We’ve always felt this way, to some degree. Since the moment they were born, a sense of looming disaster. It’s the same thing, only amplified today. The realization is a strange comfort.

After a long moment, Hugh looks back at me.

“I’m sorry I left,” I whisper.

He slides the door to the playroom softly shut.

I back farther into the hallway, and he walks to meet me, slowly.

“It’s not your fault.” This is a huge concession coming from him, this early in an argument. “You can’t understand. When you grow up here, when you’ve seen it—”

“I know.” I reach for his face as if I could smooth the worry lines away and with them all his panic.

He grabs my hand roughly, pulls my palm to his mouth to kiss it.

I close my eyes. “I swear I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just…”

“You wanted to escape.”

There’s no blame in his voice this time. Only sadness. He’d wanted all of us to escape. Even as late as last night, he was scrambling for a phone connection, desperate to get us out.

We press our cheeks together for a moment before our mouths slide into a kiss, brief, halting.

It’s beyond oppressive, the superstition here, every awful thing amplified into inescapable fatalism. I understand completely why Hugh left last time, why he was on that ocean liner, on that deck, ready to meet me. Nobody in their right mind would want to be trapped here on the Day. And yet the rest of them always stay, despite their belief. Because of it! Every seven years, they ride it out. What is it that makes them do it? A sense of family obligation, tradition, maybe. Fear of breaking the ancient pact and losing whatever blessings they believe this place offers. Or a kind of religious fervor, which seems less likely somehow. I don’t know. I can’t understand it, but confusion seems to be the point. You get so dizzy you just give in.

Maybe it’s knowing that if they left, others would stay, and they’d then have to bear the weight of their neighbors’ deaths as if they themselves had killed them. And the judgment of their friends and neighbors. Forever.

If Hugh feels that, would he admit it, even to himself?

He presses his dry lips to my forehead. “So?”

It takes me a moment to understand the question. Then I take his hand and squeeze it. “Yeah. Three.”

“Her friends.” He nods down the stairs. “Bloody stupid of them to have stayed.”

I flinch at his tone. “I’m not sure they got the memo, honestly. She doesn’t seem to have heard of the tithe.”

Don’t I sound like an islander now.

Hugh leans on the wall, scratching his head. “They weren’t warned, evacuated. It really isn’t right to involve outsiders in this.”