Title Page

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Dedication

For Edward. You’re simply the best.

Epigraph

“What will we do?” Emmeline asked, watching as the storm clouds gathered into menacing darkness.

“We’ll do the only thing we can,” Ainsley answered. “Endure.”

prologue

Everyone has a story about the first time they read the Orman Chronicles. This is mine.

The day my father left us, it was sunny. I remember thinking it was odd, because in books tragedy always strikes during a storm, lightning and thunder magnifying the worst that could happen. But my father didn’t care about the perfect, cloudless sky, or how he was leaving with our only car, marooning us in our grief.

Even then, I couldn’t help but imagine us on an island. The sofas in our small living room became piles of uneven sea stones. My father’s crossed arms and defiant stance became a crumbling, abandoned lighthouse that stood uncaring against the angry waves of my mother.

Through the front window blinds, I could see his reason sitting in our peeling green van, a woman—girl—who wasn’t even ten years older than me. Her freshly twenty-one appeal was somewhat dulled by her habit of worriedly gnawing on her index finger as our eyes connected over the dashboard.

I recognized her, I dimly realized. A cheerleader from the Saturday afternoon college football games my father had dragged me to for the past three months.

I let the broken bit of blind fall back into place with a quiet shudder as my mother pleaded with Dad to stay. My stomach twisted into a hundred cruel shapes and my mind forgot all about the island, the lighthouse, everything.

“For Amelia,” my mother begged, mascara dripping down her face in a way I thought only happened in movies. “You can’t leave her, Willy. She’s your daughter. Tell him, Amelia!” She roughly jerked me by the shoulder to face them. “Tell. Him.”

I stared at them. Mom with her self-dyed red hair sticking up in all directions. Dad, trying to look stoic and resigned, his polo collar smudged from the self-tanner that had turned his pale skin orange.

I turned back to the window.

“Let him go,” I said. “What do I care?”

I wasn’t sure if the ceramic pot holding the succulent I grew from a seed in elementary school fell when Mom whirled away from me, or if she knocked it off the table on purpose.