The girl at the front desk of the Island Inn, the one who was afraid of room eleven, looked surprised as I approached her.

“You want a room?” she said to me. “Uh-oh. Is everything okay?”

“What? Fine! I just want a vacation,” I said. “For like one night.”

“Here?” she said. “A mile from your house?”

I looked around at this world of big soft chairs. It wasn’t like the rest of the island. It was rich and new. Clean and constructed. People came and went all year long leaving nothing behind. I felt like the opposite of that—burdened by all the trappings of my life, weighed down by the past, and not just my past! I was carrying all of it. Lucas’s past. My mother’s past.

“Room eleven,” I said.

“Seriously?” she said.

The room had a huge, clean bed with white sheets, a velvety, rich-feeling bedspread. I sat on the bed and looked out at the harbor. If I stood right up against the window, I could see down Clara Day Street, see all the familiar roofs and windows, see the light spilling from windows out onto the street, all of which looked less and less familiar as the lights began to blink out and the night grew darker.

I got into the vast bed. I desperately missed the feeling of drifting off in my own bed, knowing what the morning would bring, knowing that things were good between Lucas and me. Knowing that we didn’t have many people to love, but we had each other, and that was something to count on. I wanted to find my way into that world again. I wanted it so badly, I could taste the wanting, like blood on my tongue.

I woke in the dark with Cole beside me. I recognized his smell, felt his breath and his feverish heat against my back. I heard him whispering in the faintest paper breath of a voice. I was frozen, as if in a nightmare, but it wasn’t a dream. My senses were sharp and raw. There was salt on the air, and on his skin. I heard gentle waves in the harbor outside.

“It was many, many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea,” he whispered, and the skin of my neck crawled. “I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love that was more than love.”

I couldn’t catch every word, but I heard the rhymes, the incantation.

“Neither the angels in heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea, can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”