I couldn’t remember how to breathe around them.
I was usually able to navigate any of them, one-on-one—carefully, with precision. But in the group, I lost my bearings. There was too much history, too much I didn’t understand—about them, about the people they used to be. We had been classmates and neighbors; couples and friends; strangers. But lines had shifted. Relationships had crumbled. New allegiances had been forged.
And there were too many memories tied to The Shallows. Eight years of secrets locked away inside those rooms.
Hollis had the right idea, getting out. Getting space. The house used to feel bigger.
The beach was fairly private. Not close enough to any tourist areas, it was frequented only by those who owned or rented along this strip of road. A dozen or so homes, with a pier at the end, stretching into the sea. I listened to my steps echo over the wood planks of the long path rising through the dunes, leading me to the set of steps that ended directly on the sand.
Hollis stood across from the steps, just before the rising tide, in black leggings and a matching tank. She remained unnaturally still. I was used to seeing her always, always on the move. Not like this haunting image, staring out at the ocean, like she might step into it.
She had always been striking, but now, motionless and framed against the sea, her white-blond hair in the halo of sunlight gave her the aura of something otherworldly, slightly unreal.
I almost called out to her. But then I realized she was balanced on one foot, and must’ve been in the middle of a yoga routine—practicing something, even in her stillness. There was a phone strapped to her upper arm. She probably had earbuds in.
I wasn’t surprised she was tuning us out. Hollis had a tendency to disappear further into herself, putting her focus into miles run, goals achieved. She was a personal trainer—a lifestyle as much as a career.
Reasons to save Hollis: I thought, if it came to it, she could help save all the rest.
I rolled up my jeans and slipped my shoes off at the base of the steps before veering right, down the expanse of beach. Away from her.
The wind whipped off the water, a sharp contrast to the hot sand under my bare feet.
The first time we stepped out here, that very first year, Grace had looked toward the ocean and said, in her positive way, It’s impossible to feel trapped here.
I wished I could see it through her eyes—that I could stay firmly grounded in the present, feel only the idyllic beauty of where we stood. But for me, anywhere can feel like a trap.
The bridges like a series of passageways closing behind you; the people we were stranded with. As if the roar of the waves would drown out the memory of the screams. As if the ebb and flow wouldn’t make us think of the rain, and the rising water, and the bone-deep fear.
As if we wouldn’t remember back further, to the nauseating, winding road, the swerve before the plunge; the crackle of moments that divided the before and the after.
The night was so dark here too.
A mistake. That’s what the school kept saying. A mistake that the vans had detoured from the highway. A mistake that they’d told us we couldn’t bring our phones on the trip. A mistake that the drivers hadn’t checked in with the administration about the traffic or the change in plans.
Another mistake that we weren’t together on the one-year anniversary. Though I had kept my distance, Clara had gone to the tribute at the school: a prolonged moment of silence in the courtyard, followed by twelve haunting chimes of the chapel bell—and that was the last she was seen by anyone.
Later, Clara had texted us in the middle of the night: I’m going back.
And then she’d done it. Driven that same route into the Tennessee mountains, taken that same detour to the Stone River Gorge, left her car abandoned on the side of the road, with a half-empty bottle of vodka in the passenger seat. Presumably, there, she’d walked to the edge—drawn by the roar of the river, the pull of it—and jumped. None of us had received her message until the next morning, when it was too late.
I’d had my fill of funerals by then. Couldn’t stand the thought of one more, couldn’t face the reality of losing yet another classmate—especially after all we’d been through. But Amaya asked us all to meet in the parking lot behind the school on the night after the funeral, and we each agreed. As if we needed to prove to one another that the rest of us were still here.
When we saw each other that night, the eight of us gravitating toward one another in the dim glow of a streetlamp, I suddenly felt that the real mistake was not in the lead-up to the accident but that we had somehow survived it. Without Clara, it was easier to believe that we were never meant to escape the river—that, somehow, it was still coming for us.
It was Amaya’s idea: We shouldn’t be alone again.
The pact was such an easy thing to agree to.
I used to think this was the way to save us too. That we needed to be vigilant, on high alert—or it could still come for us after all this time.
But more recently, I had started to believe that the thing we thought was saving us from the past might’ve been binding us to it instead.
