The house gave everyone away. Take a step, and the floorboards creaked. Open a door, and the hinges cried. Turn on the water, and the pipes groaned before a rush resounded through the walls. The Shallows was not a place for strangers. It was built for friends, for family. It was not a place that kept secrets.
I could hear Josh turn over in bed when I cracked open my bedroom door just before dawn. Inside one of the two shared bathrooms in the hall, Hollis’s black bikini hung from the shower rod, and Grace’s toiletry bag was ajar, with an orange prescription vial just visible inside.
I splashed water on my face and crept down the steps, hyperaware of every pop of the floorboard and of the five other people scattered throughout the house, presumably still asleep.
And then I waited, sitting on the taupe sectional couch in the living room, listening to the sounds of the house. I had to get into Ian’s phone, but nothing would be open around here for another few hours. In the meantime, I wanted the opportunity to talk to anyone else, one-on-one. Anyone who might have more answers than Brody.
The wind was picking up, rattling the window frames, a shudder I could almost feel with each stronger gust. Like someone was shaking the doors, trying to get inside.
I felt sick. Like I’d swallowed too much water. Inhaled it into my lungs.
Like I had reached for Ian in the river—fingertips brushing his outstretched hand—and missed.
Ian had been the one person I trusted too. We had grown close in the months after the accident, over the subsequent season of memorial services.
There had been twelve.
There was only one funeral home in the town of Long Brook, a suburb on the outskirts of Greensboro, so the services had to be spaced out. There were too many deaths to prepare for and commemorate all at once.
At first everyone had attended—all the survivors—sitting scattered with their own friends, their own families. We were all there for the two teachers—Mr. Kates, Ms. Winslow—who had driven the vans. But little by little, memorial by memorial, our numbers had dwindled, just as they had that night.
I wondered if the others felt it—the guilt. Or if our discomfort was simply the weight of people’s eyes on us. If the other survivors wondered whether the families looked at them, alive, and wished it had been the other way around.
Whatever the reason, by the time Ben’s funeral came, it was only Ian and me.
My parents begged me to stop. They said that I was torturing myself, that I didn’t even know these people.
It wasn’t true—I had known them all. Had sat in the same classes for four years, heard their names called down the hall, listened to their chatter as we climbed into the van at the start of the trip.
But I understood what my parents were saying. They were used to my older brothers, who had made our house a hub of activity, with their teammates, their extended groups of friends. I had always kept a smaller circle: my group had been stagehands I holed up with backstage at the theater productions, where we wore black and whispered and joked about the rumors we overheard about the more outgoing crowd, as if no one noticed us standing there. I occupied a different social circle than my brothers had, but I was just as content. Happier, even. Free to pursue my passions, to disappear into my art, my writing, without the pressure of other commitments.
My closest friends, Colby and Ella, were twins, and they’d moved away the summer before. My senior year had turned unpredictably lonely and endless then—a series of motions, a daily routine, lunch most days in the library, where the librarian either didn’t notice or kindly looked the other way while I read, or sketched, in silence. I just wanted it to be over, so I could move on to the next part of my life and all that it promised.
The service trip was supposed to be a delineation between the person I had been and the one I would become. But there were twelve of us who didn’t survive, who would never have that chance. And so I kept going to their services, committing their names and their faces to memory.
I didn’t know why Ian continued to come—whether it was the same guilt or because he didn’t want to leave me there alone. This person I hadn’t spoken to through all of high school, sitting at the other end of a row. Then sliding down until he was beside me instead, his warm hand reaching out for mine, fingers tightening, while the rest of the world went numb.
Eventually, we were spending entire days together. By summer, I’d come home from his house only when it was time for bed, and my parents grew increasingly concerned.
We skipped graduation together, sitting in his car instead, listening to too-loud music, and then driving around until it was dark, neither of us wanting to leave the confines of our bubble.
So I trusted him more than I trusted anyone else too—in the way that, as Grace claimed, there’s nothing quite like the relationships forged during that time in our lives.
