Cole leans against the building. He runs his fingers through his hair. Touches the tattoo on his wrist like a talisman. “It’s a sort of graffiti memorial,” he explains. “It gets painted over every few years. But theatre people are superstitious. So somebody always puts it back. It’s supposed to be protection. To keep us all safe.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I tell him. “We were night swimming. And we got caught in a riptide. Somehow, I survived. My mother didn’t. That’s all there is to the story.”

Dad told me that years ago. It happens all the time, he said. People forget how dangerous the ocean is. Mais la mer est mortelle.

But the sea is deadly.

“Avril—”

I tear my eyes away from my mother’s name so I can focus on Cole’s face. “You don’t really believe that old story, do you?” It’s one thing for him to say it at night. Around a campfire. Or in the barn, huddled under the ghost light. But here, in the daylight, he can’t really mean it. There has to be some other explanation for what happened to me last night. For the sleepwalking.

For the mud and the grass in my bed. The woman in the fog.

And in the bathroom mirror.

For all of it.

“Just listen.” Cole reaches for my hands. “Please.” His hair falls across his eyes, and I have this wild impulse to reach up and brush it back. “People here remember what happened to your mom. And they remember that little graveyard in the woods, too. The one where the women and children are buried. It scares the shit out of them. What the sea is capable of. It scares me.” I feel the shiver that travels up his spine. It passes through his fingers into my flesh. “It should scare you, too.”

There’s no denying how afraid he is.

How afraid he is for me.

But something tells me it’s more than that. He’s afraid for himself, too. And I don’t understand why. That fear is contagious, though. Like some kind of virus. The terror of finding myself standing in the waves hits me all over again. Hard. Suddenly I can’t seem to get enough air.

I look at those words painted in red. My mother’s name.

I almost tell Cole that there’s more that he doesn’t know. That it’s not just the sleepwalking. But I can’t find the words to explain about those moments when the lines have blurred.

Cole pulls his eyes away from mine, and they settle on that last line of cursive.

What the sea wants, the sea will have.

“Did you know,” he says, “that on some whaling ships, if a sailor went overboard, nobody was allowed to throw him a rope? They believed, if the sea wanted to take you, there was nothing they could do to stop it.”