unannounced last month when she saw the SOLD sign go up in the yard.

Angry tears had shimmered in her eyes while her hands gripped her purse like she might brain him with it. He hadn’t understood why. A long time ago, they’d discussed that what they had was about the physical and nothing more. She’d insisted on arguing with him, in front of Lyon no less, and Evan had to do the unfortunate business of dumping her—when they were never really dating—on his front lawn. It’d been a dick move, but then, so was sleeping with a woman on a tit-for-tat basis.

No puns intended.

Speaking of tat, his eyes zeroed in on the sparrow on his right forearm, the string of hearts snapped free, the broken heart drifting. That one was for Rae. The roses on his arm were for his mom and his aunt. A lotta death. Too much, too soon. They said bad things happened in threes. For his and his son’s sakes, he hoped the adage continued staying true.

“Daaaad.” Irritation lined his kid’s voice when he didn’t respond right away.

“Sorry, buddy, I was thinking. No, I won’t miss Leah,” he answered honestly.

Another dick thing to admit, but she hadn’t meant all that much to him. Them in bed, cordial would be the best way to describe how he’d treated her. As awful and uninspiring as it sounded. That’s what they’d both settled for, which was equally awful and uninspiring.

He bit back the grimace attempting to push forward on his features. Rae wouldn’t like who he’d become if she could see him now.

But she couldn’t see him now. She hadn’t been able to see him since the moment she’d collapsed five years ago and he hadn’t known he’d been five minutes away from losing her forever.

He wished he could remember their last conversation, but he’d been distracted. Not listening.

“Me either,” Lyon said, snapping him out of his reverie. “Leah was mean.”

Evan blew a breath out of his nose, as close to a laugh as he was gonna get, and considered that Lyon was the only reason he hadn’t spiraled into a whirlpool of depression.

Settling in for the drive north to the lake town they would now call home instead of Columbus, Evan once again reminded himself that this venture was a second chance. For him and his son. A place to create new memories, be closer to Rae’s parents, and Rae’s best friend on the planet, Charlotte Harris.

“Excited to see Aunt Charlie?” he asked Lyon.

Charlie had been “Aunt Charlie” since she’d walked into the hospital room a little over seven years ago. Rae had held up the blue blanket Lyon was wrapped in after she’d sworn her way through eighteen hours of labor, and Charlie, with tears in her eyes, had taken him into her arms and said, “Hi, Lionel Downey, I’m your Aunt Charlie.”

She’d been a fixture in Lyon’s life always.

Since Rae had passed, she’d become more of a fixture. Charlie was a dear friend. A constant, a solid person he and his son could count on. A light in a dark place.

Whenever she visited them since, she’d dragged out photo albums, sometimes bringing new photos of her own to add to the pages, and sat Lyon down to tell him stories of his mother.

Lyon had been three when Rae died, and Charlie insisted on never letting him forget her. While he agreed this was best for his son, Evan did better when he wasn’t confronted with her smiling face as he walked down the hallway. Or her still one, a vision that woke him in a sweat more often than he cared to admit.

For that reason, he’d left the photos in the albums, had tucked the picture frames of the two of them away. But there was no escaping the spot of carpet in the hallway where she’d collapsed, or the other side of the bed, its emptiness as real a presence as Rae had been when she was alive.

Moving to Evergreen Cove wouldn’t only get them away from the house choked with her memory, but would bring Lyon closer to the things that meant most to him.

Charlie was one of those things.

“I can’t wait!” Lyon said, a very real light shining in his eyes.

Kids were so resilient. Especially his kid. Through the process of packing and moving, Lyon had been both apprehensive and excited. Evan saw the sadness in his eyes when he talked about not seeing his friends at school anymore, but Malcolm and Jesse, the two boys who were his best buds had parents who visited the Cove in the summer, so Lyon had been appeased with the promise of hanging out with them then.

Plus, the new house offered the attractive package of swimming in the lake, a new house with a bigger bedroom, and Charlie nearby. Evan hoped that might make up for some of what they’d all lost.

Not everything, because God knew he couldn’t replace Rae, nor would he try.

But he’d sure as hell take whatever reprieve he could get.

* * *

The pain in the voice at the other end of the phone sliced through Charlotte Harris like a shard of glass. Three seconds ago, when she’d seen her best friend’s name pop up on her phone, she’d answered with a chipper, “hi!”

Her greeting was met with a beat of silence, followed by a deep, male response. One hollow, broken syllable; the nickname he’d given her a year ago.

“Ace.”

Her heart dropped to her stomach, her extremities going instantly cold in spite of the warm nighttime air. There was something registering in his tone that sent fear spilling into her bloodstream.

“Evan?”

A beat of silence, then, “Yeah.”

