1
WILLA
The island looked exactly the way it always had when she saw it from the water. Low and green and quietly beautiful, its tree line rising from the shoreline in that soft, uneven way that made it look like something painted rather than real. Sandy Shore Island sat about two miles offshore, small enough to feel private and large enough to hold the nature reserve that had been one of Sandpiper Shores’ best-kept local secrets for generations. The teenagers in the boat behind her were already leaning forward with the restless energy of people arriving somewhere they had been promised was worth the trip.
Willa stood at the bow of the small speedboat as Ace brought it in slow and steady toward the dock, her arms folded lightly against her chest, her eyes moving across the shoreline with the habit of someone who had spent her entire adult life reading spaces for risk before she let anyone into them. The dock was solid. The reserve rangers kept it well-maintained for the occasional supervised trip, and she and Ace had done the paperwork, the safety briefing, and the weather check before they had even loaded all the gear.
The weather check had come back clear.
Willa kept telling herself that.
The sky overhead was overcast in that heavy, layered way Florida did sometimes in the peak of summer, low cloud sitting thick over everything and pressing the humidity down until the air felt like something you had to push through rather than breathe. It wasn’t alarming. Not yet. Overcast days on the Nature Coast were common in summer, and the heat still sat in everything—in the boards of the dock and the wet smell of the shoreline and in the slow, warm stillness under the trees.
Willa had grown up reading the weather. She had spent her career in it, calling into conditions that made most people run in the opposite direction. She knew the difference between a sky that was merely sulking and a sky that was building toward something. This one was sulking, she told herself. Just sulking.
Still, something sat wrong in the air. Willa couldn’t name it cleanly.
The pressure felt different.
Not wrong enough to act on. Just different enough to notice.
She let it go for now and moved to help tie off as Ace brought the speedboat alongside the dock with the easy, practiced confidence of a man who had been flying and sailing and navigating his way around this coastline his whole life. Behind them, the dinghy they had brought as a second vessel knocked gently against the speedboat’s side, its line attached and trailing. Both boats in. Both secure. She checked the ties herself once they were off, testing the knots with two hard tugs before she was satisfied.
“The lines are good,” Ace said from beside her, not because he needed her confirmation, but because that was how they worked. It was how they had always worked, even before she’d let herself admit that working with Ace McKenna was one of the easiest things she did.
“They’re good,” Willa agreed, and turned toward the group on the dock behind them.
There were eight of them. Grace stood nearest to Willa with her pack already on her back, her hair pulled into a braid that Willa recognized as practical rather than decorative. Her oldest was almost seventeen, and sometimes Willa looked at her and saw Shaun so clearly that it took her breath away without warning. The dark eyes. The set of her shoulders when she was focused. Grace had always been the steadiest of the three. The one who noticed things and filed them away quietly, the one who remembered which trail they had taken and who had eaten what and whether the younger kids needed water before they said they did.
Andy stood a few feet farther back, his attention already on the tree line rather than the group, which was exactly what Willa expected from him. He was fifteen now and going through that particular stretch of teenage development where he was slightly too aware of his own height and not quite sure what to do with it. He had his father’s build beginning to come through in his shoulders, and it sometimes caught her off guard, that quiet, ordinary miracle of watching Shaun’s children grow into people. Andy noticed things the way a naturalist does, quietly cataloging and storing detail. He’d already spotted something in the brush that nobody else had seen, Willa could tell from the tilt of his head.
Katey Peltz stood with her arm bumping against Grace’s companionably in the way best friends did when they were used to being within arm’s reach of each other. Katey was Noah and Ginny’s daughter, Grace’s closest friend since before either of them could remember, and she had the particular gift of making hard things feel manageable by simply refusing to treat them as catastrophic. She was grinning at something Grace had just said, low enough that Willa hadn’t caught it, and the easy warmth of it made the dock feel lighter.
And then there was Tyler. Rad’s son stood near the pile of equipment with his pack already unloaded and sorted into separate stacks with a calm, methodical efficiency that made Willa’s chest hurt a little with fondness. He was fourteen, tall for it, and had that same contained quality his father had. That sense of someone who was paying more attention than they were advertising. He had taken it upon himself to organize the gear without being asked, which she suspected was less about helpfulness and more about the fact that standing still with nothing to do made him quietly uncomfortable.
The other three teenagers from town rounded out the group, two girls and a boy who had all passed the water safety and basic wilderness training that was a requirement for the trip, and who were currently looking at the island with the barely contained excitement of people who had been promised an adventure and were now being confronted with the reality of carrying their own bags.
“All right, campers, listen up,” Willa said, and the group turned toward her with the immediate attention she had learned over years of leading people in difficult conditions was not about authority. It was about trust. “We’ll need to take two trips withthe gear, and then we’ll set up before we do anything else. Grace, you and Tyler take the first load. Ace will show you where.”
Grace gave a nod and shouldered her pack without comment.
Tyler already had two bags in his hands.
Ace caught her eye briefly over the heads of the group, and there was something in the look that was not quite amusement or admiration, only the quiet acknowledgment of watching someone do what they were built to do. She looked away before it could become something else.
The camp setup took the better part of an hour and a half, and Willa found the rhythm of it settling some of the low, persistent unease she had been carrying since they had crossed onto the island. There was something grounding about physical work done alongside other people, the methodical business of staking tent pegs and unrolling groundsheets and stringing a tarpaulin between two trees as a communal shelter for gear and cooking. She had always felt that. Shaun used to tease her about it, the way she came home from the longest and most complicated shifts and went straight into the garden or the kitchen because she needed to do something with her hands before she could rest.
Willa didn’t let herself sit with that thought for long.
Ace was going through the supply packs at the communal tarp with Andy’s help, checking off items against a list on a waterproof card. He had the quiet, easy manner of someone who had always known how to exist alongside children without being condescending to them, which was one of those things about him she’d noticed so long ago it had stopped feeling like a discovery and started feeling like a fact. Ace was showing Andyhow to read the emergency pack, not explaining; they were just walking through it together as if it were a shared exercise.
“Water purification tablets, two sets,” Ace said. “Why two?”
“In case one gets wet and the packaging is compromised,” Andy replied, in the straightforward tone of someone who had absorbed the answer rather than guessed at it.
“There you go.” Ace tilted his head toward Andy without making a production of it.
Willa turned back to the fire setup she was working through with Grace, Katey, and the rest of the teenagers, pulling her attention where it needed to be.
