Page 198 of Secrets Along the Shore

Like I was special.

But looking now at the old yearbooks, flipping through the rest of my years, a pattern emerged. Each year, I recognized the faces of the students I spent time with up here at the lodge.

Tessa, who used to braid my hair.

Joel, who showed me how to catch frogs at the lake.

Even Elijah, who always brought his sketchbook, drawing the pine trees with fingers smeared in charcoal.

I studied each of their photos. As I did, I realized something horrifying. Every one of them had been orphaned, just like me. We also had all been born hearing.

And none of us appeared in yearbooksbefore2003. We’d all comeafter Scanlon became headmaster. Had all of us had been a deliberate selection? Chosen…for a reason?

I set the books aside and grabbed my phone, heart pounding as I searched each name. Tessa Lang. Joel Ramirez. Elijah Boone.

Dead.

Dead.

Dead.

Tessa—car crash outside Bozeman, eight years ago.

Joel—found dead from an allergic reaction at a camp for the Deaf in Oregon.

Elijah—listed as a suicide, but the details were vague, conflicting.

My breath caught, thinking of the note stabbed into the post. A threat of death if I didn’t leave here.

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

It couldn’t be.

I looked for more of the students from the files I’d read in the study. More deaths appeared, all gone like Livvie.

Slowly, I looked at the yearbook from my preteen years, flipping back through the yearbook to the Bs, scanning the class photos. Then I saw her.

A small girl, listed as a kindergartener, with long pale hair in a pink bow. She was there when I was, but our paths wouldn’t have ever crossed as she was five years younger than me. But there she was, a student at Bayberry. Which only meant one thing.

Livvie had been Deaf.

There were no more pictures of her in the following yearbooks. She vanished…or never came back to school. But why?

I didn’t remember her at the school, but I remembered her here.

I gripped the edge of the bookshelf, trying to stay grounded. To remember more. But all I could feel was a rising nausea—the certainty that there was more for me to learn, but it was far too dangerous to try.

But I needed to know what happened to Livvie—what happened to all of us here at the lodge. Scanlon had chosen us for a reason, maybe even Livvie. Not for achievement. Not for promise. He had chosen us because we had all once been hearing.

And we had all been made Deaf after birth—except for Livvie. I wasn’t sure how she fit in. What was her story?

I looked at the bookcase again. The secrets behind it held our personal accounts. They also told of what heinous things had been done to us—things I couldn’t remember for some reason. Blocked trauma, perhaps. I needed to find out. I needed the key to that cabinet.

I needed the truth.

But how could I keep looking with a threat to my life?

And yet, how could I not?