Page 16 of Carry on Wayward Son

The room stilled, and my hands fisted as I fought back the instinctive rage that anyone would target Willa. And because I knew Layla was probably right.

“They did try when she finally did remember.” Sawyer said it in the quiet, matter-of-fact way he always did. A fact he’d made peace with because that was what Sawyer did. He looked at the worst things directly, made peace with them, and kept going.

I hadn’t made peace with it. The gratitude I had for Sawyer Malone was the kind that didn’t fit into words without getting unwieldy, and underneath it was the part I’d never entirely resolved—that it had been him here for her and not me. That she’d needed someone, and he’d been the one. I knew why I hadn’t been there. I knew the choices I’d made and why I’d made them, and I stood by most of them. Knowing all of that didn’t fully close the gap.

Layla looked at Sawyer and nodded once before turning her attention back to Willa. “There.” She released my sister’s hand and sat back in the chair. “You see? No blaming yourself. She wouldn’t want that.” A beat, a gear shifting. “Now. What else is known?”

She was good with survivors. The balance between giving someone space to feel the weight of something and not letting them disappear into it, between gentleness and forward motion—it was a skill that looked effortless and wasn’t. I’d seen enough people attempt it badly to recognize the difference. She’d found every line without appearing to look for any of them. Whatever had built that in her had been built on something real, and I found myself turning that over in my mind while Ford picked up the thread.

“That’s where things get complicated,” Ford said. “The chief of police at the time—Bill Carson—turned out to be dirty. Deeply dirty. He was killed back in August after kidnapping Madden for stirring things up.”

Layla’s gaze shot to Madden, where she sat with her hand tucked in Rios’s. “Stirring things up?”

Madden shrugged her shoulders. “I asked questions he—and apparently others—didn’t want answered. It started because of Gwen. She’s my cousin. But it’s so much bigger. She’s not the only one to disappear. Anyway, I submitted my findings to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, and they’ve been auditing the department since Labor Day. We have no idea how badly the original investigation was compromised, what was deliberately buried versus what was incompetence versus what was genuine dead ends.”

Layla’s pen had stilled. “What was he into?”

“We aren’t entirely sure.” Rios kept his voice even. “He was being paid under the table by parties that haven’t yet been identified. We suspect his primary role was in smoothing the way, allowing bigger parts of criminal enterprises to operate with less oversight. Drug running. Money laundering. Possibly the trafficking itself. It all goes well beyond the island. The audit is still ongoing. I was sworn in as provisional chief three days ago. I’m still finding out what I’ve actually inherited.”

“So anything that came through the official investigation has to be treated as potentially tainted.” She looked at Rios. “And anything you know for certain, you know because you were there or you confirmed it independently.”

“Yes.”

She looked around the room, taking in each face in turn, with the same unhurried attention she’d given everything since she walked in. “Then you assume anything you didn’t experience yourselves or have first-hand confirmation of isn’t truly known.” She looked back down at the notebook, then up again. “And you start over at the beginning.”

Eight

LAYLA

I’d been in enough rooms with enough family members of the lost to recognize what grief looked like when it had been living in a body for a long time. It stopped looking like grief eventually and moved instead to the set of the shoulders, the pitch of a voice that had practiced control. These people had carried that weight, and every one of them showed it differently.

Gabi, whose knee had been bouncing since I walked in the door and whose voice stayed level and whose hand stayed tight in Daniel’s. Willa, steadier now than she’d been talking about the boat, but with the look of someone who’d learned to manage a wound rather than heal it. Ford, with his jaw set, tracking every word. Rios, who’d spent fourteen years as the island’s convenient answer to an unsolved crime, sitting across from me with the stillness of a man who’d learned to hold himself carefully in the face of things that warranted the opposite.

And Jace on the hearth, whom I tried not to look at too often.

All their reactions landed on me at once as they began laying out the details.

Koa pressed against my legs, a silent support against the storm of silent emotion.

A part of me, sitting in this room full of people who had loved Gwen, kept whispering, Tell them.

Every reason I couldn’t scrolled through my head. I put the idea down hard every time it surfaced and kept my pen moving. When they’d finished, I reviewed my notes and reflected the information back at them to make sure I understood.

“Roland O’Shea. Sutter family lawyer. Present the night Gwen was taken. He murdered Joe Anderson on the beach when Anderson refused to deal with Willa being there. She wasn’t supposed to be, and she wasn’t part of the plan. O’Shea attempted to kill Willa again last year when she started to remember and died before he could be questioned.”

“Trampled,” Sawyer said. “By the horses.”

“The wild ones that run the north end of the island,” Willa explained.

I went brows up. “Well, that’s… some kind of karmic justice.”

I wrote it down. A man who’d been a respected fixture of this community for decades. Someone who’d handled the legal affairs of one of the island’s founding families, had been running logistics for a trafficking operation the entire time. The specific horror of that kind of proximity wasn’t new to me. I’d seen it in other cases, the way predators nested inside the structures meant to protect people. It didn’t get less stomach-turning.

“He was a middleman,” I continued. “Connected to whoever made the call, but not the source of it.”

“That’s how we understand it,” Willa said. “He said he was in charge of logistics. He referred to Gwen as a package.”

I held in my instinctive flinch. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard such language. The rest of them didn’t quite manage.