I worried that Ian had been doing fine until he got that email from Amaya, reminding him.
I believed that there had to be a way out of this, for all of us.
A shock of cold water crept up around my ankles, and I jumped. I stepped farther out of reach of the encroaching tide, footsteps washing away in my wake.
The beach was dotted with only a few people: a little girl and presumably her mother building a sand castle; a man heading my way from the opposite direction, fishing pole resting on his shoulder.
I heard the next wave coming and sidestepped the surge. Ahead of me, a tangle of seaweed lingered in the froth, and at the edge, something black protruded from the sand. It looked like it might be a wallet, or—
Another wave crept over the mass, dislodging the object, and as the water receded, I saw it more clearly. I splashed into the cold surf, scooping it up before it was swept out again: it was a phone.
The screen was cracked, and the edges were coated in a cold, wet sand, and there was salt water streaked across the screen. It was out of a case, probably dead. A small miracle it had survived the pull of the tide and washed back up onshore.
I turned in a circle, looking for its potential owner.
“Excuse me,” I called to the woman and child building the sand castle. The woman looked up, one hand on the brim of her straw hat, the other holding a small plastic shovel. The little girl, in a long-sleeved purple bathing suit, didn’t look up from her digging. “Did you lose a phone?” I asked.
The woman pursed her mouth, then reached into her striped beach bag before pulling out a phone inside a sparkly case. “Nope,” she said, the sun reflecting off the glitter.
The only other person in sight was the man heading my way from the pier—maybe he was looking for this.
I strode in his direction with purpose, noticed the bottoms of his khaki shorts were wet, and imagined him caught in a wave, losing his phone. As soon as I was close enough to be heard, I called, “Looking for this?” I extended the phone in my hand his way.
“What?” he called, or I thought he called. Sound moved oddly out here. Some voices carried; others were swept up under the wind and lost.
“Did you lose this?” I tried again.
His steps slowed, and he moved the fishing pole from one side of his body to the other. He was younger than I’d thought from the distance—with baggy clothes and wind-tangled hair sticking up in sections—but he was probably in his thirties, if that. His bright eyes stood out, sparkling, against a deep tan.
“Nah,” he said. “I know better than to bring a phone out to the beach.”
I looked up and down the stretch of sand, searching for another possibility. “Is there a lost and found around here?” I asked, hoping to hand off the responsibility to him. He seemed like he was local to this place.
He laughed, running his free hand back through his hair, smoothing out the pieces—though they shot up again immediately. “Definitely not.”
“I don’t know anyone here,” I added. “I’m just visiting.”
By his bemused expression, I assumed that must’ve been readily apparent. “Look,” he said with a sigh, “chances are it didn’t even come from someone on this beach.” He gestured to the Atlantic, stretching out before us. “We get a lot of debris down here. Once got pieces of a shipwreck from the Bahamas, you know.”
It seemed unlikely that this phone would be carried in on the surf from across the sea, but he stepped away, raising his hands, absolving himself. “Take care now,” he said. Then he veered toward the nearest set of wooden steps, but instead of taking the path back to the house, he cut straight through a gap in the dunes, like he knew a shortcut.
I scanned the stretch of homes across the beach; this phone probably belonged to someone staying at one. I started heading back toward our path. When I thought about it, at least this would give me something else to focus on later, an excuse to get out of that house again. Knocking on doors, looking for the phone’s owner. If it hadn’t been in the water for too long, it’s possible I could get it to restart, track the owner down with the information it contained.
By the time I approached the steps on the beach leading to our place, Hollis was no longer in sight. I walked the wooden path toward the house, past the engraved sign at the gate that read The Shallows.
I felt myself slow as I entered the enclosed patio, trying to place the feeling of wrong that washed over me. I listened closely: the waves, the gulls.
It was the silence. There were seven of us staying in that house, and right now, there wasn’t a single sign of life.
I climbed the steps to the deck and entered through the sliding back door, into the kitchen. The inside was dim compared to the bright May sun, and as my eyes adjusted, I could make out a few discarded bottles and cans on the countertops. The downstairs appeared deserted, but I could hear the creak of footsteps from the floor overhead.
“Hello?” I called.
