In the kitchen, Jess watched Jana Marsh blink, shake her head clear, come back from wherever it was she’d gone. Jess could see how her hands were shaking, how the skin on her knuckles got whiter and whiter as she gripped the countertop.
“You know what Boyd did to my brother?” Jana asked.
Jess nodded. “I heard the stories.”
“They weren’t just stories.” Jana’s eyes flashed. “Stories are what you tell your friends around the campfire. This was…” She trailed off, lost something for a moment and then seemed to find it again. “What Boyd did to Levi, that killed him. Sure as if he’d pushed him off that cliff himself.”
“It was a horrible thing, what he did,” Jess replied. “Unimaginable.”
“You don’t think Boyd deserved it?” Jana asked. “What he did to my brother, what he did to those dogs, you don’t think the world’s better off without someone like that?”
Jess leaned against the countertop beside Jana. “Of course I do,” she said. “I’m not losing any sleep over Brock Boyd being dead. If circumstances were different, I’d be applauding you. It’s just—”
Jess dug into her jeans for her phone. Swiped to a photo she’d saved: Burke, smiling, on the breakwater that protected the Deception Cove boat basin, Lucy beside him, and the sun shining on the water. It hurt Jess to look too hard at it, knowing how he was back in Deception, in her jail, waiting on her to get him freed.
“You see this guy here?” she asked Jana. “He’s in jail right now because they think he’s the killer. And that’s the man I love.”
She looked at the phone some more, the picture, and she could smell the low-tide brine and hear the gulls call, see Burke smiling about the happiest smile she’d ever seen from him, like everything he’d ever wanted in the world was before him and there was nothing else he could ever think of needing.
You. Me. Lucy. That’s it.
Jess could hear Burke saying it, every time she saw the picture. She wondered how Jana Marsh could look at the photograph and not see who Burke was and what he meant to the world, to Jess and to Lucy. How she could not want to go back to Makah and set things right.
Jana studied the phone but didn’t take it from Jess. “They told me he was just some nobody,” she said. “Just some greasy ex-con from back east. They said nobody would care if it came out like he’d done it.”
“‘They,’” Jess said.
“The men who killed Boyd,” Jana said. “Because I didn’t do it.” Then her expression turned hard, and she looked away again.
“I didn’t shoot Boyd,” she said, “and that’s the honest truth. And I swore I’d never tell who did.”