Chapter Eight
The Taste of Fear
I’ve come back to the beach tonight. The tide has smoothed everything away—the footprints, the blood, even the memory of a woman who’d been silenced forever. But I don’t want to forget. The island erases its sins because it craves new stories.
It erases almost everything else.
A single footprint sits higher on the sand, untouched by the tide. Not mine. Not Lisa’s. A clean, deliberate step. Someone else returned to the scene before I did—stood here long enough for the sand to remember their weight. The island wasn’t the only thing retracing my path.
I stand where she fell and wait for the sickness to come again.
It doesn’t.
The air is crisp, the sand reset, the ocean whispering like a promise instead of a witness.
But the feeling of eyes on my back lingers.
Not guilt.
Not paranoia.
Observation.
Someone else is learning the rhythm of the tide, studying the angles, the way the body lay when I left it. Not correcting my work—just . . . noticing, cataloging. A student, not a judge.
The salty wind touches my face, and the world sharpens. I remember the way her pulse fluttered beneath my fingers . . . right beneath the left side of her throat.
There’s a moment, just before it happens, when everything clears. Sound folds inward. Breath slows. That’s the taste of it—not blood, not death, but a precise stillness. The instant when I decide.
I walk the line where the tide reaches and retreats, feeling it whisper against my feet, daring me to step in. Far off, the wind sighs through the cliffs—it knows what I’ve done, and it approves. I don’t wash away the blood anymore; I admire the pattern before the waves erase it.
There’s something pure about the moment before death.
The silence.
The hesitation.
The breath caught between a heartbeat and a choice.
That’s the moment the world tilts—when everything a person has ever been becomes possible.
When everything they’ve feared becomes irrelevant.
The fear used to be a wall.
Now I see it as a door. Once you walk through, it’s hard to remember why you were afraid of the threshold.
I used to think monsters were made of rage.
Now I know they’re carved from quiet.
I walk the shoreline until the moon sinks low. Then I climb the path back toward town. I move slow, steady, unhurried, listening to the wind’s low murmur. The houses blink awake in the dark, scattered across the hills—fragile, vulnerable. From here, Avalon looks like a handful of fallen stars.
Lights flicker behind glass as I pass. Lives shifting like goldfish in clear bowls. So fragile. So unaware. I wonder what they’re dreaming about. I wonder if they can feel me watching. It would be so easy to step closer, to slide my hand through an open window, to let the whispering guide me.
A figure stands at the top of the hill—broad-shouldered, hands on hips, posture unmistakably law enforcement. I can’t see the face. Just the stance. Just the certainty. The same kind of patient outline I’d seen watching other people’s windows, other people’s nights.
Deputies patrol these streets at night, but they don’t usually stop to stare at sleeping houses.
Or at me.
A porch light flicks on somewhere behind me. Not near the window—behind me.
A shadow shifts.
Someone else walking the quiet roads tonight, timing their steps to the same heartbeat.
I don’t turn around. Let them watch. Let them wonder whether I walk within the dark or the light. Maybe they think I’m just another insomniac drifting home.
Maybe they know better.
One window draws me closer.
The woman sleeps inside—breath shallow, hair spilling across her pillow—beautiful.
Peaceful.
I wonder if she’ll look that way after.
I don’t feel sick.
I feel alive.
I’ll be back to visit soon . . . very, very soon.
And as I step away from the window, I feel it again—another breath in the dark, not mine, not the island’s.
Someone else tasting the same fear I tasted.
Someone learning the story I’m writing, line by line, waiting for their chance to add a chapter.