The fire makes the heat between us almost unbearable. But we fold ourselves together among the pages of books and the blankets scattered across the floor. The wind roars outside. His fingers trace the moons of my hip bones, my thighs, my shivering heartbeat. He kisses down my throat, the place where my secrets are kept. He kisses my collarbone, where the skin is thin and delicate, patterns of freckles like a sailor’s map. He kisses so softly it feels like wings or a whisper. He kisses and I slip, slip, slip beneath his touch. Crumbling. His lips inch beneath my shirt, along the curves of my body. Valleys and hills. Breathing promises he’ll keep against my skin. My clothes feel burdensome and heavy—clothes that belong to him, boxers and a T-shirt—so I peel them away.
My mind spins, my breathing catches then rises again. My skin crackles, set alight, and his touch feels infinite, fathomless, a wave that rolls ashore but never ends. He is gentle and sweet, and I never want his hands, his lips, to be anywhere else but against me. The morning sunlight is just starting to break above the horizon, soft pinks sifting through the windows, but I am breaking here on the floor, shattering into pieces as he whispers my name and I see only flecks of light shivering across my vision. And after, he holds his lips above mine, breathing the same air, my skin shimmering from the heat. Sweat dewing the curves of my body. He kisses my nose, my forehead, my earlobes.
I have doomed him, kept him here, made him the prey of Marguerite Swan. He is caught in the tempest of a season that could kill him. He needs to leave Sparrow, escape this wretched place. Yet I need him to stay. I need him.
JOHN TALBOT
On June fifth, a week before he vanished, John Talbot entered the Olive Street Tea & Bookhouse. He had special ordered four books a week earlier, titles he had researched online that contained real-life accounts of hexes and curses that had been documented in other unfortunate towns.
It was not unusual for locals in Sparrow to take an interest in the Swan sisters. They often collected newspaper clippings and old photographs of the town from when the sisters were still alive. They shared stories at the Silver Dollar Pub over too many beers, and then stumbled down to the docks and shouted into the night about their sons and brothers who they’ve lost. And sometimes they even became obsessed. Sorrow and desperation can make cracks along the mind.
But John Talbot never shared his theories. He never got drunk and lamented the tragedy of Sparrow over a pint. He never told anyone about the collection of books he kept stashed in Anchor Cottage. Not even his wife.
And on that bright, warm afternoon, as he left the bookstore, there was frenzy in his shadowed eyes, lines of worry carved along his forehead. His gaze darted side to side, as if the sunlight were unbearable, and he pushed through the horde of tourists back down to the skiff waiting at the dock.
Those who saw him that day would later say he had the look of someone overcome with sea madness. The island had been known to drive people insane. The salt air, the isolation. It had finally gotten to him.
John Talbot had lost his mind.
THIRTEEN
Two days slip by uncounted.
Bo’s fingers coil through my hair, he watches me sleep, and he keeps me warm when the wind tears through the cracks in the cottage windows in the early hours of morning. He slides himself beside me beneath the wool blanket and runs his fingertips down my arm. I’ve forgotten about everything else but this little room, this fireplace, this spot in my heart that aches to the point of bursting.
On the third day, we wake and walk down the rows of the newly revived orchard trees under a tepid afternoon sky; the leaves are beginning to unfurl and the flowers just starting to break open. This season’s apples and pears might still be stunted and hard and inedible. But by next year, hopefully our hard work will produce fat, sun-sweetened fruit.
“What were you like in school?” I ask, craning my head upward to soak up the sun. Little white spots dance across my closed eyelids.
“What do you mean?”
“Were you popular?”
He reaches out a hand and touches the craggy end of a branch, small green leaves sliding through his palm. “No.”
“But you had friends?”
“A few.” He glances at me, his jade-green eyes spearing a hole straight through my center.
“Did you play sports?” I’m trying to piece together the person he was, the person he is, and I find it hard to imagine him anywhere else but here in Sparrow, on this island with me.
He shakes his head, smiling a little, like he finds it funny that I would even ask this. “I worked for my parents every day after school, so I didn’t have much time for friends or group sports.”
“Your parents’ farm?”
“It’s actually a vineyard.”
I pause near the end of a row. “A vineyard?” I repeat. “Like grapes?”
“Yeah. It’s just a small family winery, but it does pretty well.” It’s not exactly the farm where I imagined him toiling: hands-in-the-earth, greasy, cow-manure type of farming. But I’m sure it was still hard work.
“It’s not what I pictured,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” I examine him, eyeing his faded gray sweatshirt and jeans. “Do your parents know where you are?”
“No. They didn’t want me to come here. They said I just needed to let Kyle go. That’s how they coped with his death, by ignoring it. But I knew I had to come. So when I graduated this year, I hitchhiked down the coast. I never told them I was leaving.”
“Have you talked to them since you left?”
He shakes his head, pushing his hands into his jean pockets.
“They’re probably worried about you,” I say.
“I can’t call them. I don’t know what I’d say.” He looks at me. “How do I explain what’s going on here? That Kyle didn’t kill himself but was drowned by one of three sisters who died two centuries ago?”
“Maybe you don’t tell them that,” I offer. “But you should probably let them know you’re okay . . . tell them something. Even a lie.”
“Yeah.” His voice dips low. “Maybe.”
We reach the end of the orchard, where one of the dead apple trees is now gone, torched down to its roots.
“When this is all over,” I say, “after the summer solstice, will you go home?”
“No.” He pauses to look back down the rows of perfectly spaced fruit trees. A small gray bird bursts out from the limbs of one tree and lands on the branch of another. “I won’t go back there. Not now. Before Kyle died, I always thought I’d stay and work for my parents after high school. Take over the family business. It was what they expected of me. My brother would be the one to move away and live a different life, to escape. And I was okay with that. But after he died . . .” He draws in his lips and looks up through the limbs of an apple tree, buds pushing out from the green stalks. “I knew I wanted something different. Something that was mine. I had always been the one who would stay behind while Kyle saw the world. But not anymore.”
“So now what do you want?” I ask, my voice soft, not wanting to crack apart his thoughts.
“I want to be out there.” He nods to the western edge of the island. “On the water.” He looks back at me like he’s not sure I’ll understand. “When my dad taught me to sail, I knew I loved it, but I didn’t think I’d ever have the chance to really do it. Maybe now I can. I could buy a sailboat, leave—maybe I won’t ever come back.”
“Sounds like an escape plan. Like you want to start a whole new life.”