Chapter Five: The Cliff Cabin

Caine’s cabin was quieter than Lila remembered.

Downstairs was a living room with a fireplace; upstairs, two bedrooms. One entire wall was floor-to-ceiling glass. When the fog rolled in, sea and sky blurred into one sheet of white, and you felt as if you were floating on clouds. Caine carried her bag upstairs, then came back down to check every door and window, and set a small lamp in the entryway — he said that at night a person needs a little light, even if it’s only lying to themselves.

“I’ll make up the guest room,” he said.

“Caine.”

He stopped.

“We don’t need a guest room between us,” Lila said. “We’ve been through a kidnapping, a shipwreck, and being watched by the whole town. You still want me to pretend I’m a guest?”

He stood at the foot of the stairs, backlit, his expression unreadable. After a long time he said, “I don’t want to take anything from you while you’re afraid.”

The words went into Lila’s heart like a needle, light and precise. She walked over and took his hand. His was cold.

“I’m not afraid of them,” she said. “What I’m afraid of is that once the whole truth opens up, I’ll find out that Emma wanted me to let go. And whether these twenty years I suffered were for nothing.”

Caine closed his hand around hers. “You didn’t suffer for nothing.”

The fire crackled in the hearth. Outside, the fog had wiped the whole world clean. Lila leaned against his shoulder, and for the first time in this house, she felt a long-missing warmth, the kind that belongs to home.

And then she heard it.

Very faint, from the floor-to-ceiling windows — not waves, not wind. The sound of something hard scraping along the wooden exterior wall.

Both of them held their breath at once.

Caine rose slowly, crossed to the door, and peered through the crack. The fog was thick as milk; nothing was visible three paces away.

But the sound had stopped.

He pulled the door open and leaned out. Seconds later he bent, picked something up, shut the door, and turned around.

It was a folded slip of paper, weighed down on the porch step by a piece of reef rock.

Lila took it and unfolded it.

There was only one handwritten line, the letters crooked, as if scrawled in a hurry:

“Don’t go to the tide cave. She’s waiting for you there.”

No signature.