“I’ve had your back,” I sob. “You don’t know it, but I have. You think I’m weak, that I’m upset about Mom and Dad dying—well, yeah, I am, but that’s not all of it, okay? That’s not all of it, and I’ve been protecting you so that you can fucking get out of bed in the morning. I’ve been watching out for you, and you … you were going to let me stay with someone who betrayed me, someone who told me to get rid of my baby. Why am I protecting you, Mae? Why? WHY?”

I shake my head. Don’t. Don’t. It will kill her.

“What are you protecting me from?” Mae steps forward. “Nah … tell me.”

I turn away from her, wrap my arms around myself. Drew steps closer. I stare at the toes of his worn sneakers, the cuffs of his faded black jeans. I wish I could tell him that I broke my promise to him about the pills the day I found out my mother was in a pit. Because I’m in that pit, too.

Micah is behind me. I know it’s him, so familiar. The endless churning energy of the sea. He kissed someone else. Someone named Cathy. He slept with her. Maybe more than once. Because he didn’t love me enough. Or at all. I wasn’t enough for Mom and Dad. Not enough for Micah. Just Hannah. If the wave had taken me, would anyone have felt this empty about me being gone? Mom maybe. But she’d have Mae.

I think the world would be okay without me.

It doesn’t need me.

Just Hannah.

Just.

I wish the wave had taken me, too. I wish I’d been swept away.

Micah touches my shoulder. He’s wearing the watch my dad bought him when he turned eighteen, a twin to his own—we’d called them Indiana Jones watches because it made them look like gentleman adventurers. My gift had been a photographic flip book I’d made out of all the years I’d been watching him surf, my camera pointed at the sea. Hundreds of pictures that showed him devouring wave after wave over the past three years. We liked waves then. Thought they were fun.