“Libby!” Fiona snapped, and the sharpness of it cut through the fog like a blade across skin.
I blinked. The sail hung limp. The lines lay coiled at my feet. My palms ached where the wood had pressed into them. Too bright. Too sharp. Everything was wrong in a way I couldn’t name.
“Help me!”
I don’t remember moving. Fiona pulled the sail, and I pulled the sail and the fabric snapped taut, and the boat tilted hard to one side, and then found itself and surged forward, and none of it had anything to do with me.
The marina shrank behind us.
Smaller.
Smaller.
Until it disappeared entirely, swallowed by the gray line where the water met the sky, and there remained nothing but open water in every direction—endless and cold and indifferent to everything that had just happened.
Lily sobbed beside me, her whole body shaking.
“I didn’t mean to—” The words came out in broken, gasping fragments. “I didn’t—I just—”
I reached for her without thinking, pulling her into me, wrapping my arms around her so tight I could feel her ribs expanding with each ragged breath.
“It’s not your fault,” I whispered into her hair, even as I tried to believe it. “It’s not your fault—”
It was a simple thing. He chose her. Chose us. Over himself.
And I don’t know what to do with that except keep living, which is maybe the only thing left to do with it.
Fiona’s hands moved through the knots without hesitation, sure and automatic. She didn’t look at us. Her eyes fixed somewhere past the bow—not on the horizon exactly, but through it, at something on the other side that wasn’t there.
“We should hit the island by nightfall,” she said, her voice flat. Her hands finally stilled on the rope, the first time they’d stopped moving since we cast off. She stared at them for a long moment, as if they belonged to someone else. When I pulled her to me, all the rigidity went out of her at once, and she collapsed against my shoulder.
The wind kept at our backs. The waves lapped against the hull. Lily’s crying had softened into something worse—a low, hitching, exhausted sound that came from a place beyond tears, beyond anything my arms around her could reach.
My tears fell without a sound. I didn’t wipe them.
I pressed my face into Lily’s hair and held her tighter. Fiona cried on my other shoulder.
The wind pushed us forward.
Somewhere behind us—already gone, already part of a shore we could no longer see—
We left him.
We left him there.
Forty Four
Darkness Had Crept In -Libby
Darkness had crept in by the time the island came into view.
The sky had bled out to a washed-out gray-blue that swallowed color, flattening everything into the same dull, exhausted tone. Water, air, and horizon all blurred together until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. The boat cut through long, slow swells in a rhythm that should have been soothing, but instead, it filled the silence between us with a sound none of us wanted to hear. Because listening meant not talking, and not talking meant sitting with what had happened, and none of us could do that yet.
Fiona had done exactly what she said she would. Of course, she had. She stood at the helm, her hands firm on the tiller, her movements precise and mechanical, her eyes fixed on the water ahead with the same hollow focus she’d carried since the marina. She hadn’t spoken except to give instructions. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t sat down. As if stopping meant cracking, and crackingmeant collapsing, and collapsing meant admitting that the thing we’d left behind in that parking lot had actually happened.
I sat where she’d left me, my back pressed against the side of the boat, Lily’s weight warm and limp against my shoulder where she’d finally cried herself into something that resembled sleep but probably wasn’t. My hands lay open in my lap, palms up, and I stared at them without seeing them. My mind had gone somewhere unreachable—not thinking, not processing, just existing in a gray, muffled space where nothing could touch me because I wouldn’t let it.
The island rose out of the dark slowly—the treeline first, a jagged black edge separating water from sky, then the rocky shore taking shape beneath it, then the thin line of a small dock stretching out toward us like an arm extended in the dark.
