I saw Simon. Walking around the Bates quad, holding me on the hayride wagon. Watching me in a hospital room, checking on me as we hiked through the woods, offering me the popcorn bowl first as he, Caleb, Justine, and I watched a movie years ago.
I saw Parker. Leaning next to my locker. Bandaging my leg in the park bandstand. Diving off the side of a boat. Reaching for my hand.
And the water rushed and swirled, groaning like the ocean as it pummels the beach after a storm. The canoe lifted from the sand and spiraled away. I was next. The force was so strong it ripped the mask and case from my body. I tried to fight the pull, but I was too tired, my body wouldn’t listen.
Until there was someone behind me. Pressing against me, wrapping arms protectively around my stomach, my shoulders. A face leaned into my neck, and I knew the familiar profile immediately.
He’d come for me. Somehow, perhaps with Charlotte or Paige’s help, he’d found me in this twenty-acre whirlpool.
My body came back to life. I placed both hands on his arms so he knew to hold on, and then I twisted and turned, feeling the currents, listening to them, riding them toward the shore, the wailing sirens, the red and blue lights flashing across the water’s surface.
When my head finally broke the surface, I saw that the police were in our backyard. So were Betty, Oliver, and Caleb.
I made it as far as the diving raft thirty feet from shore. I lifted Simon’s limp body onto the bobbing metal ladder and held it there with my own. My lips, pressed against his neck, were warmed by a faint, fading pulse.
I stayed there as help came, counting the seconds between beats like I once did the seconds between lightning bolts, and whispering the same four words over and over.
“We’re meant to be… we’re meant to be… we’re meant to be…”
“T
HE
U
NIVERSITY OF
Hawaii’s sounding pretty good right about now.”
I lowered the
Globe
and looked up as Paige sat in the Adirondack chair next to mine. She rubbed her hands together, then cupped and blew into them. In her lap was a nearly empty orange plastic pumpkin.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Palm trees? Warm turquoise water?”
“I thought you wanted to be as far from water as possible?”
Her smile faltered. She zipped up the down coat she wore, crossed her arms, and shifted her gaze to the lake. “We’re down to sugar-free gum. Maybe I should run to the store and get more candy. Trick-or-treaters talk, and I wouldn’t want you to get a reputation as the house without chocolate.”
Somewhere behind us, there was a long, loud clattering, like the sound of dishes falling onto a tile floor. A second later,
Mom called for Dad.
“I don’t think that matters,” I said.
She frowned. “They’re really selling it?”
I looked out at the lake. Its flat, still surface reflected barren treetops, a cloudy gray sky. “They’re really going to try.”
“But haven’t they had this house—”
“Forever?” I finished. “Yes.”
She leaned toward me, lowered her voice like we weren’t the only two people sitting outside in the freezing cold. “But she knows, right? Your mom? You explained that they’re definitely gone this time, and that what happened last week will never happen again?”
“I did. But after being lied to for twenty years, I don’t think she knows what to believe anymore.”
“Your dad didn’t know that part, though, right? About who Charlotte really was—who she really is?”
“No. Because she never took lives; by the time he saw her again, she looked decades older than she really was. And just to be on the safe side, she dyed her hair and wore colored contact lenses.” My eyes fell to the newspaper. On the front page was a photo of a man in a Red Sox jersey and hat, cheering in the stands of Fenway Park. Beneath the photo was the headline I’d read a hundred times in twenty-four hours:
Body of Missing City Sanitation Worker Gerald O’Malley, 43, Found in South Boston.
Despite seeing him only once, I’d recognized him immediately. Gerald O’Malley was one of the city sanitation workers who’d spoken to me outside of Willa’s—outside of
Charlotte’s
—house. According to Charlotte, after I’d left that day, they’d come back around to collect the trash on the opposite side of the street. She’d followed them as they continued on their route down to the water, and then, in her words, she’d done what needed doing.
She claimed it was the first time she’d taken a man’s life. And that she’d done it only to gain the strength she needed to help save me from the Winter Harbor sirens. She said she’d changed her name to Willa when she moved to Boston in hopes of keeping her true identity from Dad and everyone else, and that not giving in to her body’s demands had aged her drastically. When the life left the men’s bodies and entered hers, it turned back the clock by years.
Like Mom, who’d locked herself in her bedroom for two days after being told the truth about my biological mother, and about Dad, and about me, I was no longer sure what to believe. That was why, after I thanked her for helping Paige rescue Simon and me from the swirling, suffocating sirens, I told Charlotte that I needed not to see her for a while. I needed time to think—preferably without anyone listening.
