I felt sick—the same type of nausea that came with sudden motion, with disorientation. I stood up, and the room tilted. I took a step, and the floor rolled. My stomach rebelled, and I found myself on the floor of the bathroom, knees pressed into the cool tile, desperate for relief.
Not Russ, who I’d let into my home, my life, my bed.
Not Russ, who had showed up at The Shallows to meet Ian, who wanted something from him—who’d been promised something that Ian didn’t deliver.
Who must’ve then tried to frame Oliver for Ian’s death—writing to him from Ian’s phone, asking to meet him there.
Who was trying to ruin us.
There was no other way around it. He was trying to destroy us, one by one.
Russ hadn’t tried to FaceTime all week. I’d been relieved, thinking he wouldn’t find out that I was lying about where I’d gone. But all along, he knew where I was. He knew exactly what I was doing.
He’d had Ian’s phone. He’d taken Ian’s phone the day he died.
I flashed back to Sunday morning, when I was sitting in his kitchen, obviously with no plans of leaving. And then I’d received that text, when I thought he wasn’t looking. When he was busy sending it instead.
He needed me to go. He needed me to go to The Shallows, because he was heading there too.
Still, I needed to be sure.
I searched his name—Russ Johnson—and the college; nothing came up. But then, he’d said he was filling in as needed. It’s possible he wouldn’t be on their website. I took a deep breath and searched Clara’s name instead, then clicked on her obituary, scrolling the details.
Clara Poranto, 19. Survived by her parents, Louis and Jane Poranto; and her brother, Russell J. Poranto—
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t slow my racing pulse. I hadn’t known Clara’s brother—hadn’t been to Clara’s funeral, hadn’t grown up on their street, or overlapped with him at school. But it seemed he knew me—knew me well enough, either through Ian or by keeping tabs, to understand that I would keep him a secret from the others.
But now I pulled up the photos on my phone, scrolled back to a night out at our favorite bar, the same place we’d first met.
I sent it to the one person who I was sure would know. Russ was four years older than we were, but Grace should still know. Grace must’ve gone to Clara’s funeral; they’d been so close. I sent a text: Do you know who this is?
And then I stared at my phone, watched as she typed, stopped, typed again. Yes. That’s Clara’s brother. Why are you with him??
I couldn’t respond. Why was I with him? Because he’d shown up at my favorite bar, and his eyes caught mine across the room; he asked me if I believed in fate, and I did. Of course I did.
I felt the memory of Grace leaning close to see my necklace, holding it closer, letting the interlocking circles slide between her fingers—like maybe she was searching for the letter C. Did she think it was a coincidence? Did she suspect something was off, even then?
I didn’t respond, still unsure who to trust. I felt my entire world shifting, like it had when Ian walked away. When I’d misjudged how deep he was in.
When I’d believed he accepted all the parts of me—that, in the end, he’d choose me, save me.
And then I’d fallen so quickly, so readily, for Russ.
Who was this person I thought I knew? I’d believed everything he’d told me. His last name, even. I thought he was too trusting, when really it was me. We were still in the early months of a relationship, before we had the opportunity to meet families, discuss holidays—before we had to get too deep.
I had preferred it that way—someone who focused on the future, instead of the past. I wanted to keep my true past private too. And he’d capitalized on that, used that so callously.
His neighbor said she thought he was gone.
As if she’d barely known him too.
As if he’d just slipped into a life briefly. He had a job he could do anywhere, and he’d chosen a place with month-by-month rentals, across the street from my favorite bar. A wave of shame rolled through me now, imagining him watching me, before I met him. Following me, deciding on his angle. Deciding to notice me, in a world that had so often failed to do so.
All because Ian had sent him my way for the journals.
I watched the video of Ian’s last day again, picturing Russ on the other side of the kitchen island, just out of sight. He talked to Ian like he knew him—and of course he did; they’d grown up down the street from each other.
The person Amaya saw on the beach; the figment we followed back toward the campgrounds; the shadow Oliver saw in the window—they were all Russ. He knew everything about that place. He knew everything about us. Tormenting not only Ian but us. Going through our things, taking Josh’s sleeping pills… leaving a note for Amaya to get out. He was targeting us, one by one. Sowing discord and paranoia between us all.
Now I imagined him in my apartment, opening my laptop while I was asleep, going through my nightstand while I was in the shower.
In response, I’d given him a key. And I’d just told him exactly where to find me.
Was he on his way? Was he here?
I had to get out. But where was safe? There was no one to go to. There was a pact, and I had broken it. I had broken it very, very badly.
Ian understood that.
Maybe he had always been trying to protect me. Begging me to destroy them, for my own good.
Clara broke the pact, and she was dead.
Ian had told his mother: I’m going to be next. But it had taken nine years. Nine years, for Russ to come for him. To feel the sting of his sister’s erasure at the dedication; to be denied his fair compensation; to see a picture that made him believe that something had happened to her, instead. Ian was the first point of contact—the name Clara had given him. And he was the one most likely to crack.
But I had broken our pledge the worst. There was no fixing it. I’d seen how fast they could turn on you. Pushing to send Brody into the water. Blaming Ben for the crash.
If they had figured out the real truth, I was in danger.
I peered out the bedroom window, which overlooked a corner of the lot. I couldn’t see if Russ’s car was there. There were no windows facing the walkway or landing—everything was oriented toward the back courtyard.
