Chapter Seven: Before the Tide Comes In

“Who is that?” Lila pointed sharply out the window.

Caine lunged to the glass. The fog shifted; the ledge was empty. Nothing but waves.

“There’s nothing there,” he said.

“I saw her. A person. Standing on the reef.”

“Lila.” Caine turned, and his tone was that stiff tenderness she knew so well. “You didn’t sleep last night. The files, the extra edition, the burned trailer — your brain is inventing things in the fog.”

She opened her mouth to argue. But she had to admit he had a point. She had slept less than ten hours all week. In that state, a person sees things that aren’t there.

She sat back on the sofa and hugged her knees. Caine poured her a cup of hot water and sat across from her. The firelight jumped on his face.

“While we can,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“While we’re trapped here, trapped together.” Caine looked at her. “There are some things I’ve been hiding from for twenty years. I don’t want to hide anymore.”

Lila’s heart skipped a beat.

“When I was eleven,” he began, his voice steady, like stitching a wound closed, “I didn’t just see the truck. I also saw that after they dragged the tarpaulin into the pier warehouse, one of the men who came out was wearing a sheriff’s jacket.”

Lila’s head snapped up. “Boyd?”

“I didn’t know whose jacket it was at the time. But the next day, I saw that same jacket on Boyd.” Caine closed his eyes. “I ran home and told my dad. He was a carpenter, a man who’d spent his whole life afraid of trouble. He made me swear not to tell. He said, ‘In Blackharbor, people who cross the Garretts don’t last long.’”

“So you didn’t even tell me.”

“I didn’t even dare tell myself.” Caine opened his eyes, the rims red. “I watched you, year after year, cry over your sister’s photograph. I knew the truth — I held that one little piece of it in my hand — and I couldn’t get a single word out. Lila, not one day of these twenty years have I not hated myself.”

A log collapsed in the fireplace, sending sparks up.

Lila said nothing. She walked over and knelt in front of him, looking up.

“You’ve said it now,” she said softly.

“I’ve said it now.”

“Then that’s enough.” She rested her forehead on his knee. “Caine, you’re not that eleven-year-old boy anymore. Everything you’re doing now is making up for the words you couldn’t say that day.”

His hand settled lightly on the top of her head. The room was so still she could hear the fog water dripping from the eaves.

Then the phone exploded.

It was Eli. His voice was urgent in a way Lila had never heard.

“Lila, you and Caine stay in the house. Don’t come out. We just got a tip — Shaw and Pruitt never left town.”

“What?”

“Their car was spotted an hour ago, parked at the base of the cliff, at the path down to the reef flats.” Eli swallowed. “Lila, they’re not waiting for you to go to the tide cave.”

“They’ve come to get you.”