“What do I know?” Eva Cardoza said. “I don’t know what to do. I’m just the neighbor. We try the clinic, no one answers. Dr. Lyle is sleeping in, because I happen to know he is drinking all night at the bar. So I bring her here, and now you can have her.”

“But what happened?” I said, aghast.

“You shush,” Marlene Hart said to me. She picked up the phone and dialed. “It’s Marlene down at the police station,” she said, in the same cheerful voice. “Yes, we need the clinic. Well, go next door and wake him up, would you, dear?” she said. “You know where the key is. If he doesn’t answer, just go right in and shake him awake.”

“Did Stephan do this?” I said.

“He does it once a week,” Eva Cardoza said. “She cries and cries and then next day she’s so in love again.”

“He does this once a week? Oh my god. Why doesn’t anyone stop him?”

“This is what their love looks like,” Eva said, shrugging.

Marlene had found an ice pack in the back and was holding it to Stephanie’s face.

“There you go. You hold this right here. I don’t think this is going to need stitches after all, honey,” Marlene said. “Isn’t that good news?” She turned to me and gave me an accusing look as if I were somehow responsible. “No one’s perfect. But I think you already know that.”

I walked out into the weak sunlight, desperate to get away from Stephanie and her swollen eye, bloody cheek, her terrible crying. And worse still was Eva Cardoza’s casual shrug. He does it once a week. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to see below the surface if this was the kind of thing I would find. And—I was seeing something else that maybe I’d known all along—George Samson wasn’t going to sweep in and save the day. He hadn’t done anything for Stephanie, not in all these years. What could he possibly do for me?

No one was going to save me.

That was the truth, and it landed in my gut like a rock.

The rhythm of the poem was in my head all day. I thought of the notebook paper I’d found in Cole’s room weeks ago. She is alive. That sentence marched along beside the poem, making a chaotic mess of the tomb by the sounding sea. A voice as clear as the autumn air called out to me: Which do you want to be? Alive? Or in a tomb by the sea? I wondered if it was my mom.