Word gets around – they’re putting together a search party for Ellis, and I can’t be a part of it.

I’m struck by the unfairness. How could this be the way it ends? Not just the situation, but I’m rattled by a sort of cosmic lack of justice, of how I got every answer I came to find and still feel like I’ve achieved nothing at all.

Dad left his car on the mainland so we both get into mine.

It’s not me who holds the wheel, who puts my foot on the gas, who points myself in the direction of my own failure. It can’t be.

I didn’t even see Peyton to say goodbye. Didn’t get to explain to Booker.

But still, we board the ferry, the line of cars waiting to evacuate the island feeling like a funeral procession. The sea is angry. It’s rocking in an ominous sort of way, waves unfamiliar, too high and too aggressive. Soon nothing will be able to cross it. Not me. Not Ellis.

‘I can’t believe any of this,’ Dad says.

No. Me neither. The sky churns grey.

We sit in silence and soon the ferry pulls away from the dock.

There’s a terrible weight in my stomach. Infinitely heavy. A black hole. It’s not exhaustion. It’s guilt. Utter failure. An overwhelming sense that I’m no longer where I ought to be. I don’t feel very much like Mona right now. I don’t feel like anything at all.

I’ve made a terrible mistake.

I’m thinking of Celeste, who I hate more than anything, who made me the person I am, small and terrible. I’m thinking of the mom I didn’t have. I’m thinking of Sylvia.

Dad, with only one daughter left to lose.

I am logical and I know there may be no one on this Earth I can trust. I know the woods are fourteen square miles and I am small and that if Ellis is out there, the odds I will find him myself are infinitesimal. According to Peyton, I’ve never done anything for another human being that didn’t benefit me.

I know I’m afraid of heights, for some reason.

And yet it doesn’t stop me from flinging open my car door, sprinting to the edge of the ferry, and leaping overboard.