“I didn’t realize what they even were,” I told her, “until suddenly I was passed out in Carson Cove. I have to be able to get off the island. I mean, if I ever really needed to. Can you write me a prescription, something I can take to manage them?”

“Drugs are good. Drugs are fine,” she said. “But there may be other ways. Meditation really helps some people. And you might want to sign up for a yoga class?”

“Oh god,” I said. “You really do turn into your mother.”

Dr. Brent said, “I knew your mother. I’m sorry you had to lose her. And you were just a teenager.”

“I was twenty when she died.”

“That’s too young to be without a mother.”

I wanted to cry, knowing someone had noticed what was happening to me back then. People had sent flowers and come to her funeral, but afterward, everyone had gone back to their lives, the business of cooking meals, and cleaning rooms, and fixing rain gutters, and bathing children—and Lucas and I had been forced to cobble together a life of cleaning and cooking and paying bills and caring for each other, without really knowing how to do it.

I shook my head, pressed my fingertips against my eyes. “I guess I’d like to be normal,” I told Dr. Brent. “You were wondering about my goal. That’s my goal. I want to live a normal life.”

“I doubt that,” she said. “I mean, what’s normal? What is it you’d like to do that you think normal people do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I knew one thing I wanted to do. “I’d like to go to Carson Cove and walk around. Without, you know—”

“Perfect,” she said. “Let’s make an action plan.”

Dr. Brent’s action plan involved small, every other day trips to Carson Cove. The idea was to rewire my brain to associate Carson Cove with something other than fear. Once I’d experienced the town without panic, it would be easier and easier to step off the ferry, get into a car, drive toward the highway.

I was glad for the excuse to return to Carson Cove because I was anxious to be away from home, away from Cole with his smile, his muscles, arms, mouth, chest, ears, neck, the smell of his sweat. His fingernails. His breath in my ear. I’d begun to think of him as something other than human, but not a ghost. Something flesh and bones, but complicated by the heft and history of myth and fairy tale. A wolf. All teeth and hunger. All ripping, tearing, cunning trickery. It was as if the beast the island was named for had returned to claim all that was his. Names matter.