The Outer Banks hadn't changed much in sixteen years. The salt air still clung to everything, the marsh grass still swayed like it was keeping secrets, and the divide between Figure Eight and the Cut was still carved deep as a grave. But the house on the Kook side was new. Too big, too clean, too quiet. The kind of house that screamed we made it to everyone but the people living inside it.

Y/n stood in the driveway with the last box from the moving truck balanced against her hip. The August sun was brutal, the kind of heat that made the cicadas louder than Y/n's thoughts. But it wasn't the heat that made her chest feel tight. It was the silence. The absence of a voice that should've been there.

John B was supposed to meet them here. He'd said he'd be at the house by noon. It was now a quarter past, and the front door was still locked. The porch light flickered, though it was the middle of the day. Something about that felt wrong.

Caycee was inside, her phone pressed to her ear, her voice floating through the open windows with that easy, polished charm Y/n had been hearing in green rooms and trailers her whole life. Their mother was working a room that didn't exist. But Y/n wasn't listening to her.

She was looking at the road. The long, flat stretch of asphalt that led toward the Cut. Toward the old marina. Toward the Château. Toward John B.

A rusted old motorbike sputtered somewhere in the distance. The air shifted. And for the first time since they'd crossed the bridge back into Kildare County, Y/n felt the itch of someone watching.

A figure peeled out from the shade of a cypress tree, barefoot, sun-bleached hair sticking to his forehead. A ratty tank top, cargo shorts, a busted lip that looked fresh. JJ Maybank. John B's best friend. The last time Y/n had seen him, they'd been kids chasing each other through the marsh with scraped knees and stolen soda. Now he was leaner, sharper, and looking at her like she was a stranger on the wrong side of the island.

He stopped a few feet from the property line, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, eyes flicking from the moving truck to the big house behind her.