The first time they came, the house wasn’t theirs.

  It was a rental, something August had found through a friend of a friend, too cheap for how close it was to the water. A two-room structure half-hidden by dunes, the walls yellowed with salt, the windows full of light but never fully clean. Someone had left behind an old fishing net, tangled near the door. A bicycle leaned against the side of the house, rusted through.

  Inside, the air smelled of damp wood and something deeper, something trapped beneath the floorboards.

  August whistled low, stepping in first, his boots heavy against the warped floor. “I had a place like this, when I was a kid.”

  Geri had been quiet for most of the drive, watching the road as if she recognized it from somewhere else, somewhere older. Now, she ran her hand over the uneven kitchen counter, fingers pressing into the wood as if testing it for something. “It’s fine,” she said.

  Cae, seven years old, slipped past them and threw open the back door.

  And there it was.

  The ocean.

  Larger than he thought it would be. Not just wide but full, heavy, as if it could spill forward at any moment and erase them all. He felt it in his stomach, the pull of it.

  Sarah ran past him, her braid catching the wind, her sandals forgotten in the doorway.

  The sand burned under their feet, but they ran anyway.

  They spent that first summer cataloging the island like it belonged to them.

  Sarah named the dunes after mountains she’d read about in a book. Cae gave names to the small crabs scuttling near the shore, only to forget them by morning. August drew a map on a napkin one night—landmarks and notes, places where the tide shifted differently, the spot where the birds gathered at dusk.

  "Memory’s a funny thing," he said, tapping the paper. "Write it down, or it’ll twist on you."

  That summer, Cae didn't understand what he meant.

  The second summer, the house felt like theirs.

  It still wasn’t—not legally—but no one else had come back for it. No one else had knocked, asking why they were there.

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  Geri filled the kitchen with the sound of pots clanging and water boiling. August brought back fish from the docks. Cae and Sarah learned to scrape the scales off with the back of a spoon, their hands smelling like salt for hours.

  The wind tore at the shutters most nights. They held.

  The small general store by the docks had an old man behind the counter who never spoke much. The kind of man who measured people with his eyes before deciding whether they were worth talking to. Cae watched him tie knots absentmindedly when there were no customers, his hands moving as if pulled by something older than habit.

  One afternoon, the old man looked at Cae and said, "You listen, don’t you?"

  Cae nodded, though he didn’t know why.

  "Then listen careful," the man said. "The sea doesn’t take. It trades."

  Sarah laughed at him later, kicking a shell across the sand. "You believe anything anyone tells you."

  Cae shrugged. He didn’t believe it.

  Not exactly.

  But that summer, he started listening.

  The third time, the house had changed.

  The roof slanted lower, as if the weight of the air had pressed down on it. The floor creaked in new places. Geri stood at the window longer than usual, fingers resting against the glass.

  August’s hair had started to gray at the edges. He still moved like he could outrun it.

  The map on the napkin had faded, but they knew the island by heart now. The dunes. The abandoned lighthouse. The tide pools that trapped small, flickering fish when the waves pulled back.

  August had started teaching Cae how to dive. Not the clumsy jumps of childhood but real diving—arms tight to his sides, body slicing through the water clean, controlled.

  "The trick is not to fight it," August told him. "Let it take you first. Then you move."

  It worked. The water liked him better when he stopped pushing against it.

  Jura had a boy with him that summer.

  He was older now, maybe twelve, maybe thirteen, standing barefoot near the doorway of the little shop that sold warm soda and packets of biscuits. Cae didn’t know his name, and the boy never offered it.

  Sarah broke the silence first. "Is it true the sea is deeper here?"

  Jura smiled like he knew something they didn’t. "Depends on how far you’re willing to go."

  The boy watched Cae. Cae didn’t look away first.

  The last time, the water was different.

  The color had shifted, darker at the edges. The tide rose higher than it should have. The fishermen tied their boats farther up the shore.

  August wasn’t worried. "We’ll leave before the storm rolls in," he said, shaking sand from his towel.

  Sarah was the first one in the water that morning. Geri sat under the umbrella, reading, turning the pages of her book as if she wasn’t really reading at all.

  Cae stood at the edge, where the waves licked at his feet.

  August clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Come on," he said.

  They dove together. The arc, the break, the way the water folded over them. It felt like flying.

  Cae surfaced first. He wiped his eyes, turned—

  August wasn’t there.

  Not on the surface. Not beside him. Not anywhere.

  Sarah’s laughter cut short. A wave pulled back. The horizon sharpened.

  Then the shouting started.

  Cae didn't remember running. He didn't remember the men on the beach moving, their voices blending into the wind.

  He remembered Sarah's scream, the way it cut through the air.

  He remembered the moment of stillness, the awful hush before people understood what was happening.

  He remembered Jura pushing past him, his face unreadable, his movements quick and certain.

  The water had been warm that year. Warmer than usual.

  And Cae had thought, just for a second, that maybe it had been waiting.