Page 38 of Fake Dark Vows

I wave my thanks to the woman in the sombrero and watch Georgie shoveling sand into the bucket. It has images of Woody and Buzz Lightyear on the side, and I wish that I could find a way to repay these people who have been nothing but generous to us.

Brandon Weiss could’ve learned a thing or two from them if only he’d stuck around. What is he afraid of? Getting knocked off that golden pedestal his parents have stuck him on top of or realizing that there’s a whole wide world out there that he’s missing out on while he’s reading emails and earning his next billion.

“Where’s Uncle Bran?” Georgie asks.

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” I say. “I think he left something on the boat.”

“Is he coming back?”

I smile at her. “Of course he is, Georgie. Just as soon as he finds what he’s looking for.”

She fills the bucket to the brim with sand that’s darker and damper the deeper we dig. She smooths the top with the spade and waits for me to turn it over into the middle of the circle we’ve declared as our castle’s moat. Then she taps the bottom of the bucket three times with the spade.

“Ready?” I ask.

“Ready.”

“Okay, here goes.”

I slide the bucket upwards, careful not to dislodge the sand inside, and we both squeal when we have a shape that looks like a castle.

Simple pleasures. I’d bet that Brandon never made a sandcastle when he was a kid, or if he did, he has erased the memory and replaced it with dollar signs.

The sun is hot on the back of my neck as we fill the bucket time and again, creating our castle masterpiece that dries up and crumbles as quickly as we can build it. I wish I’d brought some money with me to buy us both a cold drink. Or at least fetched a couple of bottles of water from the cooler on the boat.

“Here,” a voice says from somewhere behind me. “I thought you could use a cold drink.”

Brandon?

I turn around and there he is, a bottle of ice-cold water in his hand.

“You came back,” I say.

CHAPTER 13

Brandon

I left Marathon Key with seething emotions bubbling beneath the surface of my skin.

She called me a coward.

No one has ever called me a coward before—not even Damon.

Steering the boat away from the island towards the next challenge, her voice played on repeat inside my head. I never thought you were a coward, Brandon.

I don’t even know why it stung so much. But even that’s a lie.

My entire life I’ve been groomed to be a winner, a fighter, someone born to succeed, and cowards have no place in the life of a Weiss.

So, I turned around and came back for her. To prove a point. To prove that I’m not a coward and I never walk away from an argument. Not that it even felt like an argument. More a disagreement over the way we each choose to play a game. I’d bet she never cheated at Monopoly either.

On the boat, Rose is quiet, but I sense something has shifted between us. Perhaps I’ve gained a notch in her estimation of me, become less ‘coward’ and more ‘used to getting his own way’. If that’s the case, I’ll take it.

“Did you find it?” Georgie asks, joining me at the steering wheel.

“Find what?” I ask.

“The thing you lost.” She holds onto the bottom of the wheel and cranes her neck to peer over the top of the control panel.