“It’s good that things like that are coming back to you.” Cole smiles. Squeezes my hand. “It’s all those little things that keep people alive for us, I think.”

But he doesn’t understand.

“Cole, someone has been leaving me little bundles of lavender.” He looks confused. “On the porch of the cabin. And in my bed. Between the pages of my script, even.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “To scare me, I guess. That’s the only reason I can figure out.”

So that I’ll know I’m being haunted. Not by a ghost. But by a person.

“It blooms this time of year,” Cole tells me. His dark eyebrows are drawn together. “It wouldn’t be hard to find around here.”

“Where does it bloom at Whisper Cove?” I ask him.

Cole looks toward the little trailer with the flickering windows. “It grows wild all along the edge of George’s place.”

ACT III: SCENE 5

I follow Cole’s gaze down toward George’s trailer, and something flickers across his face. Something that looks like hope. “You said you remember someone else being there that night.” His words come out in a rush. An exhale that sounds like relief. “Someone who scared you.” I nod. “Maybe it was George. He can be mean as a snake, Avril. I’ve seen it. That side of him.”

I can’t help wondering if he’s ever seen that side of his father. The one Val whispered about in the cafeteria. That quick-to-anger side. And it suddenly hits me that there’s not any real difference between George and Brody Culver. The way they look at women. Men like that are all the same. They feel entitled to stare. Or to touch. The only thing that separates the two of them is that Brody Culver has money and George lives in a falling-down trailer behind the barn.

But one isn’t any better or worse than the other. It could’ve easily been either one of them.

Maybe it was more than a coincidence, George finding me washed up on the beach that morning. Almost dead.

Maybe he knew exactly where to look for my body.

I’m confused now. Grasping for those memories again. But I’m having trouble pinning them down tonight.

Someone hits me in the face with that bright light.

Then the hand around my wrist.

And I’m flying—falling—into the dark.

I think about the look on George’s face when he talked about how beautiful my mother was. How Glory said he made a fool of himself that summer, pining away after her. I remember the way his eyes slipped over my shoulders. My thighs. How he touched my hair and told me I looked like her. My mother. And I shiver.

Act like her, too. That’s what he said when I told him no. Shoulda let the sea fuckin’ have you.