But if he did... surely, he’d tell me. There’d be no reason not to.
So why did he look so afraid to talk that night?
Why say,You’ll run away?
A strange quiet rolls over me. And I’m hit with the image of a beach where the tide is pulling back, back, back, leaving flopping fish and a million shells behind.
And dread drags at my legs, pulling me deeper into the sand.
I know what this is.
The first wave was Grandpa seeing. It wrecked my nerves. The second was Trent already knowing.
But this third wave . . .
The box falls and opens. Newspaper clippings spill out.
It’s coming back to take what’s left.
sea storm
A raging clash of wind and tide that tears at the edges of everything you thought was safe.
The air is thin on the hilltop. I can’t feel my hands.
But I can feel that pull.
The same current I felt the first time I met Trent, when he swept through the doors at the Empire theatre, bringing with him the taste of the ocean and the promise of a storm.
I tasted it again the moment I sat across from him, in his dead-starfish shirt. The same burnt-orange as the dead starfish I’d buried under a mound of wet sand.
Those blue tsunami-safe zones had seemed so far away.
Warning. Warning. Warning.
So many warnings. The storm was coming. It was brewing in the shivers shared between us. Then thickening in our furtive longing, and in our half-spoken secrets.
The print blurs.
Five articles. Neatly cut.
A photo of the wreckage.
I drop them into the box and slam the lid shut.
All along, I’ve felt this storm.
All along, I thought Trent-the-Flooder would be the wave to crush me.
An achy laugh scratches up my throat, and I look all the way down at the paddock. At that splash of orange shirt.
Those warnings. They were never meant for me. They were meant for him.
The truth folds over me.
I’m the one who caused the accident that took Ika away.
The wind lashes across my face. The sea in the sky collapses into one long purple cloud.
