DEEP
SHADE
Nolan
I’M LYING IN HARPER’S BED. Her head rests against my chest, her breathing deep and even. Her skin is illuminated by the light of my phone, but only that. The lamps are off. The hallway light is on, but it stretches just a few feet into the room through the crack in the open door.
Even though she’s sound asleep, and I should be too, I’ve been obsessively trawling through the Sleuthseekers Discord server.
I’ve found nothing in my efforts to unearth details about Sam’s documentary on the various chats. Sam kept his secrets close to his chest, just like he’d done with me when I spoke to him about La Plume and his film. He dropped clues to incite speculation but never confirmed anything. At least, not to me, and not that I can find on the server.
I navigate back to the last notification that came through thirty minutes ago. KnightofTruth had uploaded the same photo from yesterday of Harper on Main Street, her back to the camera and a bag slung over her shoulder.
KnightofTruth: I’m going to find out who she is. Maybe she’s the key to what really happened to Sam.
Sam must not have told KnightofTruth all the details of what he was doing, but he was clearly a little closer to that user if he’d sent him Harper’s picture in the days before he died. And who knows what else KnightofTruth could have in his possession, ready to feed out to the followers who seem to be gravitating toward him as the next leader of the Sleuthseekers. He could have more photos. More theories. Maybe he’s even like Sam—the type of person who knows just how to tell a story to excite his devotees.
I squeeze my eyes shut. KnightofTruth could be just as in the dark as he paints himself to be online. But my instinct tells me he’s a hunter, and it’s only a matter of time until he follows the trail that leads straight to our doorstep. And then what? How long before he finds Harper and speaks to her, just like Sam did at the theater? Then he’ll be one short step away from unraveling her entire fragile life.
I close the Discord app and head to my text messages instead, opening my last exchange with my little sister, Amelia.
Hey, Fuckface. I hope you’re doing well on your seaside retreat.
Catch some rays. Maybe a girlfriend. You remember what those are, right?
I tap thoughtfully on the edge of the phone. I know why she’s checking in.
We’re getting close to the anniversary of the crash. And I’ve made it a point to never be home for that. I’ve been away on a “break” every time, ticking another name off my list. Truthfully, I can’t bear the anguish on my family’s faces. They don’t know about my annual hunt, of course, but they do know I can’t take the guilt of being the one who lived. Not this time of year. No matter what they say, or how tightly they embrace me, or how encouraging their weary smiles are, their reassurances never bring me peace.
Though I contemplate setting my phone down, I swallow my discomfort and tap out a reply instead.
Sun rays? Yeah. I remember what those are.
Ever the night owl, my sister’s response is immediate.
I clearly meant girlfriends, dumbass. How long has it been since you got laid?
I don’t want to talk about this with my LITTLE SISTER.
Well, I don’t want to talk about it with my BIG BROTHER, but I worry about you either running away to become a monk or knocking up one of your ex-girlfriends in sheer desperation.
Please not Gisèle. ANYONE but Gisèle.
I huff a laugh, one that has Harper stirring next to me.
I am not going back to any of my exes. And I’m not joining the monkhood either.
. . . so does this mean you met a girl???
OMG you should invite her to Corrie’s wedding on July 24th. You’re coming, right?
Fuck. I don’t want to think about heading back to Tennessee any more than I do the Sleuthseekers, or the search, or Yates. It’s like the entire world is trying to pull me out of here or screaming at me to leave, and all I want to do is stay with Harper.
My heart claws at my ribs with these spiraling thoughts. I fire off a quick good night reply to my sister, then force myself to set my phone on the nightstand and try to let go of the things I can’t change at one in the morning.
Instead I focus on the things I can see and touch, things that are real and present. Like Harper.
I stare at her for a long moment, taking in her scent and the comfort of her steady breaths. I know she’ll see the same Discord notifications when she wakes. Just like I know she’s built to fight the wolves that are closing in, even though she should run.
My gaze drifts back to the phone. The temptation to look up everything about Harper’s miraculous escape from Harvey Mead haunts me constantly.
I’ve crossed the line with her so many times already. Watching through her windows. Spying on her around town. The fucking head in her bird feeder was probably a low point.
But for some reason, prying into her public history feels too violating. All the details I really want to know—need to know—are the ones that only live in her head. How did she escape Harvey Mead’s house? Where did she go when she left Lubbock? What happened after we intersected in Maryland, and how did she jettison her old life when she made it to Cape Carnage? Sam must have tracked down some of this information. KnightofTruth might be able to do the same—if he hasn’t already—while I’m still ten moves behind.
I hold Harper a little tighter, as though some invisible adversary could tear
her away in the night. And eventually, after a long time, I fall asleep.
When I wake the next morning, it’s to an empty bed.
I shoot upright, my hand landing on the place where she should be. The sheets are cool. I’m about to call her name when I hear her swear at something downstairs, and I expel a long-held breath.
When I make it to the kitchen, she’s already brewed her coffee and a tea for me, and is pulling a plate of waffles out of the oven, where she’s been keeping them warm. “I was just about to wake you,” she says as she shifts three waffles onto a second plate, which she pushes toward me on the counter. “I thought you could use some food before you go to the search.”
