Page 28 of Renewal After Dark

She was newly divorced and figuring out her next chapter.

They’d fallen into a fun, flirty friendship that he greatly enjoyed. Because they were keeping things light, he hadn’t mentioned that he’d spent much of the last week searching for two men who were probably dead.

When are we going to see you back on Gansett?he asked by text while he ate one of the delicious Italian sandwiches Mario’s had sent over to feed the people searching for Billy and Jim.

Not sure yet. Got some things to figure out, but I hope to get back there in the next few weeks.

Keep me posted.

Will do.

Back to work I go.

All work and no play makes Linc a boring guy.

Haha. Right you are.

If you’re up for some time off, come see me. I could show you around Boston.

I might take you up on that.

Offer stands.

Talk soon.

The more he talked to her, the more he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to know what things she needed to figure out and what her life was like. He’d met her when she was on vacation and looking for a good time. What was she like in her real world? And why was it that he’d started to look so forward to their text exchanges?

He took those questions with him as he returned to the boat to continue the search.

As McKenzie wentthrough her morning routine with Jax, she thought about Duke and their conversation from the night before. He was such a nice guy, which was incredibly hard to find these days. She and her friends had withstood every possible dating and relationship disaster, from infidelity and lies, in her case, to the physical and emotional abuse of her friend Talia.

Many of her friends, herself included, had sworn off men forever—with good reason.

“They’re simply not worth the bother,” Rochelle had recently declared after the demise of her second marriage. Two husbands by twenty-six. Rochelle, who’d been McKenzie’s friend since high school, wondered if that was a world record.

McKenzie had to agree with Rochelle’s take. Every woman in her life had a story to tell about being ghosted, deceived, led on, lied to and, in Talia’s case, injured enough to file a police report and go through the motions of having her ex charged with assault. McKenzie’s own father had washed his hands of his three daughters after his wife divorced him. She’d seen him twice in twelve years, and neither time was memorable for the right reasons.

It was exhausting.

It was demoralizing.

It was often devastating.

Hearing that her boyfriend, Eric, had a wife and children had shattered her, especially since she’d discovered a year’s worth of lies three days after finding out she was pregnant. That’d been one hell of a week.

They’d been fighting a lot leading up to that momentous week, so she’d debated whether to even tell him about the baby.

When she’d finally decided to share the news with him, he’d told her he already had a wife and kids, as if that wouldn’t be the most shocking thing he could say after a year together. But then he went and topped himself.

“The baby can’t be mine,” he said. “I had a vasectomy years ago.”

She’d stared at him in disbelief. He knew full well that she hadn’t been with anyone but him. He also knew she was in love with him and hadn’t so much as looked at another man since the day she met him.

“There’s no one else, and you know it,” she’d said, her chin quivering.

“Well, there must be, because I can’t have kids.”

She’d wrapped her arms tight around herself, trying to hold it together until she was alone. “You should go.”

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