No one answered. I walked toward the stairs near the front door, where I could see through the living room windows. There was a new black Jeep wedged in behind my car—Oliver’s rental, I was guessing—but there was an empty spot at the other end of the parking area, where Amaya’s rust-colored car used to be. And then: a pitter-patter of feet coming down the steps. I backed away as Hollis came into view, swooping her blond hair over one shoulder. “Finally,” she said. “I thought I had been abandoned.”
Neither of us acknowledged that we hadn’t seen each other in a year. Honestly, I thought that in some ways she was most like me: here against her better judgment, but here all the same. Her hair fell in a curtain around her face, bangs to the top of her eyes, so exact that I imagined her trimming it every morning, a vision of efficiency. The only jewelry I ever noticed her wearing was a single diamond stud nose ring. Now her blue eyes flitted around the room, like even they couldn’t keep still.
It was then I saw the note on the coffee table. One of the folded take-out menus with dark writing over top: AT HIGH TIDE.
I picked it up, held it out to Hollis. “Mystery solved.” High Tide was a restaurant on the sound side of the island, the closest eat-in place, which we had frequented over the years. It was conveniently within walking distance.
“Oh, thank god, I’m famished, actually,” Hollis said. She had changed from her yoga gear into a bright-colored top, shorts, and sandals that showed off her long legs, toned from years of marathon training. Hollis always looked like she had stepped straight out of her wellness-focused Instagram account. “You coming?” she asked.
“Give me a minute to get changed, and I’ll walk over with you.”
I took the lost phone upstairs with me to the aqua bedroom, then brought it straight out to the balcony. The wind blew into the room, sheer curtains billowing behind me. Outside, the shade was beginning to stretch, so I left the phone on the corner of the wooden railing, where the sun would continue to hit as it moved across the sky. Sand and grit traced the path of the crack through the screen, but I had seen things survive worse.
Back inside, I peeled off my jeans, stiff and wet at the cuffs, and traded them for the casual skirt that had miraculously made it into my luggage. There was no dress code for the restaurant, but I hadn’t had much time to pack, and my bag was mostly full of workout clothes and a few T-shirts.
I took a quick glance in the antique mirror, then searched for my brush, before realizing I must’ve forgotten to pack it. I checked the surfaces for something of Amaya’s I could use—I didn’t think she’d mind—but there was no sign she had begun to unpack. I spun around, taking in the room. I didn’t see any of Amaya’s things. Not even the bag that had been beside her bed earlier.
Maybe she’d moved her things to the room upstairs, in an attempt to convince Joshua to trade. But their last interaction had unsettled me. She’d been so tense, so forceful. I stepped into the hall, then took the narrow stairwell across from our room up to the top floor.
I could hear a noise coming from the room before I reached the landing.
There was no door to enter the room up here, just a stairwell leading straight into a loft space with slanted ceilings, a queen bed low to the ground under a set of dormer windows.
I could think of this only as Ian’s space. It was impossible to be up here without picturing his lean frame, hunched over, sitting on the edge of the bed. The way his face would change as I climbed the last step, like he knew it would be me.
The room was empty, but there was a balcony door leading to the upper deck area, a single square of overlook that connected to the lower levels by a steeper set of steps that I assumed must’ve been added after the initial build. I couldn’t imagine they had passed inspection.
The balcony door creaked as the wind blew, the strong ocean breeze whistling through the cracks. It wasn’t fully latched. I quickly crossed the room, pushed it firmly shut, and turned the lock. Exterior doors had a way of becoming unlatched without the dead bolt, due to weather rot around the doorframes facing the sea.
Joshua’s things were strewn about the space already: open luggage on the rumpled bed; sneakers kicked off haphazardly in the middle of the floor; bathing suit tossed over the wooden chair; laptop out on the matching oak desk, papers on the surface.
There were no signs of Amaya here. On my way downstairs, I checked the navy and yellow bedrooms, but didn’t see any indication she’d moved into either of them. There was also no sign of her luggage on the main level, where Hollis stood before the front window, peering outside.
“Have you seen Amaya?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen anyone. Guess they all drove over together. You good?”
I nodded, following her out the front door. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
It was the fact that Ian should be here, and his absence had thrown everything off balance. Nothing felt right, but then, it rarely did here.