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We curled up together in bed, exhausted from the pool party, the drive, the undoing and remaking of us, the weeks of living like someone was hiding under the bed. But sleep didn’t come right away. Instead we both lay in the dark, his hand in my hair, mine holding onto him like he was the only steady thing in the room.

“She’ll drag this out, won’t she?” I whispered. “She won’t tell us right away if they signed up. She’ll enjoy making us wait.”

Damian sighed against my temple, and it was the only answer I needed.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The four days after the party moved like syrup. The Mothers told us nothing. Damian carried his phone from room to room, waiting to hear if we’d bought our lives back, and the phone stayed silent. Vivienne, at least, was constitutionally incapable of a secret. By Tuesday she’d said my little coastal reset twice and asked me to source three different products to glamp-proof her hair, so I knew she was in. The rest was darkness, and every night on the drive home I willed the universe to make Octavia pick up the phone.

On the second night of the silence, my phone rang at two in the morning.

Priya. I was awake before the second ring, Damian stirring beside me. “Priya?”

“I’m outside.” Her voice was strange. Calm, but also confused. “I’m outside your building. I’m in my car.”

“What happened? Did Adrian—”

“I don’t remember driving. I think I was driving to the coast.”

I was already pulling on a sweater. Damian sat up, and I shook my head at him. He stayed put, though his jaw didn’t like it.

She was in the driver’s seat with the engine off and her hands in her lap, still in her pajamas, a coat buttoned wrong over them. Bare feet on the pedals. I got in the passenger side, and the dome light showed me her face. She looked forlorn.

“I woke up warm,” she said, “and thinking about the cove. The fire, the lights, the water on my legs. And it felt so good, Marlowe. It felt like I was missing home, except I was in my own bed.” She turned her hands over in her lap, studying them like a stranger’s. “And then I was in the car. I had my keys. I was going north. And the only reason I stopped is that the light at Fourth was red, and I looked at my own feet on the pedals, and I couldn’t remember any of the steps in between.”

The pull. Damian had warned me about all of it at that little table in the lookout: the dreams, the dread, the homesickness for a place you spent one night. That’s when the door’s open the widest. I’d been sleeping with a decoy of myself within arm’s reach for a month. Priya had salt baths and a promise. She was the open door.

“And then I realized what I’d done, and I came here instead. I didn’t want to go back to Adrian. He’s still asleep in my bed.”

“Priya,” I said. “Feet first.”

She looked at me the way she had at the basement window of that horrible house.

“Feel your feet. They’re on your own pedals, in your own car, on my ugly street. There’s no reason for you to go to that cove.”

She pressed her bare feet flat and her breath snagged, and I told her lower, smaller, and the second breath made it down. We sat there while the sensation went out of her like the tide. Slowly, she woke up from whatever had gripped her.

“It’s still there,” she whispered. “Just a little. But there. It’s like the fog from that cove is in my head.”

“Don’t listen to it.”

“Is this them? Because we haven’t signed up? Is this the Mothers, punishing—”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s some kind of sick hex, or the thing we’re going to kill that wants to drink us dry, trying to pull us back. I just know you need to ignore it.”

I took her inside. She stayed on my couch until sunrise, under a blanket, with a jar of salt on the floor beside her like the world’s saddest nightlight. At six she texted Adrian that she’d gone into work early, then borrowed some clothes from my closet, and drove to her office.

Wednesday at six, they arrived within ten minutes of each other. Priya came with a bottle of wine, her phone in her hand. Then Callie, clutching tortilla chips. Jess came ten minutes later with pastries that I couldn’t even look at, because my stomach had curled in on itself.

We arranged ourselves around my coffee table like a book club that had drifted badly off course. Jess was the only one who ate at first.

I’d spent the afternoon rehearsing how to say it. There was no good way, so I poured the wine and took a deep breath.

“We’re not doing it on the beach. They’ll have people watching the coastline for miles. We’re doing it in a sea cave, south of the cove, behind the headland.”

“A cave,” Callie said, a chip halfway to her mouth.

“It floods at high tide. We’ll have a window. A few hours. We go in early, we wait, we do the working, and we’re out before the water comes in.”