The sound-side water was a sharp contrast to the beach. The water appeared lower, like the tide had been pulled out, and there was no chop to the surface, just a fast-moving current you could see rippling with the wind. The sky was clear, no signs of any disturbance heading our way.
We saw their gear first—coverups and bags on top of the long table in the private area behind Coral’s.
I didn’t notice Brody until we’d stepped down into the trees. He was tucked into a rope hammock, one arm thrown over his eyes, phone facedown on his chest.
All of their things were left behind on the picnic table. If someone came to rob them, Brody’s sleeping frame would be no deterrent.
“Boo,” Grace said, leaning in close, laughing as Brody’s arms flailed, legs coming down firmly on either side of the hammock.
“Shit,” he said, pushing his hair back. He gave her a small smile, like he was trying to play at being amused.
Grace pulled her hair to the side and sat on the nearest picnic table bench. “What have you been doing?”
“Watching their stuff,” he said, bloodshot eyes skimming the table surfaces, like he was performing his own delayed tally.
Grace laughed, head tipped back. “Good job,” she said.
“There they are,” I said. The others were just then approaching from the dock, heading toward the row of equipment-rental huts, all windswept hair and fast chatter and pink cheeks. Hollis had her foot wrapped up in a bandage, but she was walking normally in athletic slides, positioned between Josh and Oliver.
I saw the vendor closest tracking them, head swiveling as they passed. Another man sitting on the edge of the dock with a fishing line turned to watch them too.
Any other time, I would’ve thought it was because of Hollis, naturally drawing attention. But now I saw things through Will’s perspective: people knew who we were, and they were curious. The way Will came up to us on the beach, saying he remembered us. The way Joanie knew which table we were heading to, and knew there should be more of us. They’re the ones, I imagined them whispering to one another.
We were the ghosts, staying in a ghost house.
Oliver collected our orders to take up to the sandwich window. “Can someone see if Joanie will get us some pitchers?” he asked.
“I’ll go,” I offered, slinging the canvas bag over my shoulder. It’s not that I didn’t trust them. But I couldn’t let Ian’s phone out of my sight—not at the repair shop, and not now.
I circled around the lot and entered High Tide through the front. The dining area was relatively empty, the hours still hovering between lunch and dinner. Joanie and the bartender were leaning close behind the counter, talking, but they pulled apart when I stepped past the hostess stand.
“Hey there,” she called. Now I was wondering what exactly she thought when she saw us. This was a painfully small town, and we were still early in the season. For nearly a decade, we’d been coming for this same week—and now we were down two.
“Hi, Joanie. Wondering if we can bring some pitchers out back?”
“Course,” she said. “Mark can get you taken care of.”
Mark looked about Joanie’s age, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a sharp widow’s peak. Unlike Joanie, though, I’d never noticed him here before.
I hopped on the stool against the far wall by the register and placed our order.
Joanie unplugged her phone from behind the counter, texting someone on the other end. I imagined her typing out: The crew from the ghost house is here again—
“Hey, Joanie, any chance I can borrow that charger for a minute?”
“Course,” she said again, barely looking up. She threaded the cable my way, across the bar top.
I fumbled in my bag for Ian’s phone, then plugged it in, waiting.
I placed it on the bar top, then turned toward the television, hoping the phone would eventually power up. The television sound was off, but closed captioning was enabled, words appearing on the screen in block letters. It was the same local station the repair shop had been tuned to, and the weather report was beginning again.
Low-pressure system to move in tonight. High-water warnings in effect—
“Want to start a tab?” Mark asked. He didn’t wear the deep blue shirt that the other staff all wore, and it seemed just as likely he was a friend of Joanie’s as someone who actually worked here.
“No, this will be it,” I said, sliding him my card. Someone else could get the next round, if they wanted one.
Ian’s phone suddenly glowed to life, and I picked it up off the counter just as the home page appeared, as if by magic. There was no more crack running down the middle, or a green screen of death. I sent a silent thanks to Libby.
I tried the Mail app first, but like she’d warned, it asked for a password, his email name autofilled. I cringed—it was probably indeed obvious that I was not IanTayler9295.
