St. Helena, Napa County, California
September 2022
KYLE PARKER. MY KYLE Parker, the one who asked me to marry him, the man sleeping peacefully in the bed behind me. The man who has been with me for six years. My brain frantically tries to justify a photo that defies logic. Kyle had nothing to do with Josh. I didn’t meet him until years after Josh was already gone, and our meeting itself at the tennis center was pure chance. So many times, we’d marveled at our timing: I had needed a distraction, something to get me out of my apartment, and Kyle had wanted to return to his roots, to his love for tennis that he’d lost over the years. I used to play a lot, he’d said. But I’ve gotten away from it.
Maybe tennis wasn’t the love he had lost.
I try to make it make sense. Michelle had been a student at St. Helena High with Josh—and Andrew, before boarding school. Kyle grew up in Pasadena and went to a totally different school. How would he have met her?
I feel the blood drain from my head, leaving me dizzy. Grief is tricky, Kyle had once said. Don’t feel like you have to act a certain way around me. Just feel what you need to feel. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t just being empathetic, but was instead speaking from experience.
A sob catches in my throat, breaking the silence. Andrew Smith wanted to tell me something tonight, and it wasn’t just about Josh. I understand now: he had to earn my trust before he unloaded a story about my fiancé, the man I’ve been with for years.
He wasn’t trying to harm me. He was trying to warn me, to tell me the truth about two people: the man I’d married and the man I am about to marry. I’m not the only link between them. Michelle Young is too.
The sound of rustling sheets makes me freeze. Kyle rolls over in bed. I hold my breath. I have no idea what I’ll say to him if he wakes up. I don’t know what it means that Kyle and Michelle were friends—or maybe even more than friends? But if he cared about her, that means Andrew wasn’t the only one with a motive to kill Josh.
Except that scenario hinges on the certainty that Josh was the one who killed Michelle, something I still don’t know if I can believe.
I stand up, stuff my phone in my purse, and slip into my shoes. I need to go talk to Andrew again, to find out everything he knows before Kyle wakes up.
I’m almost out of the room when Kyle stirs again. “June?” I hear him say, his voice heavy with sleep. But I don’t stop. I pull the door shut quietly, then turn and walk the other way, in the direction of Andrew and Sadie’s house, tears blurring my vision.
I’m approaching Andrew’s front porch when I hear footfalls behind me. My shoulders tense up, my heart pounding.
“June,” Kyle calls out. “Hey, wait. What are you doing? I texted you hours ago—what happened to you getting dinner? Where were you?”
I turn sharply and head for the vines, even though I know I can’t hide here. Kyle jogs after me and catches my arm. “June, why are you running away from me?”
“I just needed to take a walk,” I stammer. “I couldn’t sleep. I’m sorry, but I want to be alone.”
He rolls his shoulders, his gray Henley riding up. “Why? What’s going on?”
There’s fear in his eyes now, his brows furrowed. All this time, I thought he was just worried about me and our relationship, but what he was really worried about was my finding out the truth. He came here for me—but not really for me. He came here to convince me to go back home before I got too close to the truth about what happened to Michelle—and with it, the truth about what happened to Josh.
I pull my arm away from him and grab my phone from my purse. I wake up the screen and find Andrew’s text, then hold it out toward Kyle. “You knew Michelle Young.”
He opens his mouth, but no words come out.
“Who sent you that?” he finally says, his voice flat.
But I don’t answer him. I can barely stand to look at him. I drop my phone back in my purse and turn around.
“June,” Kyle says. “We can talk about this. I’ve wanted to talk about it, but…”
I start to walk away, needing to put some distance between us.
“Stop, please,” Kyle says, walking behind me, but the closer he gets, the more I pick up my pace, until I’m running, his steps gaining quickly as I search for a place to hide, a place to escape, but there’s nowhere in these orderly trellises. I know Kyle would never hurt me, but now all I can picture is his ferocious backhand cracking down on Josh’s head. My breath comes in frantic waves.
“Did you do something to him?” I scream, turning around to face him, the bubble bursting in my chest, the ugly words along with it. “Are you the one who killed him?”
But he doesn’t get a chance to answer, because suddenly we’re not alone. There’s someone else with us, someone who emerges from the shadows. Someone who has been waiting for this moment for a long time.
Andrew Smith.
I watch as his fist collides with Kyle’s face. And I understand now that Andrew was in Brooklyn, but it was never me he was following.