She took a deep breath. She could do this. Moonflower Bay faced west, so sunrises weren’t spectacular like sunsets were, and this little cove was extra sheltered from the morning sun. But there was a different kind of beauty here, a subtler one. The sky was just beginning to lighten, black giving way to a diffuse blue. Mist swirled on the surface of the lake, and waves lapped the sand gently. The rocky wall behind them—the limestone that formed the cove—created a sense of coziness.

All right. All she had to do today was wade in. Get her feet wet—literally and metaphorically. The beach around here was pebbled at the water’s edge. As you approached the lake, at a certain point the sand would start to give way to tiny rocks that hurt your feet. She knew this pain. It was a good pain. You had to walk over the rocks to get to the sand again, which reappeared once you were about knee deep in the water.

She stopped walking when she hit the second band of sand. The water was up to her knees. Even though wading had never been a problem for her—her brain classified wading as fundamentally different from swimming—her heart was clipping along at a pretty good pace. It was partly because she knew this was her last day of just wading.

But it was partly because of the wrenching surprise of yet another revelation. Another of the sucker punches this town kept walloping her with. But this one was bigger than the fountain or the lighthouse or the canoe. This was the lake itself. The blue lake that was so big it might as well have been an ocean.

She loved this lake, even if she was afraid of swimming in it.

And she loved the little town on the shores of this mighty lake.

This place had made her.

She always told people she was “from” Toronto, and it was true in the sense that she’d been born there and had attended school there. But the summers she’d spent in Moonflower Bay with Lucille had had an out-of-proportion impact on her.

The epiphany brought tears to her eyes. It filled her chest with regret, regret for all the years she’d pretended she was done with this place. That it didn’t matter to her. That she could just ignore it and carry on with her life. Why hadn’t she summoned some of the anger that seemed to be coming so easily now and had it out with Sawyer? Gotten to a place where she could coexist with him in the same town?

Regret and love and fear swirled together, creating what felt like a riptide inside her that was so strong she doubled over.

“Eve?”

She stood so fast from her crouch that she felt like a marionette.

“Are you okay?”