Cole pulls me toward the boardwalk. Past the dunes. Across the marsh. Up the sloping lawn. He’s moving fast. Flowing over the ground like water. And I move with him. Because I know he’s racing that fog.

When we reach the little blue cabins, he pulls a piece of sea glass from his pocket. Pink like seashell. He tosses it into the air and catches it in his hand. Then he presses it into my palm.

“Sleep tight,” he tells me. “I’ll be right next door.” He touches my face. Moves his thumb across my lips. So gentle. And I want to kiss him so bad. It feels like bones cracking, that desperate want. But I’m suddenly afraid.

What if I feel too much?

Cole watches me until I go inside. But I don’t go to bed. Instead, I take the flashlight from under Val’s bed, and I creep back out into the dark. Alone. I’m not sleepwalking this time. It’s my choice to leave my bed. To relinquish the safety of the little blue cabin. Because I have this thought. This wild idea. And I need to know. For sure.

I move toward the thick of the tree line at the edge of the property.

The crush of the woods.

It takes me a little while. I wander for a bit. Lose my way. But eventually I find those stones again. The ones I tripped over between Cole’s house and the beach. Only something is different. They stand at attention in the fog now. Not slumped. Not crooked. They aren’t worn down. Not overturned and overgrown.

The neat rows are easy to see. The mounds of earth.

I breathe in the scent of fresh dirt. New flowers to mark the spot. And I marvel at the impossibility of it all.

The little graveyard made new again in the moonlight.

I’m not sure I can find my way back through the woods, so I take the path I took earlier with Cole. Running along the top of the cliff, then downhill toward the Whisper Cove beach. And I stand on the sand as the fog swirls around me.

But I don’t move toward the water. Because someone is already there.

My mother stands with her back to me. At the edge of the ocean. She’s beautiful. And still. But I call out one word.

“Mom.”

She turns to look at me. Confusion on her face.

My face.

We are perfect mirrors of each other.

Because this isn’t my mother.

It’s me.

ACT II: SCENE 7

“How far would you go to be with someone you love?”

That’s the question Val asks us the next morning at breakfast. It’s Monday. The beginning of our second week at Whisper Cove. And I’m staring, bleary-eyed, at a bowl of oatmeal I can’t bring myself to eat.