“I had a premonition,” Zadie added. “That’s how I found you.”

“Seriously?”

She nodded. “I can’t believe it worked.”

“I can.”

The girls shared a knowing smile like it was a telephone made from two cans and a piece of string.

Then through a break in the mist, Finn spotted a figure. “Look…” It was a long-limbed woman with wavy hair that reached the middle of her back. She was wading into the waves as if she were going for a dip, but she didn’t move like she had any intention of swimming. She barely disturbed the water, arms limp at her sides as the ocean slowly pulled her into itself.

“Mom!” Finn took off in a hobbling sprint down the sand.

She had heard of time slowing down in moments of crisis, but as she raced toward her mother, time did not slow so much as it reversed. Finn was eighteen, then a few steps later, she was seventeen. By the time her toes touched the freezing water, she was thirteen and crying into the pillow of a strange bed. And when she had waded through the last of the sea and fog, when she was in arm’s reach of the person she’d spent five years hoping to find, she was twelve years old again, picking up her mom’s discarded anklet, squeezing it in her fist until it made painful impressions of their initials in her palm; calling out for her mom in every room of the house until the windows steamed with her breath and the despair she’d expelled from her lungs was inhaled again, starting the cycle all over. And so it was in an unexpected flash of anger—not joy or longing—that she forcefully grabbed her mother’s shoulder.

But the startled woman who wheeled around to face her was not Nora, and by the bewildered look on her face, she clearly didn’t recognize Finn, either.

Finn’s heart bottomed out. “I’m—I’m sorry. I thought—” she stammered, but before she could finish her sentence, she was already wading back to shore.

“Hey! Hold on!” the woman called after her, but Zadie was already helping Finn out of the water and onto the sand. They were both drenched from the waist down. The wind blowing against Finn’s legs made her skin prickle.

“You guys are gonna freeze like that,” the woman said, catching up to them. “Come with me. I have towels and hot tea in my car.”

Embarrassed, Finn declined. “It’s okay. Thanks, though.” As she tried to slink away, dripping and shivering, Zadie hung back. “She’s right, Finn. It’s a long walk back.” She turned back to the woman. “I’ll take some tea.”