“Thank you.” I press a kiss to her hair and take both the plates to the dining table, where she joins me. Though she gives me a weak smile when she sits at the end of the table next to me, the stress is still layered just beneath it, shining through her thin mask. “I guess you caught up on Discord.”
“Yeah,” she says, grabbing the maple syrup to drizzle the amber liquid across her waffles. “Can’t say I’m super thrilled.”
“Same here. I think it’s best to keep Bryce’s bone where it is, for now. We don’t know what kinds of plans people could be making privately to come to Carnage, and your cottage is clearly going to be a draw as the site of La
Plume’s last-known kill.”
Harper nods, her brows knitting.
“And if I said, ‘Hey, maybe now would be a good time to leave town,’ you’d say . . . ” I trail off as Harper gives me a flat, dead-eyed glare. “Yeah, I thought so. What about if you took Arthur on an extended holiday?”
“Arthur doesn’t do holidays. ‘Tourists are hateful, and I do not want to be among them,’” she says in her best Arthur impression before stabbing a piece of her waffle. “Why be one when you can stay here and murder them for fun, right?”
“Right . . . except when there’s a missing persons search and the amateur detectives swarm to town. A cruise might be warranted in that case.”
Harper shrugs. “Never gonna happen.”
“Didn’t think so.” I stir the milk into my tea, letting the spoon ping against the ceramic like the grating passage of time. Harper’s eyes narrow at the
source of the unsettling sound. “We need to get some of the evidence out of here and start leading the search in the direction we want it to go.”
“I was thinking about that,” she says. “I have McMillan’s shirt hidden in Arthur’s shed. I was going to plant it at Loon Lake before Yates fucked that plan yesterday. But I did take Arthur’s murder bag and Evanston’s clothes and hid them in a safe place in one of the distillery outbuildings.”
“I figured you had something of McMillan’s, so I kept the search party busy on the east side, where the creek empties into the lake. If you give me the shirt, I can plant it on the western shore during my next routine check-in.
Yates should then hopefully surmise that McMillan went into the lake there and never came out.” Harper ruminates on this with a mouthful of waffles, then nods. “What about Evanston?” I ask.
Harper shrugs. “I think we should leave him alone for now. It would look a little suspicious for two articles of clothing to suddenly show up in close succession, even if they are in entirely different areas. That’s pretty tough country past the Loop. Thick forest for miles if you stray from the path. Lots of bogs and places to get lost in.”
I hum a low note and lean back in my chair. “I don’t love the idea of assuming interest will just fizzle out if nothing is found.”
“And the town council won’t love the idea of keeping the search for Evanston going indefinitely. He’s not the first to go missing in the wilderness, you know.”
“I’m sure.” I snort a laugh and cut a piece from my waffle. “We still need viable scenarios for Mahoney and Hornell, however,” I say, watching as Harper stares pensively at her plate. “And you.”
Harper’s eyes snap to mine. “What about me?”
“You act like I already know your whole story. But I don’t, Harper.” I set my cutlery down, letting a quiet beat linger between us. “Sam might have known more about your secrets than I do. We can’t be sure KnightofTruth isn’t far behind him. Since you’re not willing to leave Cape Carnage, maybe now might be a good time to think about letting me in, just a little, so we can plan for what happens if or when they discover who you really are.”
“Am I seriously to believe you didn’t google the shit out of me when you weren’t dismembering bodies to put in my bird feeder or following me
around town with drones?”
“It was just the one drone, actually.”
Harper snorts a laugh and takes a sip of her coffee. “I don’t think we have time for my entire life story before you go searching and rescuing people who are already dead.”
“I’ll make time for just a piece of it.”
Harper’s jaw tenses. Silence drapes over our table like cloth.
We eat without talking. She has trouble meeting my eyes. I don’t know how much to push without making her feel like I’m shoving. I don’t know how to navigate being a fucked-up person who can’t pry obsession from love.
And I don’t know how to love someone who is so afraid to receive it. We’ve both faced fear and grief and done terrible things. But I haven’t seen and survived the same evil she has. Maybe when you claw your way free of that kind of horror, you put yourself in a maze. You make yourself untouchable by love and all the loss that comes with it. And over time, it’s hard to even find yourself.
“I don’t want your whole life story, Harper,” I say. I reach into my pocket and pull out something I’ve been wanting to give back to her but was waiting for the right time. I turn her hand over and place the silver bracelet on her 2palm. ABC, the engraved panel says. It’s the bracelet she or Adam must have worn, the one Morpheus dropped in the sink a couple of weeks ago as a gleaming gift for Harper. She stares down at it, her features pinching, her eyes glassy when they meet mine. “I just want a little bit of you for myself.”
I close her hand and squeeze it before rising with my plate and cup, taking them to the kitchen. “I’ve gotta go,” I say, glancing at my watch. “Thank you for breakfast. I should be back around—”
“It was my fault.” Her voice is barely more than a whisper, but it stops me like a dart to the chest. “Harvey Mead.”
When I turn to face her, she’s laid the bracelet on the table and is moving it in a serpentine pattern. The ouroboros on my arm tingles as though she’s tracing it. She sniffs, swiping violently at one of her cheeks, punishing herself for the tears.