Opening his social media apps produced the same general result—everything prompted for Face ID, then asked for a password. Even his calendar was tied to his email. At least the phone didn’t reboot itself, but I was beginning to think it would’ve been just as productive to leave it in the sand, let it wash back into the sea.
Then I tapped the Photos app, and it opened. A grid of images scrolled across the screen, and I held my breath, preparing to see him.
But Ian was nowhere to be found.
I pulled the phone closer to my face, clicking on the first image. It was a photo of a house. Weathered gray cedar shake siding, rickety steps connecting each balcony, floor by floor. The structure rising up from behind the dunes and seagrass. The Shallows.
The next photo was a closer shot: an open door, a leg extended—someone stepping onto the back deck. Then, one floor up, a woman on the balcony. I zoomed in, trying to see clearly. She was out of focus, but I could tell by the gray sweatshirt, the dark hair: this was Amaya.
I could hear my heartbeat echoing in my skull.
There’s someone on the beach, Amaya had told us, as she stood on the back deck. We had assumed she’d been referring to Hollis, but what if she hadn’t been?
What if she saw someone watching, phone pointed our way?
She saw someone watching her, and she ran. And suddenly I wondered if she knew exactly what she was running from.
“Need help?” Brody asked, suddenly beside me at the bar.
I unplugged the phone quickly, dropping it back into my bag. Brody smiled down at me. “Figured you’d need another set of hands,” he said.
The two pitchers were already set on the bar, condensation dripping down the side. There was a stack of plastic cups placed beside them, and the bill, slid closer my way. “Thanks,” I said. “I was just paying.”
He picked up the pitchers, backing away.
I smiled tightly at Brody. “I’ll be right behind you,” I said.
I’d disappeared into my room as soon as we were back that evening, hovering over the phone while it was connected to the charger.
The only other information I had access to was his contacts. I recognized his sisters’ names, his parents. But most were people I hadn’t known. They were a decade of new people, new experiences—colleagues, friends, maybe someone who meant even more. I paused at my own name—my old number, but my current email. At the bottom, there was an indication of a group name. I clicked it now, and a familiar list appeared: It was us. All of us in this house. The survivors. He’d called us, simply, The Eight.
While I’d deleted them all, he’d held us together—prepared, in case he needed to reach out.
Then, when that moment came, I wasn’t there.
There were no other photos saved on Ian’s phone—just a string of recent pictures of the house, all taken over the span of thirty minutes. I went through everything twice. Some photos were close up, and others were far away. I couldn’t tell if the photographer had come closer, or whether they had just zoomed in from a spot on the beach. I could make out the outline of a person in most, but it wasn’t always clear who was in frame.
What was clear, however, was that we were being watched.
I stayed up late that night, not wanting to miss anything. Only Grace went upstairs early, while the rest of us sat around the fire pit.
“Love you all,” she said, which I thought, like most things, was something she had just decided, fairly haphazardly. “But some of us have to work in the morning.”
“Oliver wakes up earlier than any of us,” I said, keeping my eyes on his, lit by the fire between us, wisps of flame whipping around in the wind.
“Well, we can’t all be the King,” Josh said, smirking.
“Night, Grace,” Hollis called, ducking lower in the Adirondack chair, tipping her chin inside the hooded sweatshirt she’d pulled on.
Grace passed Brody coming out through the sliding glass door, and he skirted to the side, giving her space.
“Look what I found,” Brody said, backlit by the kitchen light, so it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. He had metal stakes in one hand, marshmallows in the other. “Like in the Boy Scouts?” he said, smiling.
“I hope they teach more survival skills than how to make s’mores,” Hollis said, taking one of the stakes from his outstretched hand. Her comment changed the tenor of the gathering, Brody’s smile faltering, silence falling. I wondered if it was intentional—with Hollis, it was sometimes hard to tell. Her exterior was hard to crack; she held all of us at a slight remove.
We roasted our marshmallows over the flame, like a group of friends bonding around the campfire, indulging in a late-night treat.