Now I stood on the side of the door, wondering if he was already here. If he was walking up the steps. If I’d open the door and become trapped.
Of course, I was already trapped. He had a key. I was three stories up.
I turned off all the lights in my apartment, imagining him out there. Imagining a knock on the door.
I tried once more to call Josh, but he wasn’t answering. And then, as I was watching my phone, a text message arrived. My heart leaped into my throat, seeing the name.
Amaya Andrews.
Finally, finally, she was reaching out. Maybe her parents got my message, told her to call us. To let us know she was okay.
I opened the message, read the words on the screen. Three words, that haunting echo. Chilling in their simplicity: I’m going back.
It was three hours to the border, when you’d cross into Tennessee after the tunnel cut through the mountains, like humanity had given up on trying to make our way over and around. Not much farther to Stone River Gorge.
I had avoided it for a decade.
My memory of the crash was dizzying, foggy. A before, to an after. A flashback under a layer of fog, stripped down to its most essential elements.
Josh, sleeping beside me. Ian, head resting on the seat in front of me—
I grabbed my bag, grabbed Ian’s phone too, as if I was afraid to leave him behind again. Strength in numbers.
Ian had been trying to save us. Picking up where he’d fallen was the least I could do now. I had to go. There was no other way. This was my responsibility.
Heart pounding, I crept out of my apartment, easing the door shut, so sure that Russ would be right outside, heading this way. But the concrete breezeway was empty. The only person I saw on the way to my car was a man walking his dog. As I darted past, his face faltered, like he could see something off in my demeanor.
I locked my car doors and pulled out quickly. Up the street, I stopped to fill the tank of gas, then started driving.
But the closer I got, the more a new thought emerged: Confess. I wondered if it echoed inside all of us. This urge to tell someone else the truth.
Was this the way out? One way or another, was this the only way?
I was shocked by the impulse, after all this time. Maybe it was just this drive. There was something visceral about it, in the way night was falling, just as it had then. It was the same time of year, almost to the day, separated by a decade.
In my journals, I hadn’t written about the drive—only the aftermath. After the crash, after the fall. I had tried to track each person, working through the motivations, trying to make sense of it all. I’d written frantically, afraid the memories would leave me, that I’d lose my grip on them, instead of the way they seemed to pull tighter, clarifying with time.
A pull I could feel, drawing me back.
There were the brake lights in the distance, a trail, a ghost. I was Ms. Winslow, or Mr. Kates, riding the brakes, hearing the groans of the students in the back.
Ten years earlier, we first hit the traffic inside a tunnel, and there was a sense of claustrophobia, an omen, a portent. Lights flickering, horns blaring, a steady tension rising.
By the time we made it into eastern Tennessee, we were desperate for a break, for a bathroom.
We’d taken an exit, looking for a rest area. We wove our way up, up, up. Switchback after switchback, but there was nowhere to stop, nowhere to turn around.
Ten years, and I knew exactly where to go, feeling the gravity of it across time and space, latching on to me, pulling tight.
Unlike when I’d just visited my old town, here everything was exactly as I remembered it. If anything, it only gained clarity, only sharpened the memory. The haze lifted, so that I could hear the ghosts of my classmates singing the lines to the latest pop song together, one catching my eye, as if welcoming me to join. But I couldn’t; the twists of the road distorted everything.
Now I knew the trick—eyes on a fixed spot in the distance. Track the yellow line in the headlights. Orient yourself to the here and now.
Ten years ago, I’d been sitting in the back of a van, wholly at the whim of the driver, the terrain, the disorienting night.
I pulled onto the shoulder now, set off just before the sign for Stone River Gorge. I didn’t know where to go next. I entered Amaya’s address into my GPS—I’d had her address from years of keeping tabs—and was directed to a house less than a mile away.
Her house was down a fork in another direction, following the curve of the river.
I pulled into the drive, careful to put my high beams on in the dark, to see where the edges were, the gravel rock, the open air.
Josh’s car was already in the driveway. The garage was closed, though; the house was dark.
Outside, I heard the sound of the river—something not quite as harrowing as in my memory. But then, there’d been the storm, the current as violent and as unpredictable as us.
I couldn’t understand how she could live here. A daily punishment, a perpetual reminder. A horror interlude every time she peered out the back windows.
I stood at the entrance of the drive, staring off down the road, at the curve I’d just come in on, the thicket of trees.
We were not in the place where we’d gone off the road—that was higher up the series of switchbacks. Instead, I believed we were closer to the place where we were ultimately found.
The truck screeching to an abrupt stop. Josh, pulling Clara tight, telling her to be quiet. A man stepping down from the driver’s side, calling for help. Counting us, one by one, in the glow of his headlights.
All along, I’d had it wrong. This wasn’t a place of punishment, but of triumph. Somewhere, behind her house, against all odds, we’d climbed. We’d clawed our way out. We’d saved ourselves, and each other.
Of course I would come for her now.
There was a flash of light in a window at the edge of her house. The only light I could see. Like a signal, or a warning. Like Oliver in the night, shining the light at each of us, one by one. Making sure we were still there.
I noticed the front door was open, a darkness within, beckoning. When I stepped inside, I could see straight through the house, just like at The Shallows. The back door was open, wind funneling from outside, straight to the front. I turned at the sound of rustling, but it was just papers on a side table, caught in a gust.
I ran my hand along the wall, searching for a light switch, the terror rising. But once more I was caught—and stuck—in darkness.