Page 134 of Fated

“Please,” I whisper. “Please.”

Before, when I fell asleep, I went to him. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But I always went to him, even though it should never have been possible.

Please.

He said he’d be there, holding out his hand to me. He promised.

I didn’t know that when I left, I’d left him alone treading water, when I’d promised to always come for him.

I didn’t know.

There’s a black wave rushing toward me, a tsunami of thought and emotion I can’t think about. I can’t feel. I won’t.

The images on the computer screen. The photographs. The words. They blur together in a tidal wave threatening to crash over me and drown me.

I push it away.

I’ll dream tonight.

I’ll go to Aaron.

And in my dreams he’ll be there.

They all will be.

I fall back into the deep folds of my mattress. letting the weight of the duvet settle over me. The cold, dark air falls silent. I pray for heat. I pray for humidity. I pray for a sea-salt breeze. I close my eyes and I pray,Please, please, please?—

48

“Please.”

I jar forward, my hands hitting the hot sand and the scuffing of spiky green grass. The sun reaches down and smacks my back in sharp streaks of heat.

I draw in a ragged, grateful breath, half-sob, half-joy.

The bright, sea-washed light assaults me, and I blink into the hot sun.

A scurry of gulls flies overhead, cawing and quarreling, white dots against the sun-bleached sky. The wind wraps around me and tugs at my blonde hair and my black cotton dress. I’m Becca then. Although now I know Becca is real. Maybe I lived her life, or maybe I lived her dreams. I don’t know.

I only know that I’m kneeling in the coarse sand, the salt-soaked wind whipping around me, and the waves are crashing, harsh and wild, at my back.

My heart pounds at the crashing of sea against shore, and there’s a salty, bitter taste on my lips. My throat aches even when I pull in another gasp of humid air, and my eyes burn.

The humidity presses over me and sweat runs down my back. Close by, a stand of whistling pine—casuarinas—twists in the wind. The scantest line of shade flickers beneath their boughs. I’m on a beach. One with rough-limbed pines, gulls sailing the wind, and the sharp scent of old pine and salt.

It’s not a beach I remember.

When I stand, a ghost crab scuttles across a long ribbon of olive-green seaweed and disappears into the sand.

I turn, scanning the rugged shoreline and the whistling pines, bent and weeping.

It’s all wrong.

I’m on the island, I know I am, but it’s all wrong.

I can see the line of the reef with its white-capped waves breaking and the water edging to turquoise, but the reef is further out now, by a few hundred meters at least. There’s the mangroves to the south, a thick line of them, with their tube-like red roots reaching into the saltwater, but at least half of the mangroves are gone.

The hill that Aaron and I biked? The one that was a fifteen-minute ride from the cottage? Far from the beach? I trail my eyes over the rise, following the sandy path to the top of the hill, sitting on the water’s edge.

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