The water was wrong tonight.

Scarlett Hale had grown up on this island. She'd learned to read the ocean the way other children learned to read clocks-by instinct, by the thousand small signals that added up to meaning. The particular slap of a wave against the jetty pilings. The smell of the air before a squall. The color of the horizon at four in the afternoon in late November, which was the specific shade of pewter that preceded the kind of storm that kept shrimpers in port for three days.

She had known the water all her life, and the water had never felt like this.

Tonight it felt like a grave.

"Miss Hale. Miss Hale. You need to come back inside." A hand closed around her forearm-the charge nurse, Linda, who had been chasing her across this stretch of beach for the past ten minutes. "The sand is wet, you're not wearing shoes-"

"Reid." Scarlett's voice came out of somewhere low and ruined. She wasn't sure she was talking to Linda at all. She was talking to the black water, to the place three miles out where the coast guard cutter had last reported debris. A life ring. A section of fiberglass hull. A waterproof duffel bag with a broken strap, recovered from the shallows near Wren Island the morning after. "Reid, answer me."

The Atlantic didn't answer.

Three days. Seventy-two hours and change since the 911 call from Reid's satellite phone, crackling and indistinct-taking on water, position is- and then static and nothing. The coast guard had run searches until the secondary storm moved in from the southeast. This morning their harbor master had come to the hospital in his dress uniform, which she now understood meant something specific and devastating, and he had told her, with genuine and obvious sorrow, that they were transitioning from a search-and-rescue to a search-and-recovery operation.

She had bitten through the inside of her cheek trying not to scream.

The wind came off the water cold and salt-wet, pulling her hair back from her face. Somewhere behind her, Linda was calling for backup-she could hear it in the nurse's voice, that particular tightening that preceded the appearance of a second set of hands and, usually, a small syringe.

They'd already done this twice. Both times the sedative had knocked her out for four hours, and both times she'd come back to consciousness mid-stride, the dream and the waking tangling into the same unbearable loop: Reid Calloway's hand on her shoulder as they stood at the rail watching the squall build on the horizon. His voice-it'll pass before we reach Wren-low and certain the way Reid always was, as if he'd read the future already and found it satisfactory. She'd told him the barometric pressure was dropping too fast. He'd said she worried too much.

He wasn't wrong. She worried too much, and she always had, and the thing about the ocean was that sometimes your worry was right.

"Scarlett." A second voice now. Dr. Petersen, the night attending, picking his way across the wet sand in his dress shoes. He was young, maybe thirty-two, and he had the careful gentleness of someone who had recently learned how to deliver catastrophic news. "I need you to come inside. Your blood pressure-"

"I'm fine." She wasn't fine. She knew she wasn't fine. Her iron count was half what it should have been even before the accident; three days of not eating and barely sleeping had left her lightheaded in a way that turned the horizon into a slow smear. "He's still out there. If the water temperature dropped overnight, he might have found something to-a sandbar, or-"

"Scarlett."

"-he knows these waters, he grew up sailing-"

"Scarlett."

She stopped. Not because of the voice, but because her knees had decided, independently and without consulting her, that they were done. She went down to the wet sand slowly, almost gracefully, and sat with the water running over her bare feet and the cold working its way up through her hospital gown and she put her face in both hands.

Reid Calloway was thirty-two years old and he had built one of the largest luxury cruise lines on the eastern seaboard from a single aging passenger ferry he'd inherited at twenty-four. He traveled alone. He had no enemies worth mentioning-unusual, for someone that rich. He had a laugh you could hear from three rooms away and he made terrible coffee and he had once, without comment or drama, paid off sixty thousand dollars in gambling debts belonging to a man he had no particular reason to help, just because that man's stepdaughter had shown up on a dock in South Carolina looking like she was one bad day away from something irreversible.

He had been the first person in Scarlett Hale's life who had ever acted like she mattered for reasons unrelated to what she could provide.

She was not going to stand on a beach and let the ocean have him.

"He's not gone," she said. Her voice came out flat and certain. "He is not gone. I know him. He's Reid Calloway and he does not lose."

Dr. Petersen crouched down beside her. He didn't say anything for a moment. Linda hovered behind him, and Scarlett could see the small sealed syringe in Linda's hand without having to look directly at it.

"We're not stopping the search," the doctor said carefully. "It just-it changes what we're looking for."

"No." Scarlett stood. Her legs shook but they held. "No. You call the coast guard back. You tell them they missed something. You tell them to go out again."

"Scarlett-"

"Call them back." Her voice broke on the last word, and she hated it-hated the way the ocean took her voice and swallowed it. "Please. Please, just-he's out there. He's-"