I pick it up without even registering the motion.
“They’re coming!” Rose barks from the other end.
“Who?” My mind careens back into focus.
“Everyone—they’re all coming to the island.” Her voice is panicked, on the edge of breaking. “Olivia and Davis and Lon and everyone who got the text.”
“What text?”
“Olivia said the summer solstice party is happening on the island this year. She texted everyone.” Rose is flustered, and herS?’s slur intoTh’s. An old habit sneaking back in.
“Shit.” My eyes dart around the kitchen, settling on nothing.Why would Olivia do this?What does she have to gain by bringing everyone to the island... and risking Gigi being found?
“We can’t let them find Gigi,” Rose says, echoing my thoughts.
“I know.”
“I’m coming to the island right now. Heath will bring me.”
“Okay.” And she hangs up the phone.
I hold the receiver in my hand, squeezing it until my knuckles turn white.
***
I hear the back door bang shut, and I nearly drop the phone. There’s the sound of feet shuffling slowly across the hardwood floor, and then Mom appears on the other side of the kitchen doorway, her robe hanging loose over her silt-gray pajamas, the belt dragging across the floor behind her. “People are coming,” she says, her right thumb and index finger tapping together at her side. “They’re all coming.”
“Yeah, they are,” I agree.
“I’m going up to my room until it’s over.” She won’t look at me.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her... for more than I can explain.
Memories of my real mother—Fiona Swan—shiver through me. A quick burst of images. She was beautiful but vicious. Captivating and cunning and deceitful. She flitted through New York City in the early 1800s with an infectious attraction that men could not resist. She used them for money and status and power. My sisters and I were born to three different fathers who we never knew. And when I was only nine, she abandoned us for a man who promised to whisk her off to Paris—the city she had always envisioned would be her home someday. Where she would be adored. I don’t know what happened to her after that: if she did cross the Atlantic to France, when she died, or if she had other children. My sisters and I have lived long enough to forget about her almost entirely. And I close my eyes briefly to squeeze back the memories of her.
Penny’s mom pauses in the doorway, her fingers trembling where her left hand is holding tightly to the collar of her robe. Her voice comes out shaky but exact, a pinprick of words that have resided in her chest for too long. “I know you’re not my Penny.”
My eyes snap to hers, my heart drops down into my kneecaps. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve known all along.”
I start to clear my throat but can’t; my entire body has dried up and petrified. “I...,” I begin, but nothing else comes out.
“She’s my daughter,” she adds, her voice settling into a cool pace that wavers against the threat of tears. “I knew the moment she became something else... when she became you.”
She’s known the whole time.I find myself struggling for air.
But of course she’s known. This is her talent—her gift. She’s always sensed when people are on the island—strangers who’ve come unannounced—so she must have sensed whenIarrived. Yet she’s allowed me to pretend to be her daughter, to live on this island with her, knowing that at the end of this month, upon the summer solstice, I would leave.
“She’s all I have left.” Her blue-green eyes lift, penetrating mine, more lucid than I’ve ever seen them before, like she’s just woken from a thousand-year dream. “Please don’t take her from me.”
She must sense that I have no intention of leaving. That I plan to steal this body permanently and make it my own. I’m not going back into the sea. “I can’t promise that,” I answer truthfully, a cloud of guilt growing inside me. She has been the closest thing to a real mom I’ve ever had—even with her madness. And maybe it’s foolish to feel this way, desperate even, but I’ve allowed myself to think that this is my home, my bedroom up those stairs, my life. And that she could be my mom.
I recognize in her a part of myself: the sadness that darkens her eyes, the heartbreak that has unraveled the loose threads woven inside her mind. I could be her. I could slip into madness and let it overtake me just like she has. Turn into a shadow.
She and I are the same. We’ve both lost people we love. Both crushed by this town. Both know that the ocean takes more than it gives.
I wish I could undo her misery, the pain skittering behind her eyes. But I can’t.
