Everything happened in one fluid motion after that. Someone called Sean Alameda, the island’s sole paramedic, who drove an old Subaru station wagon we called “the ambulance.” He unlocked the clinic and brought me inside. Someone put a sweater around my wet shoulders. Dr. Lyle showed up in pajamas to check if I had a concussion or hypothermia. I kept telling them to call the police. I sat on the table shivering. Dr. Lyle felt my wrist, shined a light in my eyes. He listened to my heart, my lungs. Then Dr. Brent was there, wanting to know if I jumped in on purpose. “Were you trying to harm yourself?” Someone put a space blanket around me.

I said, “I wasn’t trying to harm myself. He was trying to harm me.”

I was still dizzy. It was hard to look at just one thing.

“He hit me with something,” I insisted. “Maybe a flashlight.”

Dr. Brent looked into the lobby, and Lucas and Cole both stood up.

“I’m pretty sure he was trying to kill me,” I said quietly to Dr. Brent. “He tried to kill his wife, but no one knows. He confessed it, though.”

“Is she okay?” Lucas asked. He took a step toward me, but Cole put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder and held him back.

I remembered him calling me his girlfriend, the hurt and angry look in his eyes. There was something in him, some monster in there. I could see it every moment. A smaller, meaner creature concealed in the body we all saw, a creature full of wild rage. The Anthony inside the Cole. I could see them both, the two men, wrestling each other.

But then something amazing happened. All at once Anthony vanished and left only Cole. I saw it happening before my eyes, a transformation into calm, controlled power. And I realized it was because Lucas was there, that Lucas somehow had the power to make one man disappear and the other come to life. I knew one name, and Lucas knew the other, but now I knew that I’d been wrong about names all along; Cole was dangerous and desperate, no matter what we called him.

By the time George Samson showed up, Cole was gone, as I’d known he would be. George listened to me tell the whole story, skeptical but quiet.

“He has a wife,” I told him. “Up in a hospital in Vermont. The official story is that she fell down the stairs, but it wasn’t an accident—he pushed her. Her name is Emily.”

George Samson wrote EMILY in a little notebook. I felt happy to see her name in his handwriting. I felt happy that everyone was listening, George Samson, and Dr. Brent, and Dr. Lyle.

“He hit me with something,” I said. “I felt something hit my head, and I tumbled into the water.”