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True fear settled into my heart.
Fear borne from suddenly understanding that my parents weren’t magic. They could promise to keep us safe, but they couldn’t actually make that promise come true.
They were as helpless as me, and that knowledge—that awful, awful knowledge—made me clutch at my baby sister. “It’s okay, Mel. Close your eyes. It will all be over soon.”
My mother let out a tattered cry; her dark eyes locked over my shoulder.
She shook her head, her hair plastered to her shoulders, her mouth working in a frantic prayer.
Pure terror sliced through me.
I turned to look, but she threw herself over us, planting salt-stinging kisses on our cheeks. “Seni çok seviyorum. I love you so much. Seni seviyorum. Love you—”
“Jale, stop that. You’re scaring them,” my father yelled. “The boat will last—”
The boat made a sickening noise.
Not a groan this time but a crack and a tear and a gush of water sprouted from the ocean-hammered sides.
A rush of nausea and a buffet of vertigo as the ocean surged beneath us, sending us high again, soaring again, dragged up the face of a giant wave as winds whipped and rain fell and sea foam blew agony into our eyes.
“Hold on!” my father yelled.
“Baba, help—” my sister screeched.
“I love y—”
And that was the last time I ever heard my family.
The wave crested.
It broke.
Onto us.
Into us.
Killing us.
The boat smashed into smithereens.
Splinters danced into the sky as a wall of water ripped me from my parents’ hold and flung me into the sea.
The icy embrace of the churning depths suffocated what air I had left.
I plummeted from the warmth of my family with such suddenness, it tore open my heart with grief.
I tried to scream.
Salt water poured down my throat.
I tried to swim.
Waves pushed me deeper.
I tried to survive.
Something heavy crashed against my—
