The cliff didn’t fall. It snapped.

  Like a ribcage breaking open. Like something inside the land finally giving way.

  A sharp, wet crack, then the rush of earth, sand, and stone folding in over Martin Almeida’s body.

  One second, he was there—one foot angled slightly forward, shielding his eyes from the glare off the water, explaining something about sediment displacement. The next, he was gone, swallowed by forty years of erosion and something older than that.

  I didn’t scream. Didn’t move. Just stood there, listening to the sound of the land closing back in on itself, like the earth had swallowed him whole.

  This place had taken another one.

  And it had happened right there.

  The same stretch of sand. The same black cliffs. The exact place where my father died.

  They call this place Hollow Cape.

  Not its real name. The maps show something else, but no one says it anymore. No one remembers. The ocean has a way of erasing things.

  The old fishermen say this land is hungry. That it keeps what it takes. That it doesn’t forget.

  The school where I once taught? Gone.

  The house where my sister was born? Gone.

  The road that led people out of here? Gone.

  And now, Martin.

  The irony isn’t lost on me. He came here to study the erosion. Maybe he should have been studying how a place can turn on the people who stay.

  I was nine years old when my father died.

  It wasn’t like this. Not exactly.

  He jumped.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  That summer, we came to the Cape for the first time. It wasn’t cursed then. It was bright, alive—beach bars spilling music onto the sand, tourists dancing, the scent of grilled fish thick in the air. My father, August Benam, was still a name people spoke with admiration, not one they whispered like a warning.

  I remember the heat that day, the way my mother sat in the sand with her arms wrapped around her knees, eyes locked on the horizon, barely there. My brother, August Jr., was standing on the deck of the yacht, yelling down at our father.

  "Come on, Dad! What, you scared?"

  And my father—who was a strong man, a disciplined man, a man who measured risks and took them only when necessary—jumped.

  He didn’t check the tide. Didn’t read the current. Didn’t hesitate.

  His body hit a sandbank hidden beneath the surface.

  He didn’t rise.

  When they pulled him out, his spine was as shattered as the cliffs that had just eaten Martin.

  Two deaths, four decades apart.

  One beneath the water. One beneath the land.

  Hollow Cape doesn’t let go. It just waits.

  I stay on the beach until sundown.

  The body is still under the earth, but the ocean doesn’t care. The tide moves forward, drags at the broken pieces of the cliff, pulling them out to sea.

  That’s what will happen to Martin, eventually.

  No one will dig him out. There’s no one left in Hollow Cape for that. Just me, my mother, and the last few people too stubborn—or too lost—to leave.

  I wait until I see Jura.

  He moves slowly, the way he always does. Like he’s listening for something buried beneath his feet. He knew Martin, in the way Jura knows everyone—not in facts or conversations, but in that quiet, unspoken way. Like he carries all of us inside him, our weight pressing into his ribs every time the wind shifts.

  He stops next to me. Looks at the broken edge of the cliff. Then at me. Then back at the sea.

  "Another one," he says.

  His voice is low, like the tide pulling back.

  I nod.

  "Another one."

  That night, I sit outside the house with a notebook and a cheap pen, listening to the waves drag at the shore.

  I don’t write about Martin. Not at first.

  I start with the ritual.

  August Benam.

  I write my father’s name first. The ink sinks into the page, bleeding out in places.

  Sarah Benam.

  My sister’s name.

  August Benam Jr.

  My brother’s name.

  I stop.

  I don’t write the last name.

  I never do.

  Every night, my mother makes a list of the dead. A family tradition, a kind of oral inventory, spoken over dinner, as if names alone can hold ghosts in place.

  Even now, even when she forgets where she is, even when she no longer recognizes the walls of this house, she remembers the names.

  But there is always one missing.

  One she has never spoken.

  I stare at the page, at the unfinished list. My hand hovers over the paper, then presses down, forcing the ink to spill out.

  The wind shifts. A crack of thunder in the distance.

  The waves hit the shore again. A little closer this time.

  Maybe that’s why I’m writing.

  So the sea doesn’t forget.

  So the next time it comes for something, it will remember him.