Beach Reads

Welcome to Beach Reads, where Bye brings you serialized stories for your mental and emotional vacation. We hope you enjoy our first installment of The Island of Second Chances.

CHAPTER ONE

It wasn’t her first time hiding inside a stranger’s closet, but this was the first closet that smelled like coconut and sea salt.

The villa was mostly dim, except for the silvery light streaming in from the neighboring bungalow’s pool across the sandy path. She could see their fish: vibrant yellow, cerulean blue, with a flicker of crimson darting against the glass. The woman with the long, sun-kissed legs and the glass of hand-rolled tobacco lounged in the cabana, softly humming along to Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds,” which Lucy took as a personal affront. She’d left her sandals on the deck, but her toes were damp—Lucille had not outgrown clumsiness, nor had she remembered it had rained.

What was that phrase her father used? “Drowned rat chic,” he’d said once when she was twelve, and she’d pretended to find it funny because that was what twelve-year-olds were supposed to do.

On the other side of the closet door, the woman’s phone vibrated. Then a sharp intake of breath, as if she’d been holding her lungs in reserve. A chair creaked. A clink, glass on granite, and the woman began speaking in a voice meant for boardrooms and small claims court: too loud in the tropical hush.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m up. He won’t show. Didn’t last time.” A brittle laugh. “You should see the socks, it’s like she bathes in puddles.” Her hunched shadow passed close enough to the closet that Lucy could make out the seam of the woman’s black sarong, draped just above the knee. Another voice, male, but muffled; probably a man who distributed his business cards by the shore. The woman’s silhouette tilted, hair swinging. “It’s fine. I locked the gate after. I know how to handle her.” That voice again—sharp this time, compressed—and then the woman said, “God, you’re paranoid.”

From the closet, Lucy eyed her escape. Two steps: one to the side table, or a straight-armed lunge to the sliding doors. Neither was survivable if the woman had a gun, which her type sometimes did. Not that Lucy was profiling. Profiling necessitated good options. She flexed her toes, feeling the dampness seep up her ankles. A drip from her hair tapped her shoulder, and the woman fell silent.

They always sense it, Lucy thought. The minute before.

The closet was nearly empty—two linen shirts, a tennis racket with the price tag still swinging, what could only be described as a god’s worth of sunblock. Lucy pressed her palm to the low shelf, pried loose the seam. She found the sheet of laminated plastic she’d slipped in earlier, ran her thumb over its edge till it flexed and snapped.

The woman was pacing now, a staccato on the marble. “If she does show, Ill call you back. Don’t worry. One for the towel,” she drawled, and hung up.

Lucille waited for the click of the phone on the granite—heavy, familiar. This was, after all, what she was good at: catching people in the act of underestimating her. She pushed the closet door just enough, the world open to a hairline crack and chlorine haze.

The woman was at the minibar, pouring a glug of coconut rum into her glass. Lucy calculated: four steps to the French doors, five if she fumbled the patio catch. She could taste the salt, the sweat of the woman’s back. The woman’s eyes flicked to the glass doors, then back to her phone, which she thumbed now with the bright, bored efficiency of everyone who had ever stood in her way.

Lucy moved. She was, in these moments, almost herself again. No parents, no boarding school, no counselors telling her, “you could be anything, Lucy, if you put your mind to it.” She slid out—silent, a hiccup in the air—tracking the woman’s periphery, feeling the tickle of adrenaline comb the roots of her hair. The glass in the woman’s hand chimed against her teeth as she took a swallow, eyes trained on something out in the black of the surf.

Lucy pivoted, saw the golf umbrella by the door. Black, with a blue logo. She palmed it one-handed and kept low, letting herself become negative space in the St. Barts rental. The woman leaned on her elbow, scrolling, exposing the crease at her neck where a pendant hung in a slick of heat. Her nails were pearly, tips squared. What would father say now?

Lucy didn’t pause to test a quip. She swept past, out the French doors and into the sea-brine night, umbrella in tow. She kept her head down, kept her knees bent, and did not breathe until the sand started giving way from concrete to powder. The umbrella shielded her from nothing, not the wind, not the eyes from the other side of the pool, not the pulse pounding in her jaw. Still, she let it spin as she jogged the short path to the fence, feeling it catch and slap against her back with each stride.

Behind, the French doors opened in a confused gasp—the woman saying "Hey—" but by then Lucy was vaulting the low driftwood gate, knees scraping, umbrella snapping back and striking her wrist. She could have discarded it. Instead, she clung to it, the way people sometimes keep the souvenir key to a motel they never intend to visit again: as a theory, or a threat.