She stood from the chair she’d been lounging in and paced to the three steps leading from her porch down to the inky, still surface of the lake stretching into a pyramid of pine trees in the distance.

“What is it?” This from her boyfriend, Russell, who stood from the porch swing behind her.

She held out a finger to tell him to wait a minute.

“What happened?” she asked into the phone. Something. She and Evan were friends, but not call-each-other friends. If he was calling her now, it had to be because there was a problem. With Lyon, or—

“Rae.” His voice cracked, a painful sob shattering the airwaves and sending an adrenaline rush through her bloodstream. He drew in an uneven breath. “Jesus, Ace.”

Unable to hold herself up any longer, she sank onto a step and issued the understatement of the year. “You’re scaring me.”

“She’s gone, Ace.” His voice went hollow, into a dead tone she never wanted to hear again as long as she lived.

“Gone…” False hope she’d recognize later as denial leapt against her chest, borne of desperation to find a reason other than the obvious for this almost-midnight call.

Maybe Rae went shopping. Maybe she and Evan had a fight and Rae went to her parents’ house. Maybe—

“Gone,” his whisper confirmed.

That’s when the tears choking her throat pulsed against her eyes. That’s when Russell took the phone from her hand. And that’s when she knew.

Rae Lynn Downey, her very best friend, more like a sister than her actual sister, wife to the long-ago besotted Evan Downey, and mother to a dimpled three-year-old Lyon Downey was… gone.

It took five days for that fact to settle in.

For her to see Rae’s physical body in the casket, for her to notice Evan’s formerly bright eyes weary and bloodshot, for her to be a first-hand witness to the devastation of Rae’s parents and the somber expressions on Evan’s family’s faces.

For her to accept what “gone” meant.

Gone was permanent. Gone was forever. Gone was unfair.

Standing over her body, Charlie vowed to Rae she’d watch over her family. She kissed her fingers, placed them on her best friend’s cold cheek and whispered to the woman she’d never see alive again, “Sorry, Rae.”

Wheels crunched along the gravel outside her house, bringing Charlie out of the memory clouding her head and back to her living room. She dropped the open magazine she’d been staring unseeing at for the last however many minutes and swiped a single tear from her eye.

Then she cleared her throat, closed the magazine, and bucked up. Because Evan and Lyon couldn’t arrive and find her mourning over Rae. And there was no reason to darken this occasion with melancholy. Them moving here was a good thing. The best thing for them all. Their coming here had reminded her of all the promises she’d made, all the pain they’d gone through. All the loss they’d endured.

She peeked out the curtains and confirmed the tires on the gravel did not belong to Evan’s SUV. Releasing a pent up breath, she watched the blue pickup climb the hill and vanish into the trees.

Not them.

Evan had texted her—she checked her phone, then the clock —forty-six minutes ago, to say they were ten minutes away and since then she’d sat anxiously by the front window. Knowing him, and she did, he probably stopped at the Dairy Dreem for an ice cream the moment they set foot in town.

She snapped up her iced tea, frowning at the ring on the coffee table. Where was her head today? She swiped the water ring with one hand and turned for her back porch, pausing first to slip on a pair of flats.

Charlie’s house was the most modest on her street—she liked to tell herself it was because the house had been the built before Evergreen Cove had become a vacation destination. Small, white clapboard, she and her boyfriend, Russell Hartman had purchased the place because of its view of the lake and the fantastic porch. She’d believed, at the time, buying a vacation home as a couple was a sign of permanence.

But she had no regrets about the house. Since she worked from home, she’d outfitted the family room facing the lake at the back to hold her desk, computer, and a few shelves for her supplies. She’d kept the couch, and yes, the television in the room. It connected to the kitchen where she had a small table and chairs, but the real prize of her home was the porch. The wide, covered expanse, befitting of a Georgia plantation four times her home’s size, was where she ate most of her meals, entertained, or just sat and enjoyed the view.

Rather than stare out the window for the arrival of the Downey boys, she tracked out back to the swing hanging by a pair of chains, smoothed her dress, and sat.

Resting the tea at her feet, she sucked in a breath and took in the view. While the front of her house offered up traffic and trees, she preferred the back—the lake and the hill that rose behind it, a jagged skyline designed from pointed pine trees. This view was why she and Russell had purchased on the private beach.

When he’d left her two years ago, he’d kept the huge new- build with the cherry tree in the back yard. She’d reflected then how Rae had always told her a man who was unwilling to marry her was a man who would walk away. At the moment four years ago when he’d delivered her morning coffee in the enormous white kitchen with gleaming granite countertops and told her he was leaving her, Charlie thought of Rae’s words first.

Sad, but true.

He’d let her keep the vacation house in Evergreen Cove, and the Subaru they’d recently paid off. “I’d pay alimony if we were married,” he’d told her, assuaging his guilt. “The house at the Cove, the car, it’s the least I can do.”

