The dying light glimmers on the water and for a minute, it looks like flame.
And that minute, that one minute,
Is
All
It
Takes.
Things crash into me, one after the other.
Everything is on fire.
Through the flames, I see Dare.
He’s shouting,
He’s afraid.
“I…” my voice is aghast and I see it in my head. Everything.
I see everything.
I see what happened, but I can’t tell the memories from the visions.
Everything is overwhelming,
The emotions,
The memories,
The fear.
In a flash, I see years.
Year of memories.
Dare and Finn and I playing when we were small, Mud pies, and swimming in the pond, and summers in England.
I see Olivia, because I knew her.
Long black hair, big dark eyes.
Eyes like Dare’s.
Her whispers were always so soft.
“You can’t be together,” she’d told us. “It isn’t right. It’s not right. You know he can’t leave here.”
Dare can’t leave Whitley.
He can’t leave.
He can’t leave.
But he did.
I see it.
He came to get me because I lost everything.
And when we arrive here at Whitley, he lost everything too.
I see him with his mother in his arms, Through the flames of a fire.
“Help!” he shouts. And Olivia is limp and dead. “Help!”
But no one could.
Because an accident is an accident is an accident.
“Was it an accident?” I ask limply as we stand in the crypts next to her name.
“You know it wasn’t,” Dare tells me, his voice so rigid and hard. “We drove her to it. It was us. It was us.”
I see Olivia screaming.
“You took him from me. He wasn’t yours to take. He’s not yours, he’s mine.”
In her eyes, I see madness.
I recognize it.
She’s the rabbit and I’m the rabbit and we’re both crazy.
I see her taillights leaving the house, I see the fire.
I see Dare.
I open my eyes, and it’s painful.
“Your mother drove off the Seven Sisters cliffs because of us.”
Dare’s eyes contain things I’ve never seen before, levels of unthinkable sadness. He nods.
“Yes.”
“You think it’s my fault.” My words scrape my throat and I feel desperate.
“No.”
“You lost your mom and I lost mine, and they were two separate nights. Two separate things.”
I hear the desperation in my voice because I can’t keep anything straight. All of my memories swirl together and nothing makes sense.
Dare nods. “They were two separate accidents. Two separate nights.”
“But your mother’s wasn’t an accident.” I point this out thinly, and again he nods.
“Our family is cursed. Because we have to pay for the sins of our fathers,” I say in confusion, remembering Sabine’s words. “Everyone is dead and this doesn’t make sense.”
I can’t wrap my head around it. Any of it. Because my father never committed a sin. Sabine is wrong about that.
But Dare’s mother is still dead.
“Take me to the cliffs,” I tell Dare. “I’ve got to see it. I’ve got to understand.”
He doesn’t want to, but he does. He drives me and I’m panicky, and as we cliff the twisted road, I can’t breathe.
And then he’s there.
The boy in the hood.
Standing in front of our car, he cocks his head.
“He’s been waiting for me,” I realize aloud. “He’s been here for me all along.”
Dare stares at me confused and I cry out to stop the car, so he does.
I leap out and I chase the boy, straight toward the top, until I’m on the edge of the world and all I can hear is the ocean.
It growls at me.
It roars.
The boy shimmers in the night, a memory that I can’t grab. My mind flickers and wavers and wanes.
“Come back!” I shout and the wind catches my words and carries them away. “I need to know what you know!”
I’ve been here before, I think.
I’ve been here before.
The wind,
The water,
The panic.
I hear Dare calling out for me, but I don’t stop.
I can’t.
I chase the boy, but he’s been chasing me all along.
He knows the secret.
He knows.