Page 16 of Ghost Note

He took a controlled step closer, but I held up a hand in warning—a warning for him to stay back and keep his mouth shut because he’d only spoken a few words, and I already didn’t like this version of who he’d become… or who I was becoming because of it.

“You have no shame, do you?” I said quietly, my voice breaking. “It was your grandmother’s funeral today, and you’d rather stand here making me feel like crap than acknowledge the fact that you couldn’t even be bothered to show up at the church to pay your respects… if you even had any.”

“I paid my respects.”

“How? By getting drunk on the beach she once loved. By tossing your used-up cigarettes all over the place, the way she used to hate tourists doing every season. By—”

“You don’t know shit, Daisy,” he cut me off.

I stuttered, the words I wanted to say getting caught in my throat when Danny turned his back on me and looked out at the inky ocean.

“You think you know; I can tell you do, but you don’t know a damn thing about any of it,” he blew out as if the words weren’t meant to be spoken. They drifted back to me, the ache in his voice making my chest pinch before I rubbed it away with the palm of my hand. “But carry on, please. Keep saying what you have to say if it makes you feel better.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” I told him again, even though he had more right than any of us. “You shouldn’t have come back.”

“No one owns this place. I’ll do whatever the hell I want. I don’t need your approval, and I don’t need Hope Cove’s.”

What has happened to you?I wanted to ask him.

This wasn’t the soft-hearted boy I’d grown up with. He was unrecognisable to me. His voice didn’t sound like his. When had he even started smoking?

I had so many questions, but none of them mattered. I knew I wouldn’t like the answers, no matter how carefully he delivered them, so I kept them inside, locked away in that box labelled ‘Danger’ in my mind.

The moon’s light shone down on the ocean in a single strip, a white brick road illusion that made you think you could somehow walk along it to get to the horizon. It held my focus for ten seconds before I shifted back to Danny’s broad back. To those shoulders I used to climb upon when wading out to sea together. To that neck I’d tickle every night before falling asleep side by side.

How can a person somehow still feel like home when you haven’t known where they’ve been for the last five years?

I moved without instruction, taking a step back… then another… and another and another until I saw Danny’s shoulders rise, hold, and fall, as though he was setting free the weight he’d been holding onto for too long.

He looked over his shoulder, a brow raised. “For what it’s worth… I want you to know it’s okay. I hate me, too.”

Danny turned back to the sea, and I took off, not letting his words linger.

I ran because I had to.

Because there was danger in those eyes of his, and in that stirring of my fixed-up heart, too.

It scared me how a man like Danny could be the absolute worst of me, and how this stupid little body of mine could still cry out for more.

I wasn’t going to let it go through any of that again. Danny would be gone tomorrow, and this night would be nothing but a memory. A wine-induced, drunken mistake, memory.

Things like that had no place in sweet, little Devon, or in my boring, ordinary life.

* * *

The next morning, I woke on the sofa, with an arm hanging off the edge and the bright sunlight pouring in through the window of my living room. My head was playing its own concert I didn’t want to listen to, and the groan that escaped my throat hurt as I rolled off the couch and landed on all fours with a thud.

A bang at the door had me wincing, and I contemplated dropping down onto my stomach and just lying there for hours until all noise and pain disappeared from my life.

Unfortunately for me, Gina’s voice pushed through the front door’s letterbox a second later.

“Daisy Grace Piper, if you don’t open this door within the next thirty seconds, I’m getting the key from under the flowerpot and letting myself in! This is your warning to put clothes on.”

“Lord,” I whispered to the ceiling, “Make her go away. Make it all go away.”

“And don’t you be praying for any divine intervention, either. Not even Lucifer could move me right now, so open up.”

It took me longer than it should have done to get to the door. My body was sluggish, and the rosé wine was lingering in my head… and my stomach. In my panic last night, I’d finished off the bottle once I’d returned home, and then I’d stared at a wall until sleep had taken me at some early hour of the morning.

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