“He broke both of Adam’s legs when we tried to escape. And the days just went on and on . . . They said it was three weeks. But it felt like years in the
dark.”
I take slow and measured steps back to the table, my eyes never straying from Harper as I sit back down in my empty chair.
“I um . . . ” She shakes her head, fat tears sliding down her cheeks to drop on her plate. “I woke up that final day and Adam had a fever. It was cool in the cellar. Harvey had stripped us of our clothes when he tossed us in there, and we were always cold. But that day, Adam was burning. Sweating.
Suffering. So I pounded on the iron door.” Her fist hits the wooden table, a sudden shock of sound. Cutlery rattles on her plate. “He’s got an infection.”
She hits the table again. “We need medicine.” Another strike. “Please let him go.” Another hit. Another.
She delivers strike after strike. And I don’t stop her. Not when I can see the cracks in an unhealed wound finally splitting, poison seeping from their edges. I just rest my hand on her knee beneath the table and let her keep smashing until she’s done, her eyes swollen with tears. “And then the monster came, just like I asked,” she whispers. “He came and took Adam away, and I couldn’t fight back hard enough to save him.”
She dissolves into sobs, utterly crushed by horror and guilt only she can see. And I don’t pull her to me. It’s Harper who pushes back her chair. Grips the table like it’s a lifeline. Climbs onto my lap and into my waiting arms to unleash despair so deep I feel like I’m drowning in it. Like it’s a sea I can’t save her from.
“The chainsaw . . . Mead tore him apart,” she says. “They were right above me. I could hear pieces of Adam falling to the floor. The screaming.
Mead laughing. And if I’d only waited. Just a little bit longer . . . ”
“What happened is not your fault. You were just trying to help him,” I say, running a hand over her hair.
Harper shakes her head against my shoulder. “But they would have gotten us out. It wasn’t even an hour. If I’d just waited one hour.”
She repeats herself. If I’d only waited. They would have gotten us out.
But that doesn’t make sense. Autumn Bower walked herself out of Harvey Mead’s derelict farm after burning it to the ground. Seven miles. Barefoot. . . . Or that was the story she told the police?
“Who?” I ask. “Who would have gotten you out?”
When I pull her back enough to look into her eyes, she’s almost unrecognizable. Not just because of the red blotches on her skin or the streaks of tears or the puffiness around her eyes. It’s the hopelessness in them.
There’s no hint of the defiance that’s come to define her. There’s no snarky quip illuminating her features, ready to be unleashed by her sharp tongue.
She suddenly seems so delicate. So terrifyingly breakable.
“Was someone else there?” I ask. “Did someone—”
“Harper.” There are three sharp raps on the glass of the back door. I glance over just in time to see the wolf’s head of Arthur’s cane as it taps a final time.
A flash of fury burns on my tongue at the interruption. I swallow a sharp curse. “Harper. Did you take the portafilter from the espresso machine?”
Harper wipes her eyes with the heels of her hands, and when that has little effect, she tries the hem of her T-shirt instead. It doesn’t make it any less obvious that she’s been crying. The deep breath she takes isn’t cleansing— it’s a reset. She’s slipping her armor back into place. “I’ll be there in a minute to help you look,” she says, loud enough for Arthur to hear.
“Also, the cinnamon. What did you do with the cinnamon?” he calls from the other side of the door, but at a distance, as though he won’t come closer
than a cane’s length away.
“Just give me a sec—”
“And also the soy.”
“So, you’re missing basically all the ingredients to make a latte,” she calls out as she slides off my lap and heads to the kitchen sink.
“No. I have coffee. I need . . . everything else.”
“I’ll be right there, okay?”
“Yes, yes, fine. I’ll wait,” Arthur says, and honestly, I can’t tell if he’s extra disgruntled by the delay of his latte, or if this is just a standard Arthur level of grump. Harper doesn’t sigh or complain, she just turns the cold water on and splashes her face. But me? I struggle to clamp down on my protests. I stand but stay where I am, fighting the urge to rush out the door and take him back to the house myself, so she can have a little time to regain her composure in privacy. I just want to step in and fix something I know I’d only break.
Harper dabs her face dry with a handful of paper towels, and when she
turns to face me, more of her mask has clicked back into place. But not all of it. Her eyes are haunted, still red and weary. “I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved,” she admits. She doesn’t take a step closer, and neither do I. “Even Arthur. Sometimes, he doesn’t remember who I am.” Harper breaks her gaze away, and when it returns, it shines once more with tears. “I am afraid to love you, Nolan. I don’t think I could survive losing you.”
Maybe my heart should be cracking with her words. But it soars instead.
She’s not saying she won’t love me, or she can’t, or even that she doesn’t already. “That’s okay. I understand.”
There’s a little relief in her features. But only a little. A question lingers in the worry that furrows her brow, one that’s intertwined with her fear: Is that really enough for you?
I finally come closer, stopping near enough to touch her, though I don’t.
“You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met, Harper. Especially when it comes to me.”
I lean forward, press a light kiss on her cool, damp cheek, and then I leave.
