“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he said, jaw set. But I didn’t expect he’d tell me the truth, not after all this time. “I don’t know why she took my picture.” He pressed his lips together. “I know better than to get involved with a family like that.” He gave me a look, as if I should’ve understood this, too. “This is why I told the police nothing. Because just one thing—one private tour—and suddenly, I’m dragged into this whole mess.”

“This whole mess? She’s dead, Connor.” My voice broke midsentence.

He flinched. “I’m sorry, Avery.”

“She had your number.”

“She called me after. I didn’t pick up. I didn’t like . . . It was weird, okay? Why she was there, what she wanted with me. Why she took my picture. I couldn’t figure it out. At first I thought you had sent her, but . . .”

He had an answer for everything. Quick with an explanation—and yet. Sadie was out here in the week before her death. If Connor was telling the truth, what could she possibly have been looking for?

“Can you take me there?”

He narrowed his eyes, not understanding.

“To the island. Please. Will you take me there, too.”

* * *

OUTSIDE THE PROTECTION OF the harbor, the waves dipped, and the spray of the water coated my arms, the back of my neck, as he cut a path to the arc of land in the distance.

There was no way to avoid the past as we got nearer. Time snapping closer as the land mass grew larger. It was the place we’d come seven years earlier, just before the start of the summer season.

Connor had shown up at my grandmother’s house. “Come on,” he’d said. I hadn’t left the house in two days. I hadn’t slept, my hands were shaking, the house was a mess.

When we stepped off the dock onto his father’s boat, I asked, “Is Faith coming?”

“Nah,” he said, “just us.” And the way he smiled, keeping his eyes cast down, told me everything.

Before my grandmother died, it was where things were sliding. Connor and me. An inevitability that everyone could see coming but us. The knowing looks that we’d railed against our entire lives. As we grew older, a playful nudge with a shoulder or a hip, a wry joke and a fake laugh and a roll of the eyes. And then one day he blinked twice, and refocused, and it was like he was seeing something new. I saw something reflected in his eyes—of what else might be possible.

The touch of his hand became more deliberate. A play kiss in front of everyone late that last fall, when we were drinking down on Breaker Beach, while he bent me back, and his eyes sparkled in the bonfire as he laughed. And I’d said, That’s it? That’s everything? That’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years? And took off down the beach before he could catch me, my heart pounding.

When he said, hours later, You’ve been waiting?

So we’d come here with a cooler of beer and takeout from the deli and a blanket, wading out to the island together, gear held over our heads to keep dry. We never got to the food or the drinks because I knew exactly what this was, and there was too much in the lead-up. But I wasn’t capable of feeling anything then, just my own bitterness. A disappointment that, even then, he wanted something from me. How he couldn’t see that I was so far beneath the surface, he might as well have been anyone.

I was a tight ball of resentment when he came over two days later with a lopsided smile, thinking somehow that this fixed everything: not only me but us. Even worse was the new fear I’d only just uncovered, that maybe he liked me this way—watching me slide to the edge and unravel, so he could make me back into the person he desired. It was the beginning and also the end.

Connor anchored the boat offshore now, turning off the engine. Both of us looking at the mix of tree and rock and pebbled shore before us instead of at each other.

I pictured Sadie standing here, in her wide-brimmed hat, deciding to strip herself down and wade out to the island. The goose-bump prickle over her skin. The red-pink tone where the cold touched her flesh. The softness of her feet on the crude shore. The determination that had brought her to this moment.

I pulled my shirt over my head, and Connor narrowed his eyes.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

“The tide is up. You’ll have to swim,” he said.

But I continued undressing, and he looked away, opening the bench seat and pulling out one of the orange flotation devices. We’d stripped down to our underwear in front of each other a hundred times since we were kids, whenever we were out on the water. I’d never felt self-conscious about it until he looked away. Never used to think of myself in comparison to Sadie until I saw us both through Connor’s eyes.

I grabbed the orange flotation device hastily and jumped straight in, the shock of cold seizing everything up to my rib cage as my toes brushed the rocky shore.

“Okay?” Connor called from above. I must’ve let out a gasp.

I had to slow my breath, just to relax the muscles around my lungs. “Fine,” I said, using the flotation device as a kickboard, letting the current push me the rest of the way to shore.

* * *

IT HAD BEEN SEVEN years since I’d stepped foot on the island, though I could always see it in the distance on a clear day: a copse of dark trees. The terrain was rough in person. A rocky beach giving way to the hard-packed dirt and the green of the trees. The horseshoe shape created a small protected cove, so kayaks would often stop here to rest. But there were no other boats here now.

There was evidence of people who had been here, though—glass bottles half buried in the rocks that lined the dirt and roots. A log that had been dragged over and fashioned into a bench at the edge of the brush. There was an overgrown trail from back when the island had a dock.

I shivered as I walked the path that I imagined Sadie taking. My steps in her steps. The thorny roots, the sharp edges of rocks, the branches reaching for her legs.

I felt a prick on my shin, saw a bead of blood rolling toward my ankle, nicked from a loose vine. Connor said Sadie had been in her bathing suit. Would she have kept going, barefoot and bare-legged? Her unmarred skin, the fact that she couldn’t even stand walking barefoot on hot pavement—I couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine what would have driven her here in the first place.

She had a backpack, a camera—did she think there was something here worth finding? A secret worth holding? Did she see something she shouldn’t have while she was here?

The terrain was too unyielding. She wouldn’t have kept going, not if she didn’t have to—but Connor said she’d been gone a while. In her bathing suit, with a backpack.

I stopped walking. Or was it something she was bringing? Lots of hidden places, she’d told Connor. That’s what she was looking for.

A safe place to hide something of her own.

I traced my steps back to the clearing, spun around, my eyes catching on the makeshift bench once more.

The log had been partially hollowed out, and I dropped to my hands and knees beside it, peering inside. There was moss growing on the underside, insects and things I didn’t want to think too hard about. But I reached my hand into the dark and felt the slickness and rustle of plastic. I shuddered, imagining what might be inside.

It scraped against the base as I pulled it out. There was a layer of sludge and grime covering the surface, but it was a plastic freezer bag, airtight and watertight. Maybe someone’s trash but maybe not.

I wiped off the mud with my bare hands, opened the top, and saw a brown wooden box inside, like something that would hold a necklace. It remained dry. I dragged my hands against the edge of the log, trying to clean them. Then I opened the top of the box. Set in the midst of the maroon lining was a silver flash drive, cold to the touch.

The trees rustled in the wind, and I looked over my shoulder, feeling the chill rise up my neck.

Sadie had been here. I could feel her, in this same spot, opening her backpack, pulling out this bag. I could see her reaching an arm into the hollowed log, nose scrunched, eyes pinched shut, holding her breath.

Why, Sadie?

Why here? Why across the expanse of a sea, inside a log? What sort of fear could’ve driven her here—to this level of secrecy? Where the walls of her home were not enough? A place, I had once thought, with no locks, no secrets.

I wished I had something to hide this inside now. Pockets, clothes, a way to keep it for myself. But there was no way to swim back to the boat, no way to keep it hidden without Connor seeing. He’d told me the truth, at least—maybe not all of it, but enough to get me here. To her.

He wouldn’t have brought me here if he truly had something to hide, right?

* * *

CONNOR WAS WATCHING AS I waded out toward him, holding the freezer bag on top of the flotation device.

“What’s that?” he asked, reaching a hand down for me.