His fingers are tight on my arm as I struggle through the damp sand. It shifts and moves under my weight. It’s deep tonight. Drifting. But I don’t look back. And I’m relieved when we come to the boardwalk and George finally lets me go.

I don’t know what I’m more scared of, George with his alcohol breath and his roaming eyes—or the dark of the not-quite-empty beach. So I give up and follow his flashlight between the dunes. Over the marsh. Up the hill. He never checks to see if I’m still behind him. And he never says another word. Not until we reach the farmhouse.

The awning is there again. The picnic tables. And I wonder about the child who owned that wooden toy. The one that was lying on the braided rug by the back door.

Where is that little boy or girl now?

I’m rubbing at the bruised places on my arm. Trying to massage away the feeling of George’s fingers on my body. “You shouldn’t be out there,” he tells me. His voice sounds irritated. Like it’s a big pain in the ass—the worst part of his job, maybe—hauling meddling kids off the beach while they’re staring at phantom versions of themselves. “You got no business runnin’ around in the dark like that.” He clicks off the flashlight and sits on the steps. Where Cole and I sat not long ago. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and shakes one out. I watch him light it up and breathe out smoke.

“What are they?” I ask him. “They’re not ghosts.”

The girl on the beach.

The woman in the fog outside my cabin window.

George sighs. It’s a long, deep sound. It reminds me of the foghorn. “No,” he says. “But that’s what most people would call ’em.”

A stiff sea wind blows across the lawn. It carries away the fog for a few seconds, and I see the sound laid out below us.

George is looking at the water. Same as me. The cigarette is dangling from his lips, so he talks out of one corner of his mouth. “They built that lighthouse in 1906,” he tells me. But it isn’t standing there tonight. There’s no glow on the horizon to mark the opening to Whisper Cove.

And the smell of pigs is in the air.

“They’re echoes.” I breathe the words out like they’re made of mist. “Memories.”

“Not your memories,” George says. But I already knew that. Because I’ve never had any memories.

These are Whisper Cove’s memories.

My mother feels so alive to me at Whisper Cove because some part of her is still here. She still crosses the field. Stands on the sea porch. Dances on the grass. Like those home movies of Willa’s. Only more real.