“You can’t take everything. You can’t have everything. You can’t have anything. You can’t have him. You can’t take it all away from me.”

I heard a rush of static, felt humidity and pressure rise up into my throat and into the back of my head. For a moment I couldn’t orient myself in the room. Which way was up, which was down, which direction led into the hallway, and which led out into the raw night?

“He’s not our brother,” I said, my voice rising. “Just stop with that.”

A light came on in the hall. We felt a shadow in the doorway. Lucas sprang out of bed and stood facing Cole across the threshold.

“I don’t want to see you,” Lucas said, pushing past him. We heard his feet on the stairs, we heard the kitchen door. He didn’t come back all night.

Chapter 16

16

Rain continued, a fierce low rumble. Rain crashed against the windows. I wasn’t worried for Lucas’s safety, not at first. He had disappeared before and always returned home safe. Disappearing was a coping mechanism for Lucas. He knew how to hide, and he knew when to reappear. But as the hours passed, I began to feel scared. The night was cold, wet, and unrelenting, the wind off the water vicious. Around dawn, George Samson at the police station sent out search-and-rescue to check the woods and the shallow water, but there was no sign of Lucas.

Cole and I sat awake all night and into the morning. Cole’s mood seemed to blow in and out like changing winds. “What were you thinking?” he asked me bitterly. “Why would you tell him?” Then he seemed to grow sentimental. He said, “Love scares him. That’s the problem for Lucas.”

I felt wretched. On the beach the night before, out of breath, the rain on our faces, Cole’s chest rising and falling, he’d looked at me and I knew what he saw: my eyes black, the pupils dilated into inky pools, cheeks flushed and hot. I had a birthmark on my cheek, a faint mark, like a brush of pale ink. When I blushed, it darkened, brightened. I sat up in the rain. I kissed his mouth, which tasted of rain and sand and sex. I remembered the notebook in his room and what he’d written. She is alive. I was, I was. I felt powerful, in control.

“The three of us are meant to be together,” Cole had said. “Look at this.” He scratched a deep line in the wet sand, then two more: a triangle. “We’re the three arms of this triangle. You, me, Lucas. We’re this solid thing, this shape.”

Now I felt anything but powerful. With Lucas out there in the cold, I didn’t feel like a solid shape. I felt adrift, alone.