The Reunion - Softcover

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Kit Frick is a MacDowell Fellow and an International Thriller Writers Award finalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from Syracuse University. She is the author of the adult suspense novels The Split and Friends and Liars, the young adult thrillers Before We Were Sorry (originally published as See All the Stars), All Eyes on Us, I Killed Zoe Spanos, Very Bad People, and The Reunion, and the poetry collection A Small Rising Up in the Lungs. Her books have been optioned for film and television and translated into nine languages. Kit loves a good mystery but has only ever killed her characters. Honest. Visit Kit online at KitFrick.com and on Instagram @KitFrick.

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Chapter 1: One Week Ago Tuesday, December 26

1 ONE WEEK AGO TUESDAY, DECEMBER 26 Six Days Until the Engagement Party

ADDISON

The Acker-Mayweathers are accustomed to breezing through life’s annoying little lines—at the farmers’ market, the post office, the florist where Mom buys fresh-cut lilies on Sundays “to brighten up the breakfast nook.” People know us in Rhyne Ridge. People let us through. But the Cancún International Airport is six hours and one connecting flight away from New York’s Hudson Valley, and here, we are three cogs in an epic crush of sweaty, stinking bodies, everyone trying to make their way from the arrival gate to the six men and women in their little plexiglass huts checking passports and releasing exhausted travelers into the bright Caribbean sunshine.

“This blows.” My twin brother, Mason Acker-Mayweather. For the third time in the last five minutes, he lets his backpack slump from one shoulder to the floor.

“Mason, don’t say ‘blows.’?” Our mom, Elizabeth Acker-Mayweather. She twists her shiny brown hair behind her, then pats her wrist fruitlessly for a hair tie. The air-conditioning is blasting, but it’s no match for the sheer magnitude of body heat in here.

We landed approximately forty-five minutes ago, an arrival time apparently shared by every other international flight touching down in Cancún on the day after Christmas. After half an hour inching along a corridor stretching from our gate to a single escalator, we descended into the massive sea of travelers already jammed into the Passport Control hall, everyone jostling to join the six long lines snaking their way toward the agents at the front. I do a quick head count of the travelers in my general circumference, then multiply by eighteen, the approximate quantity of similarly sized areas in the hall. Roughly, there are nine hundred people inside, all waiting to see six agents.

An airport official glances at our customs slips and ushers us toward the end of line five. Give or take, one hundred and fifty people wait ahead of us. We’re going to be here a while.

I click open my red roller case and pull out the novel I need to have finished for Miss Dern’s class when I get back to school next week. Then I flip my suitcase on its side and take a seat.

“I don’t know how you can read in here,” Mason says, squatting down next to me. “It’s loud as hell.”

“White noise.” I shrug. I’m good with words, but lit has never been my favorite. I’m a science and math girl. So the faster I can get through this book, the less of the trip I’ll spend with it hanging over me.

But Mason clearly isn’t going to let me read in peace. “Have you tried the Wi-Fi? I can’t get past terms and conditions.”

I shake my head. “Reading.”

“Can you try it, though? Or give me your phone.”

I dig it out of my pocket and hand it over. There’s nothing on my phone my brother and cousins can’t see; I made sure of that before this trip. “Help yourself. But there are nearly a thousand people in this room alone trying to log on. The network is overloaded.”

The line inches forward, and I scoot my suitcase up a foot, then sit back down. Mason pokes at the screen and scowls, clearly getting nowhere. When we were little, people always wanted to know if we had that “twin thing,” which seemed to mean something between a deep empathetic understanding of one another and straight-up telepathy. We didn’t, even then, but we were close in the way many little siblings are close. And we looked a lot alike, for fraternal twins. Dusty blond hair, which we got from our dad, small noses and wide-set blue eyes from Mom. And we were both short for our age.

That changed in sixth grade, when Mason shot up and filled out, shoulders and chest broadening faster than most high school boys, and I stayed five feet flat. Soon Mason needed glasses, and I didn’t, and by the time we were thirteen, we were barely recognizable as siblings. Thirteen was the year we began to grow apart, too, until our physical differences mirrored even bigger changes on the inside. Sometimes I wish we could go back in time.

I scoot my suitcase again and try to finish my paragraph. James Joyce is so obscure.

“We should have been at the hotel by now,” Mason grumbles. He drops my phone into my lap, letting my book catch it. “I should be on the beach.”

Mom glances at her delicate gold watch. “Austin and Ted—Theo—were scheduled to land a few minutes after we did. Can you see them anywhere, hon?”

Mom only has an inch or two on me; “hon” is definitely directed at Mason, who towers over both of us.

He gives the crowd a cursory glance, then shakes his head, shaggy hair flipping back and forth before it settles in his eyes. “If there was any service in here, we could text them.”

Mom sighs, and the queue inches forward again. It’s been ten minutes since we joined line five, and we’ve almost reached the first curve. Eight belted lanes between us and the gate agent at ten minutes per lane; my guess is we’ll be out of here around two thirty. I don’t share that with Mason.

“I just wish I knew they got in okay.” Mom twists her hair back again, and I climb off my suitcase and unzip it to find her a hair tie.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” I say, holding out an elastic.

Gratefully, Mom pulls her hair through it. Honestly, I could go a little longer without running into Austin and Theo—known to his father as Teddy, a habit Mom’s trying to break after Theo made it clear the nickname’s off-limits. Ahead of us stretches an entire week of enforced bonding with the new step-fam. Austin Hunt is Mom’s fiancé; they’re getting married in Rhyne Ridge this June. Theo Hunt is Austin’s seventeen-year-old son, a senior at a high school about forty-five minutes away from the school where Mason’s a junior. I’m about an hour and a half south, in my junior year at Tipton Academy, a private school known for, among other things, its cutting-edge science program. Austin and Theo seem fine; I’ve only met them once, last month, when I came home from school and we all got together for Thanksgiving. I’m not opposed to getting to know them, but a whole week together at an all-inclusive Caribbean resort with the rest of the Mayweathers is going to be a lot.

We round the bend to the line’s second lane, and Mason bounces up and down on the balls of his feet, then pulls out his phone to check the Wi-Fi once again. My brother never could sit still. I don’t know him like I used to, before playing Division 1 hockey became his entire identity and I moved away from home to study biology and attempt to figure out what being a Mayweather means without my twin brother and my cousin Natalia constantly by my side. But some things haven’t changed. Mason needs to be in motion always, and he has the attention span of a fly. He’s also fiercely protective of Mom, ever since she got out of a bad situation with Dad, and Dad lost custody.

“How well do you really know Austin?” Mason asks her for what is clearly not the first time,...