“I was with Jude,” he tells me. “In the garden. And I heard you talking to someone.”

“I don’t remember,” I tell him. “I don’t remember anything.”

How I got here.

Where that lavender came from.

Lex studies the red words. His flashlight beam slips over every bloody letter. “That’s your mother, isn’t it?” he asks, and I nod. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

Lex leads me back to my cabin. “I’m staying with you tonight,” he tells me as he half drags, half carries me up the steps.

One.

Two.

Three.

“You don’t have to do that, Lex.”

“It’s a done deal,” he says firmly. “I never should have left you alone tonight to begin with.” And I can tell by the sound in his voice that there’s no point in arguing with him, so I let Lex take me by the hand and quietly open the door.

We tiptoe toward my lower bunk, kick off our shoes, and slip in under the covers together, both of us still dressed.

“Talk to me, Av.” Lex’s voice is low in my ear. Tender and gentle. “Please.” The sound of it cracks open some sealed-up place inside me.

“All this time, I believed it was an accident.” I’m staring at the bunk above me. Whispering. But my words still feel too loud in the silent cabin. My throat is hoarse. “What happened to my mother. And to me.” I turn to look at Lex, because I need to see his eyes in the dark. “But that was a lie.”

A lie my father told me.

“People think she walked into the water because the sea was calling her. That’s what Jude said.” Lex doesn’t say the next part, but I feel it hanging in the air between us.

“And she tried to take me with her.”

He nods, close enough to me that I feel the kiss of his red hair against my forehead. “That’s how the story goes.”

When I first remembered that cold hand on my wrist, I thought—assumed, I guess—that it was my mother’s hand, and that she’d been trying to save me. To save both of us. But what if she’d been trying to drag me down with her instead?

That fits with the images that have been running through my head. The weird bits of memory that have been bubbling up to the surface in all those strange moments.

I can’t really believe that story. That my mother was the victim of some kind of curse. Or whatever.

But I also don’t want to believe that my mother made the choice, all on her own, to hold my hand and walk into Long Island Sound one stormy summer night.