Nathan, as he still referred to himself in his internal monologue, loved the beach at night, but the sand hadn’t felt the same since that day.

But Nathan had heard everything. Asphyxiation. Restraints. Ligature marks. His dad had been in that hole, and Nathan had fit the pieces together in his head. Someone had tied his dad’s hands together, dug a hole, and thrown him in there.

It was funny. His dad had once told him, ‘Nathan, the tide doesn’t disappear. It just goes away for a while, then comes back.’

But people didn’t. Once they were gone, they didn’t come back.

Then the woman detective had come over to him and given him some spiel. She’d crouched down and asked him who he was, but she already knew. He’d asked if it had hurt his dad, and she’d lied. Gave him some rubbish about his dad being dead before the water came.

He’d researched it since then. Extensively.

Drowning while buried alive in sand as the tide rose was perhaps one of the most terrifying deaths imaginable.

The weight of wet sand compressing the chest. The inability to expand the lungs as water covers the nose and mouth.

The desperate struggle to raise the head those few crucial inches that might buy another breath. The knowledge that help isn’t coming.

Years later, he’d found out that that woman was Agent Mia Ripley. He’d always held a resentment towards her for that moment – and because she’d failed to find the real killer.

Everyone had insisted it would get better with time.

The school counselor, his parade of therapists, the grief support group leader with her empty platitudes.

They had been partly right. The edges did smooth somewhat.

He stopped waking up screaming. Stopped flinching at the sound of waves.

Eventually, he even returned to beaches, though never this one.

Not until now, when the circle demanded completion.

What they hadn’t warned him about was the memory loss.

The human brain, miraculous as it was, began discarding details of his father.

The exact timbre of his laugh. The way he folded the morning newspaper.

His opinions on baseball and whether aliens existed.

These memories pixelated, corrupted, and ultimately vanished.

By eighteen, Nathan had lost his father twice. Once to the Sandman Killer, and once to his own neurological processes.

The only thing he still had of his father’s was the book he’d gifted him for his tenth birthday.

The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight . He’d been halfway through the book when his dad had died, and Nathan had closed the book and never finished it.

Could never bring himself to. And that little detail had influenced the rest of his life.

Books had become his safety and his sanctuary, and over the years, he’d developed an obsession for the storytelling process.

Everything had to be perfect – and nothing irked him more than an unfinished tale.

That was why – when he’d seen Agent Mia Ripley by chance outside Thomas Webb’s house – he knew how this story had to end.

And indeed, books had brought some normalcy to his life, at least until the true crime boom brought a million vultures to his door. Podcasters and authors and low-budget filmmakers. They all wanted his story, and he knew that they just wanted to milk him for content.

Until Sarah Webb showed up in his inbox in 2018.

Funny how the world worked. Of all the true crime writers who’d contacted him over the years, she was the only one who hadn’t treated him like a sideshow attraction.

The others had come sniffing around for emotional table scraps, but Sarah had approached him as a human being first, a source second.

When they’d met for that initial interview in the café six years ago, she’d left her recorder in her bag the entire time.

They’d just talked. About books. About Florida.

About the way grief changed shape but never truly disappeared.

She didn’t call the Sandman by the ridiculous nicknames media outlets had invented.

Didn’t promise ‘fresh insights’ or, worse, ‘closure.’

He hadn’t meant to fall in love with her. Just as she hadn’t meant to fall for him. Life was full of accidents that, in retrospect, seemed inevitable.

Then that same year, she’d convinced him to become someone else, and so Robert Lawrence was born.

A man untethered to the past. She’d written three books which they’d released through Scarecrow Press, but over time, the publishing world changed.

People didn’t buy books anymore, at least not ones that favored quality over quantity.

True crime had become particularly saturated.

Every psychopath with a body count had their own Netflix special, their own dedicated podcast series.

Death had become content, packaged and consumed like fast food.

And the stories about his father’s case were the worst offenders of all.

Amateur sleuths who proudly proclaimed ‘the beach burial victims deserved justice’ while massacring basic facts about the case.

Podcasters who invented theories without understanding the first thing about tidal patterns or sand compaction.

Profilers who claimed to know the killer’s mind without ever setting foot on this beach.

The story needed a reset. Something to wake people up.

So together, him and Sarah had concocted this masterful story.

The victims were the detectives obsessed with old cases.

The killers were the ghosts of the original killers themselves.

What if these chronic failure cases experienced what their victims had felt?

What if the investigators became the investigated? The hunters, the hunted?

And Sarah – the woman who’d write this story – was dead center of it all.

It would be a true crime book with unprecedented insider access. Not just to the killer’s mind, but to his methodology, his motivations, his very soul. A book that would revitalize the genre, rescue their finances, and finally give Sarah the recognition she deserved.

Nathan glanced at his watch. 9:52 PM.

It hadn’t been easy to convince Sarah. She’d balked at first, horrified by what he proposed.

But Nathan understood her in ways no one else did.

He knew the desperation that gnawed at her.

Her books sold enough to keep her afloat but not enough to thrive.

The advances grew smaller with each contract, Scarecrow Press teetered perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy, as it did now.

They lived in a world where true crime podcasters with no credentials beyond a microphone and an opinion could draw audiences in the millions while serious researchers like Sarah struggled to make rent.

Their financial issues got worse. Nathan owned his apartment but couldn’t sell it due to it being on an unlicensed road. Nobody wanted it. Sarah rented a place too, not wanting to live with her boyfriend because she needed to be near her sick mother.

Hence the third, perfect victim. With Thomas Webb out of the way, Sarah would inherit his house.

A week later, she’d agreed to help him. Reluctantly at first, then with growing investment as the plan took shape.

Sarah understood narrative better than anyone he’d ever met.

She saw the elegance in what he proposed: a story they controlled from beginning to end.

But somewhere on this murderous journey, something had changed in him. The killings stopped being merely instrumental and became fulfilling in themselves. Each death felt like balancing some cosmic ledger. They were debts repaid to the universe that had taken his father and left his killer free.

He felt clean for the first time since he was ten years old.

Nathan checked his watch. Any minute now.

Would he get out of this unscathed? He didn’t know anymore.

If Mia Ripley suspected Sarah Webb of being a killer, then it’s possible that other people also knew.

But he was an editor. Sarah was an author.

People like them didn’t commit murder. The backlash from Sarah’s fans would be enough to secure them verdicts of innocence because, after all, there would be no forensic evidence tying him to the scene.

He’d been obsessively careful. Sarah herself hadn’t even been at any of them. He’d done the dirty work himself.

In the distance, a vehicle pulled up to the access road that led to this isolated stretch of beach. The engine died, then a car door opened and closed.

Right on time.

Twenty-six years after a boy with a purple book learned that monsters were real, the monster he’d become prepared to close the circle.

After all, she had to come.

He’d already dug the hole.