The wind funneled through the gate in a whistle, and the chocolate from the s’mores dripped over the edges, burning my hand. The door to the shed kept swinging open, smacking against the inside lattice, until Oliver pulled it tightly shut and snapped the lock in place.
It took another hour before anyone called it, like we were all trying to wait one another out.
“Should we get some water for this?” I asked, gesturing to the fire pit, remembering Will’s comment about unattended fires. The implication that he knew—that he noticed. That everyone did.
Oliver paused on the bottom step, not answering. I went to the outdoor shower and filled a rusted bucket with water, the pipes groaning, then dumped it over the pit, fire sizzling, smoke caught up in the next breeze. We were suddenly bathed in darkness.
I understood, then, why we always left the fire burning. No one wanted to extinguish the light. I reached for the person beside me—Hollis—and made my way up the steps, toward the glow of the kitchen.
We each called our good nights, footsteps creaking up the stairs, hinges squeaking and doors latching shut.
I could see the lights turning off, one by one, from the balcony window, until mine was the only one left. Finally, I turned it off, then stood before the window, pulling aside the gauzy curtains, peering out toward the sea.
Then I quietly stepped outside, trying not to be afraid. I held tight to Grace’s words—she had a way of putting things in perspective: We’ve already been through the worst of it. We had. And we had survived.
The moon and stars were hidden behind the weather system, and the waves were crashing violently, in a way that set my nerves on edge. I imagined Amaya standing here two days earlier, staring out at the ocean, the beach.
I wondered what she saw, looking back.
And then, just as I was watching, I noticed a faint light dancing along the beach.
I stepped to the side, to follow the movement, but it quickly drifted out of sight, to the left. In the opposite direction of the pier.
“Shit,” I said, taking off down the steps, to the first level, and then to the patio with the still-sizzling fire pit. I jogged across the path until I came to the beach. I paused—the roar of the water, the sting of the wind, a rumble of something offshore… and then, there: a light, to the left.
There was only a rocky section of beach that way—not safe in the daytime, even less so at night. I took off toward it, thinking I was following something, only to realize the light was getting closer now, coming my way.
I froze, caught. And then the beam of light swept across the sand and landed on me. I brought up a hand to shield my eyes, as a familiar voice said, “Cassidy?”
I dropped my arm, let out a breath. “Oliver? What the hell are you doing out here?”
“I could ask you the same,” he said.
“I saw a light on the beach.”
“I saw something too.” He looked over his shoulder, into the darkness. “I thought I saw someone out here. Came out to see…”
I looked around the beach, but couldn’t see anything beyond the beam of his light. I could hear the waves crashing—closer now, like they were steadily encroaching.
He gestured down the beach with the light. “You know, on the other side of the rocks is the campground. Beyond that, another road.”
I shook my head. I’d thought the rocks were the end of the beach. Not that there was another, just beyond.
“Amaya?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Whoever it was, they left in a hurry.”
A chill ran through me, and I hugged my arms across my stomach.
“What did you see?” he asked, voice low, like someone might be close by, listening.
“I think it was just you,” I said. I didn’t like how exposed we were out here. How much we couldn’t see in return. “We’re the only things visible right now.”
He turned off the light, and we stood in silence together, listening. Another crash of a wave, the wind blowing over the dunes, and then a scurrying in the sand behind us. Oliver turned on the flashlight again, illuminating a space to the left, in the dunes. Two eyes stared back, like a deer in headlights, low to the ground, before the creature skittered away.
“Jesus,” he said, dropping the beam to our feet.
I leaned closer, wrapped my hand around his wrist. “I think someone’s been watching the house. I think someone’s watching all of us.”
He didn’t answer, but I thought of the curtains pulled closed in his room. His insistence for us all to be out this afternoon. To be together. He must’ve had some reason to think the same.
“What do they want, Oliver?” Meaning: whoever was out there; whoever was contacting us.
Maybe it was the night, or the dark, or the fact I was still holding on to him, and being together always put us on the same team, the same side, with the same goal. Whatever the reason, he answered, as the beam illuminated the space between us.
“They wanted me to describe the knife.”