The waves stretch before me, rolling in slow and steady, their rhythm a whisper against the shore. The sand is cool beneath my bare feet, the air thick with salt and the warmth of the mid-morning sun. The others are back at the mansion, probably fawning over the new doctor who arrived.
She seems nice enough.
But I’ve learned never to take anyone at face value.
When I found the documents showing I’d been adopted by my parents and that my birth mother was a woman named Lisa Patterson, I was devasted, of course.
But the more I’ve allowed myself to consider it…the more it makes an eerie kind of sense.
I kick at the wet sand.
Maybe it explains why my mother never really looked at me—why she treated me like another investment instead of flesh and blood.
Money was her love language, her way of showing affection—or rather, not showing affection. When I fell offmy bike and scraped my knee, she bought me a designer party dress. When I was sick, she sent a nurse and a brand-new dollhouse. And when I was drowning—truly drowning—she turned away and let my father do as he pleased.
The tide rushes up and curls around my ankles. I stare out at the horizon, where sky meets water, where the world feels endless. My father used to tell me drowning wasn’t real. That it was all in the mind.
“Your body wants to survive,” he would say, pushing me beneath the surface. “It’s weak. It panics. But if you control it, you won’t drown.”
I was a young child the first time he tested me, pressing his hands down on my shoulders, his grip unyielding. I fought, of course. At first. Clawed at his wrists. Kicked against his legs. But the water swallowed me whole, and soon, the only thing left was silence.
I used to think he would let me die. But that was never the point. The point was breaking me. Teaching me that suffering is survival.
I wrap my arms around myself as the breeze pulls at the hem of my sundress.
My father was wrong, though. I didn’t drown.
I lived.
I became something colder, sharper. I learned to survive in ways he never expected. And now I stand here, on this island, the weight of my past pressing against my ribs like a corset. Adopted or not, nothing changes the truth of what I endured. Nothing erases the ghosts of his hands or the echoes of her indifference.
But here, in this moment, the waves can’t touch me. The past can’t reach me.
And for the first time in a long while, I don’t feel like I’m drowning.
I have a birth mother. A brother.
All tangled up in the four men on this island.
I thought River would be the answer. He’s the handsomest of all of them—at least in my mind—and he still lives in the town where they all grew up.
The town where my mother lived.
And my brother.
The brother I’ll never know.
But I need to know.
I need to fill in the gaps.
And I will.
I’m no longer that helpless little girl pushed beneath the water by an unfeeling man who was supposed to protect me. I’m not that wounded child, ignored and overlooked by a woman whose love should have been a given.
No, not anymore.
I sigh and kick at the sand. Brett said I look a lot like him. Like Jake. My brother.
