Hush by Nancy Bush

self-consciously through her hair, and asked, ―What‘s going on?‖

    ―It‘s Lucas,‖ Genevieve said after a moment, her voice raw. Her gaze shifted to Rhiannon, who looked as if she were staring into the yawning gates of hell. ―He fell from a cliff into the ocean.
    He‘s . . . dead.‖

    ―Dead?‖ Coby repeated, uncomprehending.

    ―Dead,‖ Rhiannon whispered, fresh tears welling in eyes that looked as if they‘d already cried a river. She started sobbing and wailing and Coby realized this was what had woken her up.

    ―I‘m sorry, Bug,‖ her father said, murmuring his favorite nickname for her. ―I‘m so sorry.
    The police are on their way and want to talk to all of us. . . .‖

    Twelve years ago

    Now Coby pulled into the gravel drive that led to the same house, still her father ‘s beach house, listening to the crunch beneath the tires, watching the rain pour over her windshield and the trees wave their branches menacingly as she slowed to a stop. Twelve years that felt like a lifetime ago in some ways; like it happened yesterday in others.

    Switching off the engine, Coby sat for a moment, her hands still on the steering wheel. She gazed at the familiar beach house and wondered, as she had so many times before, if there was any way she could have stopped the events that happened later that night. It was the same thing she wondered anytime her thoughts touched on the beach and Lucas Moore. If something—if just one thing—were different, maybe there would have been a different ending as well.

    But it was what it was, and many other things had happened since, some good, some not so good, some out-and-out tragic. They had all graduated from Rutherford High the following spring and Coby had gone onto college and then her job at Jacoby, Jacoby, and Rosenthal. McKenna was a stand-up comic on the regional circuit and was still single, and Dana had moved to the East Coast, married, and had birthed a passel of children, apparently; at least three by last count. Genevieve Knapp was married also, to Jarrod Lockwood, and they lived in the greater Portland area but were unhappily childless at last report. Ellen was a mystery; living in California, maybe. At least that was the extent of the information that had reached Coby‘s ears, though she thought McKenna kept in touch with her. Wynona was now a social worker around Portland, unmarried, according to her Facebook page, and uninterested in anyone from Rutherford High, according to her attitude.
    Rhiannon was gone, the tragedy of their group. She‘d attended school in Arizona but had been home for winter break, hiking along a trail above Multnomah Falls, just east of Portland, when the fatal accident occurred.

    Coby expelled her breath, feeling that eerie breath of fate brush her nape whenever she thought of unexpected death. Why Lucas? Why Rhiannon? It seemed like there should be some reason, some explanation, for what had happened to them, yet both deaths were accidents. Statistics.

    Bad things happen.

    She was cocooned inside her car by the rain, and it was a last moment of peace before she had to face the social battle ahead. With a sigh, Coby reluctantly climbed from the car and crunched up the gravel drive, head bent to the dousing rain and ripping wind.

    Their last friend, Yvette Deneuve, had turned up pregnant her senior year. She‘d delivered her baby boy in mid-March, almost nine months to the day after the beach trip, and that certainly got the rumor mill spinning. But Yvette had yet to tell anyone who the father was, to Coby‘s knowledge. If she was asked outright, her answer was to walk away and cut that person dead.
    Everyone had expected her to give up the child for adoption; Yvette just didn‘t seem like the motherly type. But she fooled them all, keeping her little boy and raising him as a single mom. Like all the rest, Coby had seen next to nothing of her since graduation, though that wasn‘t true of Yvette‘s sisters, who were a