Enough to confide in him the things I wouldn’t tell my therapist. Enough to believe it was real love, instead of a codependency—though was that truly so bad, to need one another, to have one another, so completely? He was an outlet and a sealed box. It was my first real relationship, a kind of intimacy I’d been chasing ever since.
I’m not sure I would’ve left for college, if not for the fight we had, right before. Then the distance severed whatever was left.
I didn’t see him again until the next spring, when we all gathered in the parking lot behind the school, the night after Clara’s funeral. And I tried to remember the way it had been with him: the feel of his hand in mine; the way he leaned over me before dawn in my still-dark bedroom, like he was scared to go home.
But by then the memories were all mixed together: the cool touch of his arm, the cold of the river. His tentative smile, and his wide mouth open in a frozen scream.
I saw things more clearly now, with the benefit of time and distance and hindsight, in a way I couldn’t back then: I was an addiction for him, something to fill a void, to quell his memory of the river, and in my absence, he had moved on to other things instead.
Back when we were together, there had been only the cigarettes he kept stashed in his tree house, or the occasional bottle swiped from his parents’ cabinet. If he’d been using something more back then, I would’ve noticed.
I was sure of it. We all noticed, in the years that followed.
But ten years later, when it came down to it, there was still no one in the group I had trusted more. If you believed in fate—and I did, I do—then how could I not see what was happening—the text, the phone—as Ian, still reaching out, arm outstretched toward mine in the river? Trying to help me, to warn me?
I just didn’t believe fate existed in a vacuum anymore. I believed you could prepare for it, and plan for the way it bent. I believed fate was an accumulation of decisions, not all of them yours.
So while I waited for the rest of the house to wake, I searched for and made a list of electronic repair shops nearby.
The message that had arrived, with Ian’s obituary, had been sent from his phone. And I had no idea how it had gotten on the beach, washed up in the surf.
If his information had been in my contacts, I would’ve known the message had come from his phone from the start. Which made me consider the point of it—was the note sent to destabilize me, send me scrambling? Send us all scrambling?
But the thing that had me most unnerved was the fact that someone had been holding on to Ian’s phone since his death.
It had been three months. Three months of waiting—for what?
And was it such a big leap to consider that whoever had this phone now had also been with him when he died?
The wind blew again, shaking the windows. Something under the house had come loose, knocking against the pillars below. Someone resettled in a bed upstairs, mattress coils groaning overhead.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pictured Ian alone somewhere, sending me that email. Typing my name with nicotine-stained fingertips, nails bitten down to the quick. Reaching toward me—
And finally, finally, I could see him as I always wanted to: alone, his mouth just above mine, his breath the only thing that existed in the world. I could smell a tinge of cigarettes, mixed with the leather of his favorite jacket. Feel the rough pad of his thumb running down the delicate skin of my neck.
You’re the only one I trust.
Please.
Someone was talking—low and urgent. The sun had just started to rise, orange and pink filtering through the windows at the back of the house. I stood from where I’d been dozing on and off on the couch, followed the sound toward those windows, thinking it was coming from the back deck.
But the conversation was coming from Oliver’s room instead. I paused at the entrance and leaned closer, just as the door swung open abruptly.
Oliver jerked back physically at my presence. “I’ll call you later,” he said into empty space, then removed the earbuds. “Can I help you?” he asked, dark eyebrows raised, but his face gave away nothing.
“Thought I heard someone outside,” I said, gesturing to the glass windows, the red flag visible along the wooden path violently whipping back and forth. Our own warning system—high winds, dangerous surf.
Oliver cracked a grin. “Thought I heard someone too.” He raised an eyebrow at me—this time friendly, joking.
“A little early for work, isn’t it?” I asked. He smelled like soap and fresh shampoo, and was already dressed in khakis and a polo.
