When Jace was alive, he and Camille had both made sure Julie was a strong swimmer. By the age of eight, she’d learned about the way a riptide worked, and how to survive if she happened to get caught in one–tread water, stay parallel to the shore and don’t fight it. Camille could still remember Jace explaining it. The riptide will come back around in three minutes, so there was no need to panic.

These days, panicking was Camille’s specialty.

Keeping her eyes on the road, Camille groped in her bag for her phone. Her hand bumped up against the usual suspects–wallet, pen, checkbook, hair clip, comb, mints. No phone. Shoot, she had forgotten it in her rush to get to the hospital.

The hospital, where her wounded daughter had been taken while Camille was holed up in her darkroom, ignoring the world. With each negative thought, she pressed her foot harder on the accelerator, until she realized she was going fifty in a thirty mile per hour zone. She refused to ease up. If she got pulled over, she’d simply ask the police for an escort.

The word please echoed over and over in her head. She begged for this to not be happening. Please. Please not this. Please not Julie.

Fourteen, smart, funny, quirky, she was Camille’s whole world. If something happened to her, the world would end. I would simply end, thought Camille with rock-solid certainty. I would cease to exist. My life would be kaput. Over. Sans espoir, as Papa would say.

The coast road bisected the flatlands embraced parenthetically between the teeming mystery of the Chesapeake Bay, and the endless, vast expanse of the Atlantic. Fringed by sand dunes filled with native bird rookeries, the bay curved inward, framing the crashing Atlantic and forming one of the best surf beaches on the eastern seaboard. It was there, on this stunningly beautiful sugar-sand beach that drew tourists every year, that Julie’s accident had occurred.

Camille accelerated yet again, on the home stretch. Five minutes later, she careened into the parking lot of the medical center. The place held both distant and recent memories for her. She leapt from the car, hitting the ground at a run.

“Julie Adams,” she said to the woman at the reception desk. “She was brought in from surf rescue.”

The receptionist consulted her screen. “Curtain area seven,” she said. “Around to the right.”

Camille knew where that was. She ran past the memorial wall–the Dr. Jace Adams Memorial Wall, which never failed to pierce her heart with remembrances.