A few seconds of choked, scrambled syllables followed, then Luce’s heart stopped as she heard her mother speak again. “Oh, we’ll definitely call him Peter,” Alyssa announced, deadpan, and there was a shocked pause before her father cracked up laughing. “You think anybody but me knows what a sharp edge you’ve got behind that sweet face, babe? You know Peter’s nowhere close to being over you . . .” The laughter spun around Luce’s head, ruffling her hair, before it fell apart into a series of disconnected bleating sounds. Again longing stabbed through Luce; she was consumed by desire to know exactly how her mother had replied. Her words would be playful but also acerbic. And smart, and quick, and full of life . . .

“The man,” the crackling voice said then paused. It sounded wounded, as if Luce had deliberately said the cruelest thing possible. “He has lost much.” The words were becoming slurred. Luce realized that the voice wouldn’t be able to sustain the discussion much longer. It was sapped by the effort of forming new words, new thoughts. “We have no need of you,’’ it added, but now its words were so drafty and misshapen that Luce could barely make them out. The snarl of speaking winds around her head was dissolving, leaking away up the beach.

Then she was left alone again in her narrow cove, stone walls rising on both sides of her, green waves cresting in at the opening. Clouds were pouring across the sky, blotting out the fresh golden sunlight she’d seen earlier that day, and the now-voiceless wind blew a few spatters of cold rain into her face.

Rain, Luce realized after a second. Not snow.

Spring might be coming faster than she’d thought. And she wasn’t any closer to rescuing her father from this nightmare of an island, this place where all his sweetest and most heartbreaking memories were constantly dragged from his mind and then flung back at him. Where he had to lose everything—his wife and his daughter and his hopes—over and over again . . .

There was something important in what the gruff spirit-voice had told her, Luce realized. It hadn’t told her much, but somewhere in its jumbled words there was a hint, an unwitting clue to how she could finally get through to her father. If she could only put her finger on exactly what that hint had been, she’d know how to convince Andrew Korchak that she was real. The real, actual Luce and not just some haunting memory.

The daylight lasted for a long time.

∗ ∗ ∗