Three figures this time, emerging from the shadows between the pines in quick succession—drawn by the boy’s shouting, by the sound of the hull scraping against the dock pilings, by the impossible sight of a sailboat drifting in from a world that had stopped making sense weeks ago.
The first man stepped into view—tall, broad-shouldered, older, with silver threading through dark hair and a weathered steadiness in the way he moved that reminded me of someone who’d spent a lifetime solving problems with his hands. He carried himself as if gravity pulled harder on him than on everyone else, and he’d simply learned to walk under the weight of it.
Behind him—
My breath caught so hard it hurt.
The second man stood, bigger, taller, built as if carved from the same mold as Finn. He had the same stance, the same wide shoulders carrying tension like an immutable burden, and the same way of holding his head—slightly forward, slightly tilted, scanning everything before committing to a single step. For one split, delirious second, my brain refused to process what my eyes already knew: it couldn’t be him. The proportions differedslightly; the jaw sat squarer, the hair grew darker, and the gait carried a heaviness Finn had never possessed. In that fraction of a heartbeat, before reality caught up, something inside my chest detonated with a hope so sharp and cruel that when it collapsed, grief rushed back in twice as strong.
Not him.
But close enough to shatter me all over again.
Tears burned instantly, blurring the dock, the figures, the treeline—everything dissolving into smears of color and shadow as I pressed my hand over my mouth to stifle any sound.
“Oh God,” I whispered through my fingers.
Trailing behind them came a woman—small, compact, with red hair pulled back in a knot. Her stride was quick and purposeful as she worked to keep pace with the two men ahead. Her eyes found us immediately.
Fiona didn’t wait.
She jumped from the boat the second the hull kissed the dock, her boots hitting the planks hard, and she ran. Not the controlled, measured movement I’d watched her maintain for the last six hours—this was loose, unraveled, desperate, her arms pumping and her composure falling away.
“Callan!” she cried, the name broken, raw, and so full of relief it barely sounded like language.
Both men met her halfway down the dock, neither slowing. The bigger one reached her first, pulling her into his chest so hard that her feet left the ground. The older man wrapped around them both a second later, his arms long enough to hold them together, his face pressing into the top of Fiona’s head as all three stood locked in something too fierce and desperate to call a simple embrace. She laughed—actually laughed—a sound I hadn’t heard from her once in the weeks I’d known her, bright, cracked, and soaked through with tears, her voice breaking apart and reassembling between gasps as they held her.
“You’re alive—” the bigger one said, his voice so thick the words barely made it out. “We thought—Jesus Christ, we thought—”
“I’m okay,” she said, the words tumbling over each other, crashing together in a pile. “I’m okay, I made it, I’m here—”
They talked over each other, voices overlapping, interrupting, and circling back. Relief poured out in a rush too fast and too tangled for me to follow from where I stood on the boat’s deck. It sounded like a dam breaking, like pressure that had been building for weeks finally finding a crack wide enough to escape.
And it made the hollow space in my chest yawn wider.
Because he should have been here. He should have been standing on this dock, walking into this reunion, hearing his name called by the people who loved him. This island belonged to him. This plan had come from his mind. Every mile we’d traveled, every obstacle we’d survived, every decision that had kept us alive and moving—all of it traced back to him. He should have been here to see it through, and he wasn’t. His absence at this moment of reunion carved a hole in the air so obvious that I could almost see the shape of where he should have stood.
The bigger one pulled back just enough to look at Fiona properly, his hands gripping her shoulders, his eyes moving over her face with the desperate thoroughness of someone checking for damage. Then his gaze shifted: past her, down the dock, to us.
To me, standing on the boat’s deck with my hand on Lily’s shoulder.
To the empty space behind us where no one else waited to step off.
“Who are they?” he asked, his voice dropping, caution edging in around the relief.
Then, quieter—the way you ask something when you already suspect the answer will ruin you—
“Where’s Finn?”
The name landed between us like a blade driven into the dock planks, and everything inside me twisted so violently I nearly doubled over.
Fiona went still. Just for a second—a single, visible hitch in her breathing, a tightening across her shoulders that pulled them up toward her ears before she forced them back down. I watched her mouth open and close. I watched her search for words and come up empty. Then her hand lifted, and she pointed down the dock.
At me.
My stomach dropped through the floor of the boat and kept going.
No, I didn’t want to be the one. I didn’t want to carry these words across this dock and put them into the air where they’d become real, permanent, and impossible to take back. I didn’t want to stand in front of this man who shared Finn’s blood and tell him what I’d watched happen in that parking lot.
