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I relayed the question to the others, and they both nodded.
“Frittata’s great.” I almost told him that I missed him, but that might have sounded needy, and I didn’t want to sound needy. “See you in twenty. Are you sure everything’s okay?”
“There’s nothing for you to worry about.”
That wasn’t a “yes,” but Nico had hung up, and perhaps I was overreacting? He’d probably had a difficult meeting, that was all.
“So, what kind of job are you looking for?” Addy asked again once Vega had peed one last time and the six of us had piled into the car. The trail was quiet today, the parking lot nearly empty, but we still got stuck behind a truck driving at half the speed limit when Brooke pulled out onto the road.
“I used to be a waitress. Events, mainly, but I worked in restaurants from time to time.”
“Events, huh? You should call Sara Baldwin. She just started an events company.”
“Sara Baldwin? I heard the Baldwins create a lot of problems around here.”
Brooke slowed for a turn, and thankfully, the truck went straight on. “Sara’s one of the good guys. None of the stuff that happened was her fault. You should avoid LKB Events like the plague, though. Her cousins run it—badly—and they’re impossible to work for.”
“Nico said he banned them from the Peninsula.”
“Yup, them and one of their brothers. I was there when he banned Easton,” Brooke said. “What’s that German thing? The shade thing?”
“Schadenfreude?” I suggested.
“Yes, that. He definitely deserved it.”
The two of them gave me a rundown of the Baldwin family, which included far more detail than Nico had volunteered. He wasn’t a chatterbox, but I’d been dead right about Brooke and Addy—they loved to ladle out the dirty details with a healthy topping of rumour.
Matty dropped Shelley 1.0 and struggled against his seat belt when he couldn’t reach her. I fished her out of the footwell, absentmindedly rubbing my finger over the spot between her shell and her foot where I’d repaired a small hole. Matty had liked to chew things when he was younger, and even Shelley hadn’t escaped his teeth. Thankfully, he’d grown out of?—
Wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
This wasn’t Matty’s original Shelley. This was the replacement.
So why did it have a tight little bundle of stitches in the exact same place? I took a closer look, and the bile that rose into my throat was worse than anything I’d experienced while I was pregnant. Those were my stitches. This was Matty’s Shelley. She’d been washed, but it was the same damn toy.
Which meant… Which meant… There was only one person who could have listed her for sale on the internet. Only one person who could have sent her here to Baldwin’s Shore. Cesare must have realised how attached Matty was to the stupid snail—or maybe Lyndsey had told him, the traitor—and he’d known I’d look for a replacement.
He had my address.
He knew where I was.
We were so close to the Peninsula, just a few hundred yards away, but I reached for my phone anyway. I had to tell Nico how stupid I’d been, again. Had to warn him that Cesare would be on his way if he wasn’t in Baldwin’s Shore already.
Brooke braked sharply, and I was thrown forward against the seat belt. Matty let out a cry, and I shoved Not-Shelley into his hands to try and placate him.
“Get out of the way, you idiot,” Brooke muttered.
The SUV was blocking the road, and I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. Not until the passenger had what he came for.
“Is that a gun?” Addy asked. “This has to be a joke, right?”
It was no joke.
Cesare had brought Alonzo with him, the one brother who was even more sadistic than my husband. Alonzo hauled me out of the car, and when I tried to grab my phone, he twisted my arm behind my back and put his gun to my head. My knees buckled, but he held me in a vise-like grip.
“Let me go!”
