I bite down on the rage building in my chest. “If he hadn’t, they would have believed he was one of us, helping us. They would have killed him.”
“And yet he died anyway.” One of her eyebrows arches upward.
I can’t stand here anymore, listening to Marguerite. She’s never known real love. Even her infatuations with men when we were alive were all about her: the attention, the pursuit, the satisfaction of winning something that wasn’t hers to start with. “Owen tried to save me that day, and he lost his life. He loved me,” I tell her. “And Bo loves me now. But you wouldn’t know what that’s like because you’re incapable of love.”
I turn away from her and start up the sidewalk.
“Did you hear?” she calls after me. “Our dear sister Aurora has been sprung from her jail in the boathouse. It seems someone decided she was innocent after all.”
I look back at her over my shoulder. “She’s not innocent,” I say. Marguerite squirms inside Olivia’s body. “None of us are.”
***
The dock is slick from the rain. Waves push into the marina at steady intervals, a ballet choreographed by the wind and tide. I climb into the skiff and start the motor. A few persistent rays of sun break through the dark clouds, spilling light over the bow of the boat.
Tonight, the summer solstice party will happen on Coppers Beach, marking the end of Swan season. But I won’t be there. I’m staying on the island with Bo. I’m staying in this body—whatever it takes, no matter how painful, I’m going to fight it.
Yet I have the acute, anxious feeling that something bad is stirring out on those waters, in that approaching storm, and none of us will be the same after tonight.
SHIP
TheLady Astor, a 290-ton merchant ship owned by the Pacific Fur Company, left New York City in November of 1821 for its five-month passage around Cape Horn and up the west coast to Sparrow, Oregon.
It carried mostly supplies and grain to be delivered to the rugged western coastline, but it also carried two dozen passengers—those brave enough to venture west to the wilds of Oregon, where much of the land was undeveloped and dangerous. Aboard the ship were three sisters: Marguerite, Aurora, and Hazel.
Four months into the voyage, they had encountered mostly storms, dark seas, and sleepless nights when the ship rocked so violently that nearly everyone aboard, including the crew, was ill with seasickness. But the sisters did not clutch their stomachs and heave over the side of the boat; they did not press their palms to their eyes and beg the ocean to cease its churning. They’d brought herbs to sooth their swirling stomachs and balms to rub into their temples. And each evening they walked the deck even in the rain and wind to stare out across the Pacific, yearning for the land that would eventually rise up on the horizon.
“Only a month remains,” Aurora said on one of those nights as the three sisters stood at the bow of the ship, leaning against the railing, the stars spinning bright above them in a clear, boundless sky. “Do you think it will be how we’ve imagined?” she asked.
“I don’t think it matters what it’s like, because it will be ours,” Hazel mused. “A new town and a new life.”
They had always craved to leave the hurried panic of New York City, to leave behind the reminder of their callous mother, to start anew in a land so far away, it could have been the moon. The west, a place said to be uncivilized and brutal. But that’s exactly what they wanted: a territory so unfamiliar that their hearts raced and their minds whirled with fear and excitement.
“We can be anyone we want,” Marguerite said, her wild, dark hair unspooling from its pins and cascading out behind her.
Aurora smiled, feeling the salt wind on her cheeks, and closed her eyes. Hazel stuck out her tongue to taste the sea, imagining a perfume that smelled just like the open ocean—crisp and clean.
“And no matter what,” Marguerite added, “we’ll be together. The three of us, always.”
The sisters leaned into the railing, urging the ship forward as it pushed on into the night, through gales and strong currents and unfavorable winds, the moon chasing them. They saw something out in that vast sea, in the dark as the ship speared across the Pacific: the promise of something better.
They didn’t know their fate.
But perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered even if they had. They would have come anyway. They needed to see it, to step onto soil that was rich and dark and all theirs. They had been unmoored since birth, brave and fearless and wild just like that boundless unknown land.
They wouldn’t have changed course even if they’d known what was awaiting them. They had to come. It was where they belonged—in Sparrow.
NINETEEN
Puddles have collected in the overly saturated soil, and my feet slap against the bent and warped wood boards of the walkway. I hurry up to the main house and fumble out of my boots.
I feel rattled after seeing Marguerite, after returning from the graveyard, knowing what I’m about to do. I need to settle my nerves before I go back to Bo’s cottage.
I pace across the kitchen floor in my bare feet, weaving my hands into knots. My head pounds, crackling like Penny’s body is trying to rid itself of me already. Trying to reclaim control. And there’s another sensation building inside me: like a string being pulled from the very center of my chest. It’s starting already, the gnawing beneath my fingernails, the desire weaving up my spine—the sea is calling to me. It wants me back. It beckons me; it begs.
But I’m not going back, not tonight, not ever.
The phone rings from the wall, clattering the bones down every limb of my body.
