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He groaned but couldn’t stop smiling as he turned off the porch light after Amy’s car pulled away.

For the first time since Amy’s massage, he felt the stress in his chest ease.

The drive home was quieter than usual. Instead of singing along to her favorites, her mind was lost in thought. Keeping one hand loose on the steering wheel, the other rested lightly on her lips where she could still feel the ghost of that soft kiss against Sully’s cheek. It replayed in her mind more than she wanted to admit—not because of what it meant, exactly, but because of how it made her feel.

Light. Steady. Seen.

She smiled to herself, turning onto the road that cut through the thick fringe of trees toward the mansion grounds. Her headlights caught a swirl of leaves spinning across the gravel, like the night itself couldn’t decide which way to move.

With Sully, things had been shifting. It wasn’t just their shared desire for the renovations to be successful. Pieces of him had revealed themselves over the past few weeks that spoke to the man beneath the gruff exterior. He was kind and caring, not only for what he had done for her, but in the way treated others. Watching him tonight—with sparkles in his hair, no less—had stripped away who she’d thought Sully was, revealing someone she wanted to know more deeply.

And she hadn’t exactly been surprised. They’d shared a certain passion in arguing about construction approaches, historical preservation, and the cost of it all. They were good at arguing. Through it all, along with the hours they’d spent together over the past several months, they’d learned about each other. And it hadn’t slipped past her he was an attractive man—rough and tumble as he was.

Amy exhaled, glancing out the window as the mansion came into view. The lights from the main house glowed faintly beyond the trees, golden enough to look inviting from a distance. The old structure sat like a shadow against the rising fog off the nearby sea—massive, half restored, half remembered.

She slowed near the curve where the service road split off toward the cottages. A scatter of faint blue lights flickered near the mansion’s terrace—flashlights, equipment cases, and a tripod glinting silver under the beam of a flood lamp.

The ghost-hunting crew.

Mason’s people were back, setting up for their research and filming. Likely excited to be granted run of the place for the weekend.

As she coasted past, she could make out their silhouettes: someone hauling cables, another kneeling near a sensor that blinked rhythmically in the dark. The warmth she had carried home from Sully’s house thinned by degrees.

Her fingers tightened on the wheel.

She tried to ignore the chill that rippled through her. It was the same low pull she’d felt before, when the dreams had started. When she’d wandered outside, with the gravel damp beneath her bare feet and the house calling her from sleep.

That pull was stronger tonight.

The rational part of her dismissed it as stress, overwork, the tangle of the old island stories, the medium, and Mason’s team’s recordings and excitement—whispered suggestions leaking into her subconscious. But the other part of her, the part that had begun to dread the twilight hours, knew better.

She’d been drawn to the mansion long before any of this had transpired, since she’d first laid eyes on it while looking into renting the cottage. It had started quietly, like gravity. Lately, though, it had transformed into something dark. It wanted something from her. But not her, exactly.

She felt there was something she was supposed to remember.

Amy turned into the gravel drive leading toward her cottage. She didn’t breathe until she pulled up beside the small house and killed the engine.

In the sudden hush, the night leaned in. Amy sat there for a moment longer, listening to her own heartbeat.

As an act of self-preservation, her thoughts returned to Sully—the way he had squeezed her hand as she’d left, and how grounding it had felt. Like a period at the end of a sentence, after agreeing to a date with him.

A date! She laughed out loud.

Her laughter echoed in the stillness, light and real. But somewhere beyond the trees, her laughter faded, swallowed by the quiet night.

Chapter 21

Friday night refused to yield to sleep.

Amy lay tangled in the sheets, her hair damp against her neck, the window cracked to the soft hush of surf beyond the pines. Every time she drifted, something beneath the quiet pulled her awake again. The sound of waves echoed wrongly, as if they rolled beneath the floorboards instead of against the rocks far below.

She sat up, brushed her hair back, and let her eyes adjust to the pale spill of moonlight on the wall. Ollie lifted his head from where he’d curled at the foot of the bed, ears twitching.

“It’s all right,” she whispered, though she had more hope than conviction.

The overall pulse she felt was louder tonight, ink-dark and insistent. It pushed away the old familiar ambiance of home, of belonging.

She closed the window to shut out the sea’s damp breath, but the pull only coiled tighter inside her ribs.