“Not when your clients are eight hours ahead, unfortunately.” Then, eyes skimming up and down my body—at the fact I was already dressed for the day, like him: “Going somewhere?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, figured I’d get out this morning before work.” The closest repair store opened at ten, and it was in the next town up—too far to walk in any reasonable span of time, and Oliver’s rental was blocking me in. “I was thinking of taking a drive,” I said.
He tipped his head. “We can do a tour later this week.” Which sounded like an answer, though I hadn’t been asking his permission. He slipped by me, into the kitchen, to start preparing for breakfast.
If Amaya felt paralyzed by decision-making, Oliver was the opposite. Oliver had built a career on a willingness to take risks, on a series of split-second decisions. He could make them on the fly, as inconsequential as flipping a coin—and he had no problem making them for others as well.
Still, I knew better than to argue. I wanted to ask him about Ian, about whether he had received a text too—but he’d seen my message last night, and said nothing. I needed to tread carefully here.
“Oliver,” I said. “What did the fact-checkers ask you?”
His hand paused on the open cabinet, and he turned slowly, taking me in. “I didn’t engage. Like Josh advised.”
Had I expected anything different? It had been a decade. A decade of burying the past. No one here would drag it out willingly.
“And that was it? They let it go?”
He shrugged. “Looks like Josh was right,” he said. As if he was confident that nothing could move forward without one of us confirming the details. Then, after a beat, “Did you get another message?”
“No. Did you?”
He blinked. “We didn’t get any texts, Cassidy,” he said. The words weighted, eyes darting to the side briefly, before moving on.
But I was stuck on the way he’d said We—like there was a smaller group within our numbers. A tighter circle, of which I was still on the outside.
And suddenly I remembered Ian’s email: Did they come to see you too?
Oliver stared out the back windows, pressed his hand to the sliding glass door just as it shuddered again from the wind. “Jesus,” he said. “Guess we’re going sound side today.”
Sound side meant paddleboards and kitesurfing and Jet Ski rentals. It meant sailboats and fishing charters. The sound was on the west side of the island, sunset instead of sunrise, where fresh water from the mainland met the ocean. The water was brackish and shallow, less intimidating than the ocean, though the distance to the far shore—land that dipped over the horizon—still seemed insurmountable.
Hollis came down the stairs first, wood creaking under each uncertain step, shifting the tone of the room.
“How’s it feeling today?” Oliver asked.
“Better. Just need to change the bandage.”
I stayed in the kitchen, giving them space, watching. Watching their interactions, listening for anything I hadn’t picked up on earlier.
Hollis had her leg up on the couch, leaning closer to see. Oliver stayed on the other side of the couch, smiled down at her. “Maybe no beach run today, but we’ll have you on a Jet Ski for sure.”
She smiled back, her face unreadable. “Wouldn’t miss it,” she said.
The sound of someone else coming downstairs broke them apart. Oliver turned back to the kitchen, as Hollis began scrolling through her social media.
Grace emerged from the stairwell, laptop under her arm. “Can I get the dining room for work this morning? Since Josh has co-opted any possible office space for himself?”
Oliver kept moving, pulling things out of the cabinets, making breakfast. “I’m reserving the space behind Coral’s. Anyone can work there if they want.”
Coral’s was a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop, served out of a window, across a shared gravel driveway from High Tide. It was highly frequented due to its proximity to the rental huts in a row beside it, and the public dock behind it. There were colorful picnic tables with chipping, splintered paint, which were first come, first served. And there was a rectangular area for rent, kept private via a step down between wooden beams, with hammocks strung between trees and long tables. Plus, it came with a key to the bathroom, which was the true value.
Grace dropped her laptop on the table, watching the clock. “I can’t do video calls from outside, Oliver. It’s unprofessional.”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ve got the space all day. Meet us there when you can.”
“I have some calls this morning too. I’ll head over later with Grace,” I added, seizing the chance. I had a plan for today too.
Ian had sent me an email, five days before his death: Did they come to see you too? And three months later, his phone was used to send me a text with his obituary. No one else had received it. Once again, it was only meant for me.
The key was in my hands.
I was going to get into that phone.