They Left Me Out of Their Group, So I'll Leave Them Out of My Life novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Day Before

On Thursday, the day before the party, the tent men came at nine.

They were three strangers in a white truck, and they raised a long canvas roof over the end of Gran's dock without asking anyone anything.

Rowan had strung the dock lights the day before, because Santino's email said to, and because Tegan's plan needed them lit.

I stood on the porch with a mug and watched the poles go up.

"Do they know whose dock it is?" I asked.

"They know whose check cleared," Rowan said.

At eleven, two cars came down the lane, one behind the other.

Beckett got out of the first, in the rowing sweatshirt, and looked at me over the roof and gave a very small nod.

Out of the second car stepped the couple and the three guys.

I had not seen the three guys since my birthday dinner.

They had been in the chat. They had put laughing faces on the cake line.

The tallest one wore a Phillies cap, and he stopped halfway across the gravel when he saw me on the porch.

"Tegan," he said. "You're alive."

"I've been alive the whole time."

"Santino said you were..." He stopped. "Never mind what he said."

"Say it."

"That you'd had a breakdown. That you were somewhere getting help." He took off the cap. "He asked us to be nice if you showed up. To not set you off."

The woman from the couple walked up beside him and put her phone in his hand.

"Read it," she said. "All of it. The ledger first."

He read, standing in the gravel, and the other two crowded in on either side.

I watched their faces go from careful to blank to red.

"Sixty-one thousand," said the shortest one, flatly.

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