"That Mayor Drayton's really something, huh, Gracie-baby?"

I roll my eyes, even though it's exactly what he's expecting. It seems like the right thing to give Gramps what he wants every chance I have. "He's okay. A little overconfident."

"You know, I think he thought you were prettier last night, without your makeup and fancy purple dress. He's no dummy, and you can bet most of the single gals in town have made a pass. Not interested, though. Nope." He slurps a bite of oatmeal doctored with a healthy dose of brown sugar and syrup.

He could be gay. The thought stays where it belongs, in my head, both because Gramps would argue and I don't believe it for a second. The way he looked at me, the not-quite-hidden suggestion of interest in his gold-flecked eyes, betray him. I might not have been able to tell that my fiancé was sleeping with half of his graduate students, but surely I haven't lost the ability to sense when a man is genuinely interested.

"Well, I'm sure it'll be the same with me."

Gramps shakes his head. "You're just like your Grams. Don't see the truth of how pretty you are—look just like her, too."

The comment lifts the corners of my lips and swells my heart in my chest, even though it's far from the first time he's uttered some form of it. The fact that Grams and I bear such a strong resemblance to each other might be part of the reason Gramps has always had a special affection for me, and my Grams was a beautiful woman, even in her eighties. Regal. We do share features, along with a kind of prickly countenance, but she had grace—a quality that, despite my name, continues to elude me.

I get up and rinse out our bowls, helping Gramps take a quick stroll around the front yard, then into his chair. He's situated with remote controls, blankets, his pills, and a drink all within easy reach, not to mention Mrs. Walters saw us outside, so she can't say he's not getting enough air. It's an hour before the library opens when I step out the front door, taking a moment to breathe in the fresh morning air before it turns stagnant and sweaty.

Maybe it's lingering fear of Anne's ghost, or a sudden urge to burn some fat, but my feet find the sidewalk instead of my butt finding the driver's seat of my car. I have an hour, and the walk will take fifteen minutes. I'll regret it later, when the trek home in a hundred muggy degrees drenches me from head to toe, but that's then.

I'm out to prove that I don't give a shit about consequences after all. Fuck adulthood.

Avoiding my car turns out to be a moot point when, less than two blocks from Gramps's house, the scraggly redhead from my backseat joins me on the sidewalk. Her gait matches mine, but her feet don't make any sound on the concrete despite her clunky, knee-high leather boots. Lord if she doesn't smell bad enough to gag a maggot, even outside.

Yesterday, I ran. Today, for some reason, it's as though none of this is happening in real life, and I don't go faster or slower, just keep going, eyes forward, clinging to the hope of waking up. It's like swimming through the air with my blood pumping through me ten times too fast, depositing a chilly sweat on my brow and palms.

She doesn't talk, but based on my sideways glances, the premise that she's Anne Bonny seems legitimate. The smell and her stiff men's shirt, trousers, and boots, combined with the sword and dagger belted at her waist, convince me that she's Anne Bonny or that I'm going nuts. Or both.

The expression on her face wavers between frustration and sorrow, but nothing about it or her posture suggests causing harm is on her agenda. We walk side by side a few more steps, me and my reeking ghost, before my nerve returns out of nowhere.

Dead or not, she's kind of starting to bug me.

"What do you want?" The question would sound more at home in the mouth of the first victim in a horror flick, but it has to be asked.

Even so, Anne—if it is Anne—doesn't reply. Maybe she thinks it's a dumb thing to ask, too.

"Okay, obviously you left your tongue in your grave. Let me guess, you want to grab a coffee and a bagel? I'm thinking about stopping at Westies, but I'm not sure...Oh," I gasp as my body turns to ice.

My blood freezes in place, sluggish in its attempt to continue flowing; the soles of my sandals frozen to the pavement. When the chill lands in my chest it's impossible to breathe.

The cause of the cold seems to be Anne's fingers wrapped around my wrist. Below it, my hand may as well have disappeared, because there's no feeling at all. Terror races as fast as the cold, enveloping me with equal strength. I'm going to die in the street, frozen into an ice sculpture in the middle of summer, and end up on one of those shows about unexplained alien murders on the Science Channel.

