I opened my eyes and focused through the dark, speckled with bits of shell and sand and green. A haze dividing us. But he was there—Owen.
He grabbed hold of my arms and began tugging me upward toward the surface, fighting the cold and the weight of rocks around my feet. His legs kicked furiously while mine hung limp, tied together. His face strained, eyes wide. He was desperate, trying to save me before the water found its way down my throat and into my lungs. But the stones around my ankles were too heavy. His fingers worked at the rope, but the tension was too great, the knots too stiff.
Our eyes met, only inches apart as we sank deeper to the bottom of the harbor. There was nothing he could do. I shook my head frantically—pleading with him to give up, to release me. I tried to pry his hands off of me, but he refused to let go. He was falling too deep, too far. He wouldn’t have enough air to make it back up. But he pulled me against him and kissed his frigid lips to mine. I closed my eyes and felt him against me. It’s the last thing I remember before I drew in a breath and the water spilled down my throat.
He never let me go. Even when it was too late. Even when he knew he couldn’t save me.
We both lost our lives in the harbor that day.
The following summer, when I returned to the town for the first time—hidden in the body of a local girl—I walked up the steep slope to Sparrow Cemetery and stood on the cliff over his grave. No one knew who I really was: Hazel Swan, come to see the boy she loved now buried in the ground.
The day we both drowned, his body eventually drifted to the surface of the harbor and his father was forced to pull his only son from the sea. A fate that he had set in motion.
Guilt seethed through my veins as I stood over his freshly dug grave so long ago. His life had ended because of me. And that guilt quickly turned to hatred for the town. All these years, my sisters sought revenge for their own death, but I wanted revenge for Owen’s.
He sacrificed himself to try to save me, maybe because he felt he had betrayed me—for the trial, for confessing to having seen the mark of a witch on my skin. He believed he caused my death.
But I caused his.
I should have died that day—I should have drowned. But I didn’t. And I’ve never forgiven myself for what happened to him. For the life we never got to have.
*
I kneel down beside the grave, brushing away the leaves and dirt. “I’m sorry. . . .” I begin then stop myself. It’s not enough. He’s been gone for nearly two hundred years, and I’ve never said good-bye. Not really. Not until now. I lower my head, unsure how any words will ever feel like enough. “I never wanted to live this long,” I say. “I’d always hoped that someday the sea would finally take me. Or old age would bury me in the ground next to you.” I swallow down a deep breath. “But things have changed. . . . I have changed.” I lift my head and look out at the sea, a perfect view of the harbor and Lumiere Island, where Bo is waiting. “I think I love him,” I confess. “But maybe it’s too late. Maybe I don’t deserve him or a normal life after everything I’ve done, all the lives I’ve taken. He doesn’t know who I really am. And so maybe what I feel for him is also a lie.” The wind brushes my cheeks, and a light rain starts to scatter over the cemetery. Confessing this to Owen’s grave feels like a penance, like I owe him this. “But I have to try,” I say. “I have to know if loving him is enough to save both of us.”
I wipe a palm over the face of the tombstone, where his name was once etched. Now just a smooth surface. A grave without a name. I close my eyes, the tears falling in slow, measured rhythm with the raindrops.
Maybe I did die that day. Hazel Swan, the girl I once was, is gone. Her life taken on the same day as Owen’s. My voice trembles as the last word slips out—I say it to him as much as to myself. “Good-bye.”
I stand before my legs are too weak to carry me, and I leave the graveyard, knowing that I’ll never come back here again. The people I loved are gone.
But I won’t lose the one I love now.
EIGHTEEN
Memories can settle into a place: fog that lingers long after it should have blown out to sea, voices from the past that take root in the foundation of a town, whispers and accusations that grow in the moss along the sidewalks and up the walls of old homes.
This town, this small cluster of houses and shops and boats clinging to the shoreline, has never escaped its past—the thing it did two hundred years ago. Ghosts remain. But sometimes, the past is the only thing keeping a place alive. Without it, this fragile town may have long ago been washed out with the tide, sunken into the harbor in defeat. But it persists, because it must. Penance is a long, unforgiving thing. It endures, for without it, the past is forgotten.
I stop in front of the old stone building that sits squat and low on a street corner facing the sea. Rain pings off my forehead and shoulders. The sign above the door reads: ALBA’S FORGETFUL CAKES. But it didn’t used to. A sign with bold black swirling letters hand-painted by Aurora once hung across the sidewalk, clattering with the afternoon breeze. This was once the Swan Perfumery. Although I’ve walked past it thousands of times in the summers since our death, seen countless businesses occupy it, and even watched in dismay during a fifteen-year period when it sat abandoned and crumbling before it was restored, sometimes, like today, it still strikes me that after all this time it has endured . . . just as we have.
A woman steps out through the glass door, her rain boots splashing through a shallow puddle as she walks to her red SUV holding a pink pastry box surely filled with tiny frosted cakes intended to wipe away some sticky memory caught in her mind.
I spent nearly every day inside that shop, concocting new scents made of rare herbs and flowers, my hair and fingers and skin always bursting with scents that couldn’t be washed away. The oils soaked into everything they touched. Marguerite was the saleswoman, and she was good at it, a natural peddler. Aurora was the bookkeeper; she paid bills and tallied profits from a small, wobbly wood desk behind the front counter. And I was the perfumist, working out of a windowless back room that should have been a storage closet—a place for brooms and metal buckets. But I loved my work. And in the evening my sisters and I shared a tiny home behind the shop.
“It doesn’t even look like the same place,” a voice says beside me. I flinch. Olivia Greene is standing next to me, a black umbrella held over her head to protect her sleek, charcoal-black hair from the rain. My eyes pass through her fair skin to Marguerite underneath.
“The windows are the same,” I say, looking back to the building.
“Replicas,” she answers, her voice more somber than usual. “Everything it used to be is now gone.”
“Just like us.”
“Nothing that lives this long can stay the same.”
“Nothing should live this long,” I point out.
“But we did,” she says, as if it were an accomplishment to be proud of.