Making my final walk down the path to the dock, it feels as though the island reaches inside me and rips a chunk of my heart free. I let her, hoping she will plant it in her earth and keep it forever.

I drive my boat to the marina. Knowing it’s my last time skimming across this lake, I make sure to take in the landscape, to enjoy how it feels to fly across water. I’m grateful that I got to come back here one more time.

I leave here a different person than the one who came. I was always depending on someone else—my mother, May, Leo—to define me, to point out my next steps, to influence my actions and decisions. I did Avril Island all on my own, brought her back to life, searched out her secrets, and then put them and her to rest.

I have survived solitude, grief, finding love and losing it, a bloody house fire, and discoveries that altered my entire history. Avril Island raised me through the summers of my childhood and now has taught me what I need to know in adulthood to free myself of her, my past, and my own mistakes.

MAY

It would appear that the rules of death are ever changing. I’m not attached to June anymore, I think because she no longer needs me to be. And the coming and going has stopped. Now I’m at Avril Island, in the earth, the trees, the rocks; no one thing holds me. I’m everywhere and everything at all times. It’s a peaceful way to be.

If I want to pull myself together, I can, but that’s only when I feel like going into the cottage. Buildings can be ghosts too, you know? We make each other appear just by being together. So I get my body back for a little while, and she gets her walls and floors and windows and plumbing. Every now and again I like to walk down the hallways, lie across the beds, rock on the metal glider on the verandah. I never spend much time in there, though, only a few hours, because it gets lonely remembering what was.

I still get to talk to June in her dreams. We’re always in my bedroom at the cottage. It seems to be our forever meeting place. It makes sense—growing up, it was always our safe place. We spent so much time in there, just the two of us. A cocoon that not even my mother could rip apart.

Eventually the island will start to claim the burnt-out wreckage of the cottage. Moss will climb up and over it, pulling it down into the soil so that it’s a less violent reminder of what happened that night. The land has a way of doing that, absorbing our sins in an attempt to cleanse them and make them good again.