The ghost's eyes reflect confusion at the look on my face, which must be horrible. Her gaze falls to my arm, and her fingers reflexively set me free. It takes several minutes for my skin to thaw out enough to allow movement. My teeth continue to chatter. For her part, the ghost doesn't look the slightest bit apologetic. That, more than anything else, makes me sure she's Anne Bonny. If even half the stories are true, she's not the type to care much if she made the poor living girl uncomfortable.

Curiosity begins to trump my fear. For whatever reason, having a ghost stalker scares me less than if an alive person started following me, and aside from the unbearable cold of her grip, she seems harmless. A tad annoying, perhaps, but since she hasn't tried to kill me yet, I'll assume she doesn't plan to.

Her expression changes again, morphing into a twist of desperation that's so intense it makes me sick. She snakes a hand toward me again, but she snatches it back when I recoil.

Note to self: Ghostly types and touching do not go together.

"I don't know what you want. I'm guessing you can't tell me."

Like her boots, her matted red hair makes no noise when she shakes her head. Grime smears her from head to toe, as though she climbed straight out of a grave for today's visit. She points a cracked, blackened fingernail the direction I was headed before she turned me into a proper ice sculpture.

"You want me to keep walking the same way? That's super helpful. Thank you so much."

Her lips twist in a display of distaste that might make me laugh if our lack of ability to communicate didn't frustrate me as well. It's looking as though she's not going away until I figure out what she wants, but the answer to how to make that happen sits outside my grasp. Less drinking and wallowing, more thinking.

Anne's head snaps up, her eyes fixed down the empty street. I follow her gaze but see nothing. When I turn back, she's disappeared, and a heartbeat later a young mother appears around the corner, jogging behind a stroller. Fantastic. She seems to like me, as Beau suggested in jest.

Why, I haven't the slightest.



By the time I order my sugar-free iced vanilla latte at Westies—named by an owner obsessed with the dogs she breeds—my thoughts are completely consumed by the mystery of why Anne Bonny has taken an interest in me. There's nothing special about me, nothing that relates to her as far as I know, but there must be a reason.

Unless I'm batshit crazy and don't even realize it. That seems more likely than her picking me for some mysterious, specific reason.

My mind drifts so far from the comfortable coffee shop that I don't see Melanie until she perches in the chair opposite mine and sets down a hot drink on the round table between us. The marker on the side of the cup declares it a decaf mocha, which sparks my interest. Mel's been a caffeine addict since we could buy our own from the Kwik Stop.

She appeared so fast and so silently that if we hadn't been friends since first grade I might assume she's a ghost, too. "Hey, Gracie."

"Hey, Mel. You're up early."

She gives me a wry smile. "Things change. Can't exactly sleep past noon once there's a baby in the picture."

I nod toward her decaf mocha. "Or two?"

"Plus I have class this morning. Had to drop Grant off first," she continues, ignoring my suggestion.

"Will mentioned you were going to school. What are you studying?"

"Accounting."

"Hmm." Silence invades the space between us, but we were friends for so long I can read her like a book.

She's uncomfortable, and she sat down here to talk about something specific, not shoot the shit or catch up. We shared every secret for most of our lives, and even the fact that she married Will can't erase twelve years of friendship. Over six years have passed without a single word, but despite the fact that it's been as much my choice as hers, I hate that we're uncertain around each other—like strangers, but not.

"Whatever you want to say, just say it, Mel."

"I want you to stay away from Will."

"Stay away from Will?" Incredulous disbelief begs me to laugh. "Are you serious? He's your husband. You have a little boy together. Why should you feel threatened by me?"

Especially by me. The loser whose fiancé cheated, who ran away so she didn't have to face the fallout. The one too stupid to realize that sometimes first love is the real thing. Was, I guess.

"I don't need any uncertainty in my marriage right now, Gracie, and you and I both know why I should feel threatened by you." Her dark gaze falls to my left hand. "Where's your ring?"

She asks the question like it's been burning a hole in her pocket since we ran into each other at the Freedmans'. It kills me that she and Will have likely been discussing what might have happened to send me scurrying back here to bury my head in the marsh. Heron Creek is a small town, and I don't want to talk about it.

"I didn't come back to Heron Creek because of any lingering regrets over what happened between Will and I, if that's what you're thinking. He seems happy. Have some fucking self-confidence for once in your life."

She cringes, maybe because of my language but probably because of the remark. It's unfair to throw that in her face. Melanie lost her mom before I met her, and her father's one of the most critical men I've ever met.

