Ezra must have stolen the photos from my cottage, and the poem and bracelet, and god knows how he got a chunk of my hair. I pile it all back in the box and place it in the trunk before slamming the lid down. Pushing myself up off the floor, I return to the living room, where I come face-to-face with May’s photos of Ezra and me at Avril Island. Did she actually send those to him, or did he steal them like the other items in the cigar box?

I wrap my arms around myself and sink down onto the couch. I don’t even know what to feel—anger, flattery, fear. Why would he want those photos of me and the poem and bracelet and hair? Judy said he was angry at my family after everything that happened, so why keep souvenirs of one of us?

No matter how I frame it, the whole thing feels insidious. Not wanting to be here, not wanting to be at Avril Island, not wanting any of this, I pull a blanket off the back of the couch, slide a pillow under my head, and curl up right there, wishing it would all go away. But with every breath, I breathe in the scent of the man I’ve accidentally fallen in love with. The man who in an instant has become unknown to me, who has an unhealthy obsession and an agenda that I just can’t figure out.

MAY

The cottage is dark and quiet when I arrive. I can tell without looking that nobody is here. It’s the first time I’ve arrived in the living realm without anybody being there. Am I no longer attached to June? Has she left Avril Island, leaving me in the process?

I float up to the second floor and am flooded with relief when I see her belongings still scattered about the room. Why, then, am I here? Floating from room to room, I search for the point of my presence here, in the shadows and in the light that comes in from the moon.

I glide through the tunnel-like darkness of the stairwell, but something stops me at the bottom, as though I’m here in the flesh and my dress has gotten snagged on a nail, holding me in place. It’s not a nail, though, that I’m caught on; it’s another bit of memory dislodging from deep down and floating to the surface, tethering me to the spot where it happened.

It was the night that I left June upstairs so I could secretly listen in on my parents’ fight. My father’s arrival on a Wednesday was too unusual, too disruptive to not investigate. So I ordered June back to her room, promising I’d be back soon with an update, then went downstairs and tucked myself into the shadows on the second-to-last stair to listen.