Page 50 of The Reaper
“It was just … one night,” I said.
“Sure, it was.”
The kettle clicked. I focused on the pour-over, hoping the steam would conceal my blush. But Dean was already too interested.
“You’ve got that look, Meggie. Like someone lit a fire under your cutting board.”
“Could be the Aleppo pepper,” I said flatly.
He didn’t buy it. He never did.
Dean Delaney was many things—former chef, occasional investor, lifelong flirt—but above all, he was a man who read people with eerie precision.
I hated it.
I loved it.
We moved into the sunroom. He took the sofa, I took the armchair, and Finn leaned against the doorway with his mug in hand like a sardonic bodyguard.
“I drove out to Folly this morning,” Dean said, after a few moments of silence.
I looked out the window, eyes on the creeping ivy, throat tight.
“I haven’t been back in years,” I said.
“You should go. See what’s left.”
“Nothing’s left.”
He sipped. “You don’t know that.”
I did, though.
I remembered it too clearly—the wreckage, the smoke, the wet snap of timber underfoot. The ocean had been calm that day, eerily indifferent, like it hadn’t just watched everything burn. The restaurant had been my parents’ dream. A little place with a big heart—Meggie’s—named after me. The menu changed every week, written in chalk on a board outside the door like an offering to the sea, as if they were asking for permission to dream a little longer.
I was six the night it was destroyed. Not old enough to understand grease fires or insurance gaps or how fast a dream could dissolve when no one was watching. But I remembered the screaming. The sirens. The way my father stood in the parking lot, holding my mother like she might fall apart if he didn’t. I remembered how the flames painted their faces gold, like saints in agony.
They didn’t die that night.
But they never came back from it.
The fire took more than the walls and the recipes and the vintage glassware my mom had collected like it was sacred. It took the best of them. The fire stole their joy. Their spark. The thing that had once made them reach across countertops for each other, laughing like teenagers with flour on their noses.
By the time I was nine, they were gone.
Not in a way I talk about. But gone, all the same.
Dean didn’t say anything. We’d walked this road before, and there was only so much anyone could say when a child carried grief.
He and Trish had taken me in after. No children of their own, and no clue what to do with a girl who barely spoke and spent most of her time arranging invisible menus in the backyard. But they had tried. They’d let me put a makeshift kitchen in the garage and bought me my first real knife when I was ten. A Victorinox chef’s blade with a red handle and my name etched in tiny cursive letters.
Dean had never stopped calling me Meggie, no matter how old I got or how hard I tried to outgrow the girl who’d once cried over her family’s shattered dreams.
I took a slow sip of coffee, letting the bitterness ground me.
“I’m not ready to go back to Folly Beach,” I said finally.
Dean tilted his head. “You don’t have to be ready. Just curious.”