“Why’d you do it, Paige?” I asked quietly.
“Vanessa… I already told you.”
“Tell me again.” I looked at her. “Please.”
She sat back, hugged the plastic orange pumpkin. “After last summer, after losing… everything… I wanted something that was just mine again. You and your parents were wonderful to take me in, but they were still
your
parents. I was living in your house, going to your school. And then, in the middle of all the college frenzy, I realized I was trying to figure out a future that belonged to someone else. Because if last summer hadn’t happened, if I’d finished high school here, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college. I would’ve worked at the restaurant, eventually married some local fisherman when Jonathan inevitably left me for some pretty, Ivy League genius who his parents would’ve approved of, and had a million babies.”
I reached for her hand. She let me take it.
“And then… I don’t know. Betty had been trying to convince me to transform because that’s what Raina and Zara wanted, but even if they’d had nothing to do with it, I think I still would’ve been tempted.” She paused. “At least the powers will be all mine, you know? To use the way I want to—to help people instead of hurt them.”
“But—”
“Vanessa.” She gave me a small smile, squeezed my hand. “I know. It’s hard, and complicated. But it’s also too late.”
I struggled to return her smile, picturing her in the ocean and choking on salt water before her body finally relented. Unfortunately, my telling her about me only convinced her all the more to go through with it—especially since she thought that together the two of us had a better of shot of defeating the sirens for good. Shortly after I’d left for school and went to Charlotte’s instead, Paige had asked Mom if she could borrow her car to get out of the house, and then she’d driven to Maine.
She’d found Betty in her room, standing transfixed before the open window, and managed to break the trance by calling out to her, hugging her.
Apparently, when it came to sirens, love’s power worked on women the same way it did on men. That was actually how Raina and the others had managed to control Betty this time.
Despite what Simon had sworn time and again, that the sirens couldn’t last two months packed in ice, they’d survived. They were unconscious until the ice began to thaw, but once it did and their bodies absorbed the salt water, they slowly came to. The only ones who didn’t were the sirens the deep-sea divers had found still frozen; they’d been brought up too soon, and the divers paid dearly for their discovery.
The sirens who survived started with Oliver and used their weakened powers to convince him that if he really loved Betty the way he claimed, then he should do whatever he could to bring Paige home—even though Betty had insisted that being in Boston was best for her granddaughter. Because Oliver’s feelings for Betty were greater than his fear of the sirens, it worked, and he did what they told him to, including building their tubs, helping them heal, tracking their targets—and manipulating Betty to manipulate Paige. Their ultimate plan was to transform Paige so they would have another member in their ranks, and to either convince me to join them… or to kill me.
Fortunately, once Betty was herself again, Oliver was, too. Reluctant but too weak to refuse, they’d helped Paige transform in the ocean behind their house. Paige had recovered quickly, and she and Betty had listened for the other sirens. After they heard them, they’d alerted the authorities to possible drownings and reached the lake seconds after Charlotte. Caleb, returning home from marina, saw the lake frothing and lights flashing beneath the surface, and joined the others in our backyard.
“But look on the bright side,” Paige said a moment later, jarring me from my thoughts. “Now we’re more like sisters than ever before.”
Before I could decide how to respond, the doorbell rang in the distance. Paige jumped up and hurried toward the house.
“Hope the little monsters don’t mind minty-fresh breath!” she called over her shoulder.
Little monsters. She referred to trick-or-treaters, but I still found the reference strange. Just like other things we hadn’t wanted to talk about a few weeks ago, we hadn’t really talked about her transformation or what it meant; this last conversation was the most time we’d devoted to the subject. When we finally did discuss it, though, one of my many questions would be how she was able to treat it so lightly. Was it merely a coping mechanism, the way I hoped… or was she really that happy to be one of us?
“Peppermint?”
My head snapped toward the voice. Simon stood behind the empty Adirondack chair, fiddling with a pack of gum.
“I hope you’re saving the good stuff for the kids in costumes,” he added. “You don’t want to be known as the only house in Winter Harbor that cares about cavities on Halloween.”
I stood, stepped toward him, my heart straining against my ribs. “Simon—”
He held up one hand, then lowered it, palm side up. I took it carefully, afraid he’d pull away. My eyes welled when he didn’t. We walked silently down the lawn, putting more distance between us and the house.
After inhaling enough lake water to fill a small pool, Simon had been hospitalized for four days. I’d visited him at least a dozen times, but whenever I did, other people—Caleb, his parents, even old high school teachers—had been there, making it impossible for us to talk. Now I didn’t know where to start.
