Her sister’s last words hung in the air: “You’re just jealous because I belong here and you don’t.” Alice had goaded her into saying them, had pushed and pushed and pushed, but hearing them still hurt. Or would later. Right now Alice was too numb to feel pain. She was staring at Charlie’s face, hot, mad, tear-streaked, and then she was staring at Charlie’s back, smooth, tan, naked except for the thinnest of bikini straps and a Band-Aid just above the low-rise denim cutoffs, the flesh-colored adhesive concealing the angel’s-wing tattoo. Alice closed her eyes. The sound of long hair whipping around, of bare feet clipping fast down wooden steps. When Alice opened her eyes again, she could still see Charlie’s back but not the Band-Aid on it. Charlie was too far away for that, was already halfway down the beach, sand kicking up angrily behind her. She stopped at a towel, a guy and girl—lazy-limbed, drowsy-eyed, enough alike to be brother and sister—lounging on it, smoking cigarettes. Charlie flopped down beside them and started talking, arms waving around wildly. After a bit, they turned to look at Alice, leaning against the railing of the deck. Alice let them look. Then the girl put her hand on Charlie’s shoulder, and the guy passed her a flask. They stood, and started walking down the beach. Alice watched. Three backs moving away from her now, not just one. Three backs wanting to be anywhere she wasn’t.

A minute later they’d disappeared from view, and Alice wondered if there’d ever been a time when she’d felt so alone. She knew it was weird—beyond weird, sick, really—to blame a dead girl for her troubles, but she couldn’t help herself. This was all Camilla’s fault. Camilla, no longer living and yet the most alive person she knew. The most powerful, too. Camilla could come between people even if she wasn’t in this world anymore. Could do it easy, without even breaking a sweat. A ghost who taunted as much as she haunted. And it was as Alice was thinking these thoughts that she heard it: the high, silvery tinkling. It might have been the wind chimes hanging above the sliding glass door, reacting to a breeze coming off the ocean. Might have been but wasn’t, Alice knew. It was Camilla laughing at her from the other side of death, from beyond the grave.