Prologue
MAXIM
Four Years Earlier
I’m standing on the beach in the Hamptons, looking out at the swirling gray sea thousands of miles away from my home. My heart has been ripped out of my chest as the stormy sea crashes against the shore, mimicking my melancholy.
How can she be dead?
I only spoke to her this morning. I don’t understand how this all happened.
Elena was excited to be getting out of Manhattan for the weekend, away from school and the grueling hours spent training to be a ballerina.
She and her childhood best friend, Anna, had been invited to an end-of-summer party in the Hamptons.
She had told me how excited she was going to the party put on by a Manhattan influencer she has become friends with, and was giddy with excitement over meeting a heap of celebrities that were going to the event.
It worried me her excitement over that life, a world away from our home in Sochi, a town that overlooks the Black Sea.
Sergei, my co-worker, mentor, and Anna’s father, stands beside me.
“I don’t believe it, Maxim.” He shakes his head.
“Nothing makes sense. Why would they have gotten into the surf when they don’t know how to swim?
I don’t believe my little girl is gone. I won’t accept it.
They never found their bodies. Until they do, I have hope. ”
A flash of lightning streaks across the sky.
I keep staring at the storm rolling in. Witnesses said they saw the girls go into the water but never saw them come out.
I wish I had faith like Sergei does, but the police, coast guard—everyone—has been out combing the sea until it became too treacherous.
It’s like they just vanished into thin air.
What happened, Elena?