Page 22

TWENTY-TWO

EMILY

I’m underwater, but I’m not swimming or struggling. I’m floating in Lake Superior, or maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m somewhere between life and death, someplace where the fuzzy edges of my vision blur and the sounds of Ryder and Killian fighting on the dock above me fade to nothingness.

I tell myself to open my eyes, to fight, but instead I’m sinking, weightless. I hear something—a voice, deep toned and desperate, calling for me, and then it disappears, replaced by the distant sound of my mother’s voice, as tinny and warm as if it were pulled straight from a memory.

“Emily,” I hear, and I swear I feel the warm pressure of my mom’s hand in mine, squeezing me tight like she did when I was a little girl and got spooked by a thunderstorm.

I knit my fingers through hers, even though I know I’m just remembering , or hallucinating, like a halfway-conscious lucid dream. Because of course Mom’s not here, but she was once, and I remember it. I feel her, the same way I feel my brain aching and swelling and responding to the all-consuming pain of Killian hitting me with his gun.

“Emmy,” another voice sounds, and it’s deeper than my mom’s. Closer. “ Emmy .”

My eyes are still closed, I know it, and yet I can see, not just underwater but everywhere. I can see Dad, right in front of me, smiling at me like he always did, with that wide, easy grin that reaches all the way up to the corners of his eyes. It makes no sense, of course it doesn’t, but my neurons keep firing and resting and firing again, and there he is, plain as day.

Dad.

My heart cracks open at the sight of him before me, and I know he’s not here , not really, because I remember picking the outfit he would wear for his funeral, and crying with Brooke as we organized his belongings, and burying my head in my hands as I sat in the recliner where he always listened to baseball on the radio, wondering how I was ever going to make it in a world where he no longer existed.

But here he is regardless, whether through a memory or my imagination, and relief floods me as I realize that everything is okay now. I don’t have to be afraid; my dad is here. My dad is here . And there’s so much I want to tell him—I love you, I miss you, I’m sorry —but trying to say the words aloud is like trying to cartwheel through quicksand. So I just think them instead, think about how I wish Dad had found the diamond instead of me, because he would have known what to do with it and how to protect Ryder. I think about what I read in Dad’s letter— I dreamed of a life of adventure, and instead, I got minutiae —and how I wish I had been different so that his life could have been different, too. I think about how deeply I regret letting him down when he asked me to come to Isle Royale, how badly I wish I could reverse time and give him his big adventure.

“Emmy,” he says, and I know this is all my brain trying to make sense of my grief and my fear and Killian hitting me over the head, but I don’t care. Because Dad is smiling at me, that warm, everything’s-okay smile, and all that exists is him and me and the endless love that binds us together, the love that lives on beyond death.

“Emmy,” he says, his tone bearing the same quiet patience it did when he helped me memorize my multiplication tables and taught me how to drive and listened to me describe, in excruciating detail, my ranking of every Disney Channel Original Movie from worst to best. “You don’t need to be sorry. Because I got to be your dad. I get to be your dad. And that’s the greatest adventure anyone could hope for.”

I know I’m delirious, hallucinating, whatever description my medical textbooks would give the intricate cascade of synapsing neurons happening inside my brain right now, but it doesn’t matter. I know I’ll cling to those words for the rest of my life, for all the days I live on after this and all the adventures I have until I see Dad again.

The sounds from above the surface of the water get louder, sharper, and an aching tightness fills my lungs. I know without knowing that I’m going to come to, to return to reality, and the realization is both a relief and a tragedy.

“Listen to me, Emmy,” Dad says, his voice getting so fuzzy and faint I have to strain to hear it. “Focus on what’s real. Okay? Focus on what’s real .”

I want to ask him what he means, want to tell him all about Sharp’s last breaths and Killian’s cruelty and the devastated look on Ryder’s face when Killian hit me with his gun. But of course I can’t, not really, because this is all just a strange, beautiful trick my brain’s playing on me as it tries to rewire itself back to consciousness.

“Emily!”

And I don’t understand what Dad meant, because my head is swirling and I can’t tell what’s real or imaginary any more than I can use the stars to find my way home.

“Emily!” the voice repeats, and the tightness in my chest aches, peaking, just as someone wraps an arm around me from behind and yanks my head out of the water.