Truly (New York 1)

“Yes.”

The bastard knew it, too. It had been his contractor’s arrival with a small fleet of demolition equipment that had driven Ashley to at

tach herself to the tree in the first place.

She’d passed the first few days after her grandmother’s death in a haze. Her father’s voice over the phone had called her back from Bolivia, but when she arrived in the Keys there’d been no one here. No funeral, because Grandma hadn’t wanted one. No family, because her family was broken, and her father and grandmother had hated each other.

No idea what to do with herself.

When she’d come to her senses and realized she had to do something before Sunnyvale was lost, only a little more than a week remained of the grace period Díaz had given her, and she’d wasted it whirling around South Florida in an unfocused panic. She’d hounded the secretary at Díaz’s Miami office and pestered various Monroe County officials in an attempt to figure out how to prevent a wrecking ball from taking down her home.

When the demolition team had shown up anyway, even Ashley had been surprised by how completely she’d gone off her nut.

You can’t do this, she’d insisted. I won’t let you.

And the contractor—a kindly, bearded man named Noah—had said, You’ll have to talk to Roman.

I can’t! He won’t return my calls!

He’ll be here. Roman always supervises the demo.

Just seconds later, Gus had pulled up in his junker of a truck. Out on his rounds, looking for cans and bottles to turn in or trash to sell on Craigslist. Gus was a Little Torch Key fixture—harmless, friendly, slightly cracked.

Usually, he pulled over onto the curb and hailed whoever was outdoors, hanging his elbow out of the truck window to settle in for a long chat. She’d thought it would be a reprieve, chatting with Gus. That it would help her reset her head into a less panicked mode.

Instead, he’d said hello, and she’d launched into a monologue, blurting out everything she’d discovered since she came home to Florida and ending with the lament that had been playing on a loop inside her head all day long: In the morning, Ojito Enterprises was going to knock Sunnyvale down and build something else on the site, and there was nothing Ashley could do about it.

It would be a shame, Gus had said. This is such a great place.

She’d wanted to cry then, because even Gus knew what a big thing this was. How people came here, and it didn’t look like much, but it changed them.

Such a great place—her place—that the thought of losing it opened up a hole in her heart from which all kinds of horrible things kept escaping.

Grief. Needy desperation. Fear. She hadn’t felt so scared since she was thirteen. Not since her mother died and she’d come to understand there wasn’t a single person in the world she really mattered to—and there never had been. At thirteen, she’d felt like nothing. Invisible. Useless. Terrified. And angry—so angry.

But later, after things didn’t work out with her dad and she came to live with her grandmother, Ashley had learned to chase away the fear and anger. She’d spent years loving the world and being loved back—happy, well-adjusted years. Good years.

So the fear caught her attention, for sure. The fear made her lean in to listen when Gus spoke, slow and mellifluous, like some sort of Little Torch Key sage offering her The Answer.

I saw a movie about this guy in California? Didn’t want them to cut the redwoods down, so he built a platform and lived in one.

In her overwrought condition, Ashley had forgotten that Gus was not the brightest light on the patio. That he wasn’t even, by non-Florida-Keys standards, altogether well. She’d been too distracted by the clarity of this vision of herself attached to the palm in the middle of the courtyard, head held high, fending off injustice.

Within five minutes, Gus had pulled a long length of chain out of the back of his truck, Ashley had located the padlock, and they’d bound her to the tree in full view of the contractor.

Watch him try to knock the place down now, Gus had said, and Ashley had smiled, filled with triumph.

It was only after Gus took off and the contractor finished getting his heavy equipment in order, made a phone call, and left for the day that Ashley remembered how very stupid fear could be.

How, when you let fear be in charge, it made terrible, terrible decisions.

A number of inconvenient facts elbowed their way to the forefront of her consciousness. Like the fact that she probably should have brought food and water and some way to consume it.

Or that she definitely should have changed her clothes, because a still-damp, salt-encrusted bikini covered by an oversized T-shirt was simply not adequate protection against crotch-poking mulch, much less from the elements.

That she’d never managed to stick with a job for more than a season or a man for more than sixty days, so there was absolutely no reason to think she could stick with a protest for long enough to make it count. Especially when the contractor hadn’t actually said when Díaz would arrive.

And of course that she was a moron. An impulsive, grieving moron.