Prologue
Five months after high school graduation
RIOS
By late September, the island had gone quiet again.
Tourist season was over, and what was left of Hatterwick felt stripped bare. The boardwalk planks creaked in the heat, and the humid air hung thick with the scents of salt, sunscreen, and gossip. Without strangers to feed it, the talk turned inward, circling the same names like sharks lured by the scent of blood.
Mine most of all.
I’d just finished work at the docks, unloading the latest catch for the fishing company that signed my paycheck. Not a glorious job by any means, but it was who’d been willing to hire me fresh out of high school a few months ago despite the shadow hanging over me from the police investigation that had stalled without enough evidence for an arrest or a conviction. Not that the court of public opinion needed actual evidence to convict me.
My truck was still down—some clutch issue I couldn’t fix without parts that said paycheck still wouldn’t cover—so I started the walk home. It wasn’t far. At thirteen miles long and only three miles wide at its broadest point, nothing much on Hatterwick Island was far. The tide had gone out, leaving the mudflats slick and shining under the lowering sun.
Two old-timers outside the tackle shop fell silent as I passed.
They didn’t spit anymore, which I guess counted as improvement.
“Evenin’.” The greeting came automatically because my mama had raised me polite before she left us high and dry years ago.
Neither man answered.
I tried to focus on the glare off the water of the sound instead of the whispers.
Should’ve been him.
You’d think he’d be gone by now.
Same words, new mouths.
Four months on, and they still hadn’t found fifteen-year-old Gwen Busby.
She’d have been a sophomore by now, along with my baby sister, Gabi. Instead, she’d vanished from the end-of-school-year beach bonfire like smoke into the night. They’d dragged every inch of the inlet and the deeper waters around the island, their hooks scraping bottom until mud clouded everything. Search choppers had beaten the air overhead for weeks, their rotors drowning out the gulls, while dogs from the mainland worked the dunes and maritime forest with their noses pressed to sand that held nothing but the ghosts of footprints washed away by tide and time.
Nothing.
Not a scrap of clothing, not a shoe, not even a hair tie to prove she’d ever existed at all.
By the end of June, the search parties that had repeatedly combed every salt-beaten inch of our scrap of land had turned into prayer circles. Old women with sun-spotted hands clutched their rosaries outside the Catholic church, their voices rising and falling like the rhythm of waves. By the end of July, those prayers had curdled into whispers that slipped through screen doors and across backyard fences like poison. And by mid-August, when the tourists had gone home and left us alone with our ghosts, everyone had settled into the comfortable certainty that she was dead.
Since they needed a villain more than they needed proof, they’d picked me. I’d been the last to see her alive—or thought I had—just a flash of her walking toward the cars when the storm rolled in. When news had spread that she’d never made it home that night, I’d gone straight to Chief Carson and told him every detail I could remember. How she’d stumbled a little in the sand, maybe from the beer, maybe from the wind that had already been howling off the water from the incoming storm. How I’d watched her disappear between the parked cars and figured she was heading home like all the other kids when the lightning started forking down.
That honesty had been my first mistake. My last had been thinking it would matter.
I crossed Front Street, dust rising in small clouds from my work boots, and heard the low rumble of an engine behind me. The sound was too clean, too smooth for the usual island traffic of rusted pickups and salt-eaten sedans. A black SUV crept along the curb like a predator stalking prey. Clean and new and expensive—the kind of vehicle that told you exactly who could afford to leave the island whenever they wanted, and who chose to stay just long enough to remind the rest of us of our place.
The Reilly family. Kin to the Busbys on the mother’s side, which made Gwen their blood, their loss, their grief to weaponize however they saw fit.
Mr. Reilly sat behind the wheel like a judge reading out a sentence he’d already decided, mirrored sunglasses shielding whatever passed for conscience in his eyes. I didn’t need to see through the lenses to recognize his disdain. It radiated from him like heat off summer asphalt. Mrs. Reilly occupied the passenger seat with the rigid posture of someone who’d never learned to bend, her lips pursed like she’d caught a whiff of something rotten and couldn’t escape the stench. Her gaze fixed on me with the kind of hatred that had been polished smooth by months of practice.
And in the back, Madden—dark hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight it might have been drawn with a ruler, posture as perfect as her grades, looking everywhere but directly at me, while somehow managing to watch my every move.
She was a year behind me in school—a senior now, with her sights set on some Ivy League future that would carry her far from this postage stamp of sand and spite. Someone I noticed, not because everyone knew she’d be valedictorian of her class, destined for bigger things than the rest of us even dreamed, but because something about those hazel eyes had always pulled at me. Not that I’d ever done anything about it. Someone like her would never have looked at the likes of me, even before the scandal.
She hadn’t even been at the bonfire that night with the rest of the student body, too buried in test prep or college applications or whatever other serious business occupied the minds of people who planned to escape this place through merit instead of luck. That whole prim, proper, overachieving, stick-up-her-ass vibe should have been everything I wasn’t interested in. But even I’d been able to see the way grief had carved hollows under her eyes in the weeks after Gwen disappeared, how she now moved around the island like someone walking underwater.
They slowed at the intersection, waiting for a cluster of men to cross—guys I’d worked beside last summer before all this started, before my name became a curse word that mothers whispered to keep their daughters close. One of them, Jimmy Kowalski, caught sight of the SUV and then let his gaze drift to me with deliberate slowness. “There he is.” He pitched his voice just loud enough to carry over the engine noise. “The one who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”
