She adjusted our approach, guiding the boat in with small, confident corrections. The hull slowed, the sail luffing as the wind shifted, and the island grew larger and more real with every second until I could make out individual trees, individual rocks, the grain of the dock planks in the last gray light.
And then I saw it.
Another boat. Tied off at the far end of the dock. Not a derelict, not something washed in by current and neglect—the lines secured properly, the hull sitting even in the water, a tarp pulled tight over the bow. Used. Recently. By someone who intended to come back to it.
My stomach dropped so hard it pulled the numbness right out of me.
“Fiona,” I said, and my voice came back sharp, cutting through the fog in my head like glass breaking on tile.
She’d already seen it. I could tell by the tightening of her hands on the tiller, the half-inch rise of her shoulders, and the familiar way her chin lifted as she shifted from existinginto assessing. Not fear—not exactly—but something coiled and cautious that lived in the same neighborhood.
Finn had said this place stood isolated, safe. His family’s. Alone. No neighbors, no through-traffic, no reason for anyone to come here unless they knew it existed.
And now someone else’s boat sat tied to the dock like it belonged.
“Stay back,” Fiona said, her voice low and controlled again, though I could see the tension running through her shoulders like current through a wire.
Lily stirred against me, blinking awake with the disoriented, swollen-eyed confusion of someone who’d surfaced from grief-sleep into a world that still hadn’t improved. She looked at the island, then at me, then at the boat tied to the dock, and I watched understanding arrive on her face—the way her brow creased, her mouth opened slightly, and her hand drifted back down to the carrier and rested there.
We stood on the deck in that awful in-between—too close to turn back, too exposed to stay on the water, too uncertain to move forward. The silence stretched tight enough to hum.
My heart kicked back to life in my chest, hammering so hard I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.
“What if—” Lily started.
“I don’t know,” I said. Because I didn’t. None of us did.
Then—movement on the shore.
A shape broke from the treeline, small and fast, scrambling down the rocky slope toward the dock with the kind of reckless, sure-footed speed that only belonged to someone who’d run that path a hundred times before. A kid. About Lily’s age, maybe a little older, all lanky limbs and wild hair, skidding to a stop at the end of the dock so abruptly that gravel sprayed out from under his shoes.
He stared at us. We stared at him. For three full seconds nobody moved, nobody breathed. The only sound was the water lapping against the hull and the distant rustle of wind through the trees.
Then his face changed to fear.
Not at us.
Past us.
“CALLAN!”
The name hit the air like a shockwave, rolling across the water and slamming into me so hard my knees nearly buckled.
I turned so fast that the deck tilted under my feet. “Callan?” The word came out as barely more than breath, barely more than air shaped around a hope I didn’t dare hold yet.
Fiona went still beside me, her hands frozen on the tiller, her body rigid, her face caught in that terrible, suspended moment between hearing something and allowing herself to believe it. I watched the steel she’d built around herself over the last six hours—the control, the precision, the locked-room composure that had kept us alive and moving—shudder visibly, like a wall taking its first hit.
Then it cracked.
Relief flooded her face so fast and completely that she was barely recognizable. Her eyes went wide, her mouth opened, and her chest heaved with a single, sharp inhale that sounded like someone breaking the surface after being held underwater for too long.
“Our brother,” she breathed, and her voice broke clean in half on the last word, the two pieces falling away from each other with a sound that carried everything she hadn’t allowed herself to express since the marina—the grief, the terror, the guilt, and the impossible, crushing weight of keeping two people alive while losing a third.
Lily grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and a sound came out of her that lived somewhere between a sob and a laugh, raw and confused and so full of desperate, fragile need that it made my chest ache. It had nothing to do with Finn and everything to do with the fact that this girl—this kid who’d lost too much in too few hours—still had enough left inside her to hope.
Because if Callan stood on that island—alive, breathing, real—then maybe the world hadn’t taken everything yet. Maybe the math of loss had a limit. Maybe we’d paid enough.
The boat hadn’t even settled fully against the dock before more movement came from the treeline.
