“I’m on my way.” She lunged for the back door, scooping her keys from the hook as she leaped down the porch steps to her car. There was no thought. No planning. Just action. When you get a call that your kid is in the ER, there could be no room for thinking. Just the deepest fear imaginable, the kind that gripped like a steel band around her chest.

She hurled herself into the car, started it up and tore down the driveway, her tires spitting an arc of crushed oyster shells in her wake. She roared around Lighthouse Point at the end of her road. The rocky shoals there had been guarded for a century by the sentinel overlooking the bay.

The car radio was on, broadcasting a surf report at the top of the hour by Crash Daniels, owner of the Surf Shack. “We are getting our first taste of summer, people. The whole Delmarva Peninsula is basking in temperatures in the mid-eighties. The ocean side looks rad. Bethany Bay is totally off the hook…”

She snapped off the radio. Panic about her daughter demanded total focus. Surf rescue class? What the hell was Julie doing in surf rescue? She wasn’t even taking that class, an optional PE credit offered to ninth graders. Camille had forbidden it, even though Julie had begged. Far too dangerous. The tides on the ocean side of the peninsula could be deadly. There was no satisfaction in being right. Julie got caught in a riptide, the nurse had said. A surge of horror filled Camille’s throat, and she felt like puking.

“Easy,” she told herself. “Deep breath. The woman on the phone said Julie is conscious.”

Jace had been conscious, too, moments before she had lost him forever, five years before when they were on a romantic second-honeymoon getaway. She couldn’t stop herself from thinking about that now. That was the reason she had refused to sign the permission slip to allow Julie to participate in surf rescue. She simply couldn’t survive another loss.

There had been a time when Camille had led a charmed life, cheerfully oblivious to the devastation that could strike without warning. Throughout her idyllic childhood in Bethany Bay, she’d been as wild and carefree as the birds that wheeled over the watery enclave at the edge of the Atlantic. She herself had excelled at surf rescue, a rigorous and physically demanding course all high schoolers were encouraged to take. In this community, surrounded on three sides by water, safety skills were mandatory. Thanks to the popularity of the beach, with its pipeline waves rolling in, local youngsters were trained in the art of rescue using special hand-paddled boards. It was a time-honored tradition at Bethany Bay High. Each May, even when the water was still chilly from the currents of winter, the PE department offered the challenging class.