The very least, she’d thought bitterly, but now she didn’t feel bitter. She considered herself blessed things had ended before she’d thrown good years after bad into a relationship doomed to fail.

Russell was a software developer, a pragmatic thinker, and ten years older than Charlie. She’d met him at a wedding—prior to her photography career, so rather than the photographer, she’d been the bridesmaid at this particular event. A guest of the groom, Russell had sought her out, danced with her, and practically begged her to take his phone number.

After several dates she’d learned he didn’t want to be married, and he didn’t want children. She had always wanted children, and had assumed children were the natural path following marriage. But when it became clear they were serious, she’d decided both marriage and children were things she could live without. With the right person, sacrifices were unavoidable. Forever would be worth it.

But her relationship didn’t last forever, making the six- year compromise she’d made all the worse for her to live with now.

After the kitchen conversation over coffee, he’d arranged for movers to extricate her from the house and then Russell had eloped with a woman with three children. One going into college, and twin boys in the sixth grade. He gave no explanation for what changed his mind, but she knew. The other woman, Darian.

Darian had changed his mind.

Which had the unpleasant side effect of making Charlie feel like she hadn’t been enough.

She’d taken what was behind door number two and moved on as intact as she could. Some nights, the hurt and the fear of being alone lingered, and the fact she’d been unable to achieve the seemingly simple goal of having a family and settling down had haunted her enough that on those nights she became practically nocturnal.

Taking in a deep, humid breath, Charlie centered herself on the here and now. June was nearly July and the hot and sticky had both settled in at the Cove for the long haul. Sunlight danced on the surface of the lake, sending waves rippling in the wind. Behind the lake, a sea of evergreens lined the hills. There were a few hidden homes back there as well, but that was much too “deep woods” for her taste.

From her coveted porch—yes, even her fancy neighbors with their large, enviable homes admitted to coveting her porch—a patch of grass gave way to shore and led into the water. Her aquatic neighbor, Earl stepped out onto the deck of his beaten houseboat off to the left where it was anchored in the deep, and raised a hand to wave. She could make out his pipe, handlebar white mustache and sunglasses from here. He was tanned and brawny and made the best clam chowder she’d ever tasted.

Murmuring from the side of her house brought her to her feet as the smile spread her mouth.

Finally!

The voices grew louder as they closed in and she strode across the porch to meet them. She couldn’t make out the exact words, but she knew the boy’s voice as if he were her own.

“Aunt Charlie!” Lyon appeared around the corner and burst into a run. Before she’d had a chance to take the three steps to the grass to meet him, he’d bounded up them and straight into her arms. She caught him against her, savoring how small he was and knowing it was a battle with time she’d lose, and bent to kiss his head. His tight curls had grown out some since she’d seen him last . They tickled her nose.

Pulling away, she flattened his hair with both hands. It sprang up again, refusing to be tamed.

“You need a haircut,” she teased.

“I knoooooow.” He rolled his green-blue eyes. Lionel Downey was a stunning kid. He had Rae’s chocolate-brown skin, a touch lighter than hers had been, and her genuine, full smile. He had his father to thank for his eye color: ocean blue so striking against his dark features.

“That’s a tired subject, if you can’t tell.”

Her eyes went to Evan, who’d crossed his bare arms over his chest and leaned a hip into the column at the bottom of the steps to watch their interaction. His presence wasn’t overbearing or intimidating, but easy. Evan matched his laid-back, live-and-let-live attitude with a lazy swagger that was anything but. He’d worked hard his entire life and as a result, had confidence oozing from every pore. The thinning pair of Levis, the casual T- shirt hugging his chest, his array of tattoos, and devil- may-care smile he showed to the world was him through and through, but Charlie knew Evan ran deeper than his outer layer.

Her eyes tracked along the tattoos decorating his arms to the new one. His latest patch of artwork was a series of evergreen trees, their dark blue-black bases circling his wrist and branching up his arm, their tops almost reaching his elbow. Each tree was a different height, and knowing his attention to detail, each one had some significance. The whole of the pictorial on his arm had a big one.

His moving to Evergreen Cove.

Unable to keep it from happening, her heart reverted to the state it’d been in at age fifteen, somersaulting in the wrongest way imaginable. Before he was Rae’s, oh, how Charlie had pined for him. Must have been seeing him back here, or maybe her earlier thoughts about her life that caused the mini-backslide.

But she couldn’t backslide. She ‘d made a vow to herself, to Rae’s silent body, to care for Lyon and Evan.

“Did you guys eat?” she asked.

“Yeah. Dairy Dreem,” Lyon confirmed.

She knew it. She tilted her chin at Evan in reprimand. An accidentally sensual smirk crooked his mouth, surrounded in a one or two days’ worth of stubble.

“We didn’t only get ice cream.”