Cole dives below the surface, and I follow him. It’s dark and cold and beautiful under the sound. We pop up at the same time. Both laughing. Wiping seawater tears from our cheeks.

And then he starts to swim.

And I follow him again.

We swim toward the horizon line. Muscles burning. Lungs aching. Cold sitting inside our bones like it’s made a home there.

We swim out farther than I went that first night. Past the swim dock. And the safety buoys. Past the lighthouse even. Until the shoreline curve of Whisper Cove seems more like a memory than a place.

And then we float. On our backs. Fingers linked. We don’t fight it.

And the current takes us right back to shore.

All the way back to Whisper Cove. Like that’s where it wants us to be.

We sit together for a long time in the sand, still warm from the sun. We write our names with a stick. I have this urge to draw a heart around them. But I don’t. Because it seems silly.

Cole finds the boat for me. The one I tossed from the cliff. It’s already washed up on the beach near the jetty. The mast and sail are missing. Stolen by the sea. But the rest of it is intact. Whole. He hands it to me and leans down low. I wait for the press of his lips. But it’s the soft touch of his fingers that I feel. He wipes the sea from my eyes. The salt from my skin.

“Let me save you this time,” he murmurs.

His mouth is so close. I feel our mingled breath.

The words are a kind of kiss. Pressed against my skin. But I’m so hungry for the real thing.

I pull him closer. My hands on his damp cheeks. His thumbs against my hip bones. “Do you trust me?” I ask him again.

It’s getting dark now. We’ve missed dinner. But we still don’t leave. We linger. Hands sliding over wet skin. The grit of sand.

And then the fog comes.

It rolls in so fast—so low and thick—that I can’t tell if it’s coming from the sea or rising from the ground beneath our feet.

“We need to go,” Cole says, and we pull on our clothes. He grabs my hand, and we hurry toward the boardwalk. But I stumble over something buried in the sand. Those stone blocks. They keep tripping me up. I lean down to brush one off.

Cole is watching me. “Foundations,” he says. “Of the old village. The bones of their houses are still here.”

I can’t stop staring.

I’ve been tripping over the past since I got to Whisper Cove.