This I can’t make right. There’s nothing that can change it. It’s unforgivable.
“I know.”
Another wave slams into us, and I grab on to Bo instinctively then let him go just as quickly. “Why did you do it?” he asks. I’m not sure if he’s asking about his brother or asking why I lied about who I am. Probably both.
And the answers are tied up in each other. “This town took everything from me,” I say, blinking away the water on my lashes. “My life. The person I once loved. I was angry... no, I was more than angry, and I wanted them to pay for what they did to me. I took your brother into the harbor like I’ve taken so many boys over the years. I was numb. I didn’t care whose life I stole. Or how many people suffered.”
I grip the wood helm beside the steering wheel to keep from being thrown sideways by another wave. This storm is going to kill us both. But I keep talking—this might be the last chance I get to make Bo understand. “This summer, when I took Penny’s body for the third time, I awoke in her bed just like the last two years, but this time a new memory rested in her mind: a memory of you from the night before. She was already falling for you. She saw something that made her trust you. But I was in her body now. And you were on the island—the boy she brought across the harbor and let stay in the cottage. And for some reason I trusted you too. It was the first time I’ve trusted anyone in two hundred years.” I brush away a stream of tears with the back of my hand. “I could have killed you. I could have drowned you that first day. But for some reason I wanted to protect you. Keep you safe. I wanted to feel something again for someone—for you. I needed to know that my heart wasn’t completely dead, that a part of me was still human... could still fall in love.”
Rain and seawater spill over the hard features of his face. He’s listening, even if he doesn’t want to.
“No one should exist for as long as I have,” I say. “Only getting small glimpses of a real life each summer, tormented by dark waking dreams the rest of the time. I’ve spent most of my two hundred years down there, at the bottom of the sea, a spook... an apparition moving with the tide, waiting to breathe air again. I can’t go back there.”
Not alive—not dead. A phantom trapped as the months tick by, every hour, every second.
“So you’d keep this body forever?” he asks, squinting into the storm as we near the end of the cape and chug out into open water.
“I’m not sure what I want now.”
“But you stole it,” he answers sharply. “It’s not yours.”
“I know.” There is no justification for wanting to keep this body. It’s selfish, and it’s murder. I would be killing the real Penny Talbot, tamping her down as if she never existed at all. I wanted to believe I was a different person because of Bo, because I haven’t killed this summer. But I’m no different from who I’ve been for the last two hundred years. I want something I can’t have. I am a thief of souls and bodies. But when will I stop? When will my torment on this town be enough? My revenge satiated?
Penny deserves a full life—doesn’t she? The life I never got to have. And in a burst of realization, I know: I can’t take it from her.
All my thoughts surface at once. A deluge of memories.
They snap like little firecrackers in my mind. Explosions along every nerve ending. I can fix this. Remedy the injustices. Give Bo what he wants.
“I’ve only been on this sailboat once before,” I tell him. He frowns at me, not sure what I’m talking about. “The first summer that I took Penny’s body, her father was suspicious of me. He figured out what I was. I think that’s why he collected all those books in your cottage: He was trying to find a way to get rid of me without killing his daughter—the same thing you were searching for. Except he found a way.” Bo turns the boat south down the coastline, and the wind shifts direction too, hitting us from the starboard side. “That summer,” I continue, “he left the house one night after dinner and walked down to the dock. I followed him. He said he was taking the sailboat out and asked if I wanted to go along. Something didn’t seem right. He seemed off—anxious—but I went because that’s what Penny would have done. And I was pretending to be her for the first time. We didn’t get very far out, just past the cape, when he told me the truth. He said that he knew what I was—a Swan sister—and that he was giving me a choice. He had found a way to kill me without destroying the body I inhabited—Penny’s body. He had discovered it in one of his books. But it involved sacrifice. I draw in a shallow breath, locating the words lodged at the base of my throat. If I jumped into the sea,” I say, trying to steady my voice, “and drowned again, like I did two hundred years ago, I would die, but Penny would not. I had to repeat my death. And he believed it would also kill my sisters, effectively breaking our curse. We would never return to the town of Sparrow again.”
Bo tilts his head to look at me, his hands white-knuckled and braced around the steering wheel, fighting to keep us from being blown to shore or capsized completely. “But you didn’t do it?”
I shake my head.
And then he asks what I knew was coming. “What happened to Penny’s father?”
“I thought he was going to push me overboard, force me to do it. He came toward me, so I grabbed the mooring hook and I... I struck him with it. He wobbled for a minute. Off balance as the boat rolled with each wave.” I choke back the memory. I still wish I could go back and undo what happened that night. Because Penny lost her father, and her mom lost her husband. “He went over the side. And he never came back up to the surface again.” I look out at the sea, midnight blue, churning and pockmarked with rain, and I picture him sucking in water, drowning just like I did so many years ago. “There was a book sitting on the deck of the boat, the one where he had read how to break our curse, so I threw it overboard. I didn’t want anyone else finding out how to kill us.” I had watched it sink into the dark, having no idea that there was an entire cottage filled with books he had collected. “The boat had slowly been drifting toward shore,” I explain. “The sails were down, thankfully, and the motor still running. So I steered it away from the rocks and somehow made it back to the island. I tied it to the dock and crept back up to the house. And there it has sat, until now.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Bo asks.
“Because I know what I need to do now. I should have done it that night. I should have changed the course of everything. Then your brother would still be alive, and you never would have come here. I was selfish then, and a coward. But I’m not anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” He releases one hand from the steering wheel.
“I’m going to give you what you want—your revenge.”
I turn away from him and walk to the starboard side of the sailboat, facing out to sea. My grave—the place where I belong. Lives have been lost. Deaths counted. It started with my sisters and me when we were drowned in the harbor all those years ago, but we have caused more suffering than can ever be measured.
“What are you doing?” Bo’s voice is still hard, but I sense a hint of uncertainty in it.
“I wanted to stay in this body and live this life... with you. But now I know that I can’t... for so many reasons. You will never be able to love me knowing what I’ve done, who I am. I’m sorry for your brother. I wish I could take it back. I wish I could take back most of the things I’ve done. But at least now I can end it. Make right this wrong.” I close my eyes briefly, drawing gulps of air into my lungs.
“Penny,” he says, a name that isn’t mine. He steps away from the wheel, the motor still rumbling, the sailboat crashing through the waves without a captain to pilot it. He doesn’t touch me. But he stands in front of me, rocking side to side with the heaving sailboat. “Hazel,” he tries instead, but there is still the burning of anger in his voice. “You ruined my life; you took my brother from me. And then I fell in love with you—I fell in love with the person who killed him. How am I supposed to deal with that? What do you want me to say? That I forgive you? Because I can’t.” His eyes waver away from me.He can’t forgive.He never will. I can see the struggle in him. He feels like he should try to stop me, but a part of him, a bitter, vengeful part of him, also wants me dead.
“I know you can’t forgive me,” I say. “I know I hurt you—I ruined everything. I wish it were different. I wishIwere different. But...” I choke down on the words I need to say. “But I did love you. That was real; everything between us was real. I love you still.”
I hope to see a glimmer of something in his eyes, recognition that a part of him still loves me too. But he can’t see through what he now knows I am. I am only the girl who drowned his brother—that’s all.