“Your glasses are back,” I attempted after several minutes.
He smiled, absently pushed the black bridge up his nose. “They didn’t make a difference.”
We stopped at the edge of the dock. “What didn’t?” I asked.
“Contacts. Riley thought they’d help.”
“Your vision?”
“In a way.” He released my hand, slid both of his in his coat pockets. “I saw the way those guys looked at you, Vanessa. At school, in the coffee shop. Of course, then I assumed it was just because you were amazingly beautiful and that any guy who didn’t notice you was blind. I couldn’t blame them—but I could work on my own appearance to keep you from looking back.”
“You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to do anything.”
“Right. You would’ve broken up with me anyway.”
I started to reach for him but stopped when he tensed. “I was trying to protect you,” I said, my voice wavering. “I didn’t know how to tell you, and I knew as soon as I did we couldn’t be together.”
“You assumed,” he said quickly. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t have without talking to me first.”
“I get thirsty,” I said, my throat automatically drying. “When I’m happy, excited, stressed, angry—all the time. I have to drink gallons of salt water every day. I have to take saltwater baths and swim in the ocean whenever I can. You don’t want to deal with that. I don’t
want
you to deal with that.”
“Vanessa,” he said sadly, “when you love someone, you don’t just deal with her problems. You don’t tolerate them and simply hope they pass. You work through them together—not because you hate being inconvenienced, but because your lives are connected, intertwined. When you’re happy I’m happy, and when you’re not… nothing else matters.”
I brushed at my watering eyes. “I didn’t think you loved me.”
“You didn’t—How could you—”
“I believed you only
thought
you did. Because of who—what—I am. And I wanted to believe, so much, that that feeling was real… but I didn’t know if it was.”
He didn’t say anything. When I looked up again, he was staring out at the lake, his jaw clenching and releasing.
“What I did know,” I continued, my voice barely a whisper, “was that I loved you.”
His jaw tensed, then froze. His eyelids fluttered closed as his Adam’s apple sank and rose.
“And that as much as I couldn’t stand the thought of not being with you, I hated the idea of your not having a full, genuine life more. So when you said you were thinking about leaving Bates for BU and changing your entire life for something that might not even be real… I couldn’t let you do it.”
He opened his eyes. I followed his gaze to the square diving raft, where, days before, I’d clung to him as if our hearts, like our problems, were connected. Intertwined.
“It was real.” He looked at me, waited for our eyes to meet. “Want to know how I know?”
I hesitated, nodded.
“Because when I saw you with that guy. I totally fell apart.”
That guy. Parker. “Simon, I can explain—”
“All three times?” The sadness in his voice sharpened. “You can explain what you were doing on his boat, in that picture online, and on the sidewalk in Boston? Not to mention what-ever I didn’t witness firsthand?”
“Nothing happened,” I said, my chest burning. “We kissed a little, but—”
“Vanessa.” He shook his head. “I saw you. That wasn’t just kissing. That wasn’t an accident.”
I tore my gaze away. Did I tell him? About how the attention made me stronger? And why I’d wanted to be stronger? Or did I just let him believe the worst so that he could finally move on?
“I’m sorry.”
My head snapped back toward him. He looked at me, tears filling his warm brown eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly, “for letting Zara get to me. I’m sorry I kissed her. I’m sorry I told her that I… felt something I’ve only ever felt for you.”
“Stop.” I stepped toward him, gently placing my hands on his face and wiping away his tears with my thumbs. “It doesn’t matter. You did nothing wrong.”
He took my hands in his, pulled them away from his face. “It does matter. Because I wouldn’t have done it if my feelings for you were as strong as they’d always been.”
“But I hurt you,” I insisted. “Whatever I did or didn’t do, I hurt you. Of course you felt differently.”
“Feel.”
I watched fresh tears slip from his eyes and slide down his cheeks. “What?” I whispered.
“I
feel
differently.” His hands, still holding mine, trembled. “That’s how I know it was real. Because if it wasn’t, your powers would’ve fixed everything already. I would’ve forgotten what you did even before I’d forgiven you.” He paused, took a shallow, shaky breath. “I’d love you now as much as I did before.”
As our hands slowly lowered, then released, I was vaguely aware of the feeling drifting from my legs, my arms.
“I do love you, Vanessa,” he said, his voice cracking. “For better or worse, I don’t think anything will ever change that. It’s just, right now, there are other feelings, too. Strong ones. Painful ones.”
I searched his face, tried to imagine not being able to see it whenever I wanted to, whenever I needed to. “What are you
saying?” I asked.