“Never,” I say, and my voice cracks. Because I remember the bits of mud and grass clinging to my feet. “Not anywhere else. Not before I came here.” I turn to look at Cole, and his eyes are so intense. But there’s a softness in them I haven’t noticed before. He reaches out to brush sand off my cheek with his thumb.

“Yeah. Well. I tried to tell you. Here isn’t like anywhere else.”

“You followed me,” I say. And he nods.

“I lost you in the fog. And it took me a while to find you. I was afraid—” He stops.

“Afraid of what?”

He hesitates, but his steel-gray eyes never leave mine.

“I was afraid I’d be too late.”

Fear settles in my stomach again. I feel the lead weight of it. Solid and heavy. The metallic taste of it in my mouth.

What the sea wants, the sea will have.

Cole runs a hand over his face, and I realize how exhausted he looks. Not just tired. The kind of bone-deep weary that comes from years of never resting easy.

“I told my mother not to cast you as Eden,” he says. “I begged her to give you some other part. Any other part. But you can’t argue with Willa Culver.”

“Why?” I ask him. “Why would you do that?”

“You’ve already drowned once,” he tells me. “It’s enough. You shouldn’t have to do it again.”

“I can handle it,” I say, even though I’m sitting here sandy and wet and terrified. “I—”

But Cole cuts me off.

“You need to go home,” he tells me. “Tomorrow. Call your dad and tell him you made a mistake coming back here. Get Jude to drive you to the train station.”

“I don’t want—”

“It’s not safe for you here,” Cole says, and there’s this desperate sound in his voice. “It’s not safe for—” He starts to say something else, but then he clearly changes his mind. “It’s not safe.”

“I’m not going home,” I tell him, and I hear the undercurrent of anger bubbling beneath my words. I don’t like to be told what to do. Not by Cole Culver.

Not by anybody.

“Jesus, Avril. I need you to listen to what I’m saying.” Cole reaches for my hand. He turns it palm up and traces a compass rose onto my wrist. Like he’s marking me. “We’re alike, the two of us. And I knew it the moment I saw you. That first night. I felt it. Before I knew who you were, even.” His eyes have turned dark around the edges, and he tightens his grip on my hand. “I didn’t remember you. But I knew you. In that instant on the beach.” He lets go of me, and I can breathe again. “I fucking knew you.”