But I don't want to think about why she feels threatened by me. About the force Will and I had been or all the times he called after I left—crying, begging, demanding to know why we couldn't be together. There wasn't a good answer, then. The week before I left for college it had hit me that if Will and I stayed together nothing new, nothing exciting or adventurous, would ever happen to me again.

He and Melanie were engaged less than a year later. The regret hit me like a ton of bricks, and the fact that he and I never talked about it made moving on harder than I could have imagined.

All of the explanations, the I still love yous, the I'm sorrys and Let's try agains hung in the empty years between us, forever stuck in our mouths and hearts and souls. We would never say them. It used to bother me, but now I think it doesn't matter. We had been close enough, once, that we know.

We know what we had was real, and rare. And we know it's over.

"Will and I had a thing, and it was important to both of us. But that was a long time ago, Mel, and we were stupid kids. If you want my reassurance, you have it. I promise I'm not interested."

It's the truth. It took me years to let go, to really move beyond the hope that he'd find his way back into my arms, but when it happened, it was permanent.

Relief oozes out of her pores, which is nice for Mel but does nothing to relax the knot between my shoulder blades that's been throbbing since Anne touched me a half an hour ago. As she sips her coffee, a different regret threads through me. I might be past wishing things could go back to the way they were with Will, but I would kill to have the old Mel. It would be so nice to be able to talk through what happened with David or to get the scoop about Mayor Sexypants from my oldest friend.

As sweet as Mel's always been, she's not quite ready to trust me. She's not sure what my reappearance means in her life, and the mama bear in her can't decide whether to believe me about Will. I sense all of this, and accept it, because the thought of spending time with her and Will together fades my desire to rekindle our friendship. My fragile emotional state can't handle happy couples, especially not them.

"I thought about what you said about Amelia," I say, feeling my way along the frayed, damaged thread that used to connect us. Surprised to find it's survived at all.

"Yeah?"

"I don't know what we can do about it, if anything, but I'm worried, too."

She pauses, closing her eyes as though maybe she's searching for how we used to be, too. "What happened between you two?"

It's easy to forget that no one knows except Amelia and me. And Jake. Being able to release that burden from my shoulders, to let Melanie carry a piece of it, tempts me more than Beau's dimples. The fact that telling Mel means telling Will almost stops me, but in the end, it doesn't. "Jake made a pass at me when I was in town for her shower. It's the only time in my life I felt in honest-to-God danger of being raped."

"Sweet Jesus."

"Yeah. Anyway, I told Amelia, but Jake had gotten to her first and said it was the other way around, that I came on to him. She believed him. Instead of me." A lump throbs in my throat, begging to be let loose.

Melanie's mouth falls open, and she tucks pieces of blond hair behind her ears, taking several breaths before finding a response. "I can't believe it. I mean, I believe you. But you and Amelia were like sisters."

I swallow hard. "I know."

"She believed Jake because she couldn't face the shame of calling off her wedding. You know that deep down she doesn't think you could sleep with her boyfriend."

"Either way, I lost her." Breathing gets easier. The tears recede. To my surprise, letting Melanie in on the deep, dark secret lightens the weight dragging down my heart. "Things might have gotten worse with Jake. The guy definitely has a dark side."

The memory of his assault on me, from which I escaped only because the heel of my hand accidentally found his nose, sends shivers down my spine. I'd thrown up all over myself once I'd gotten away.

"But obviously you can't check on her." Mel chews on her lip. "I'll try calling again. Tell her my news."

That makes me smile. Secret for secret, just like old times.

Melanie gets up to leave, tossing her cup in the trashcan. I follow suit, since my shift at the library starts in a few minutes, and I'm pretty sure the mean front-desk lady won't be forgiving any tardies. We're outside, where the morning's cool is starting to give way to the humidity, when she gives me a real Melanie smile.

"It's good to see you, Gracie. It really is. And I'm sorry things ended badly with David."

"Life isn't turning out the way we all thought it would as kids, I guess." I shrug and summon an honest smile for her in return. "See you around."

"Yeah. I hope so. And Gracie?"

"Hmm?"

"You didn't lose Amelia. Or me, or Will. It's impossible. We stick together. Until the end, remember?"

I do. The reminder of our old friendship pact brings a faint smile to my lips, rolls the required echo right off them. "Until the end."