Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Shay
Bernice’s cabin was quieter in the morning.
Not peaceful quiet, more like… waiting quiet.
The kind of quiet that wrapped around you and made you think too hard. Sunlight filtered through the curtains in soft, hazy stripes, and dust hung in the air like it hadn’t been disturbed in decades, even though we’d been crawling all over this place yesterday.
I sat on the floor with my back against the couch, legs crossed, with a shoebox of photos balanced on my thighs.
Prime sat behind me on the couch with his legs on either side of my shoulders.
Close enough that I could feel his warmth at my back.
Every so often, his breath brushed the top of my head as he leaned in to look over my shoulder.
I noticed it more than I wanted to admit.
Anchor sat in the recliner across the room with his eyes locked on the open door like he expected someone to come flying through it. He didn’t blink much. Didn’t talk much either. Just sat there, hands clasped loosely on his knees, with his jaw ticking every few seconds.
Pearl was curled up on the other end of the couch, thumbing through another cardboard box that held what looked like a lifetime’s worth of paper clutter. Receipts, torn envelopes, random lists, folded pages from old notebooks were all organized into piles that made sense only to Bernice.
It looked like chaos, but I had a feeling she had known exactly where everything was.
“Why did she keep this?” Pearl muttered, holding up a faded receipt. “It’s from 2001. She bought a wrench and a bag of marshmallows.”
Prime huffed. “Sounds like Bernice.”
Pearl shook her head and smiled a little. “She saved everything. I swear she kept every receipt she ever got.”
She set it aside and dug deeper.
“This one’s from 1997. Sardines and red nail polish.” She stared at the paper. “What the hell was she doing with that combination?”
A tiny laugh slipped out of me. “Pearl, you knew her better than I did. You tell me.”
Pearl paused at that, her mouth softening. “I’m… really sorry you never got to know her.”
The apology hit deeper than I expected.
I shook my head. “Don’t be. I’m not mad. I’m just… trying to figure out what I should feel.”
And how I should feel about all of this. My grandmother, this island, my mother, the lies, and the memories clawing at the edges of my mind.
Pearl reached out and brushed my arm. “She would’ve loved you.”
I swallowed hard and looked down at the pictures in my hands—photos of Bernice younger, holding me as a baby while laughing beside my mom.
“I wish I remembered her,” I whispered.
Prime’s hand came down gently on my shoulder. “You don’t have to force it,” he said quietly above my head. “Whatever you remember, you remember. Whatever you don’t… we’ll figure out.”
I nodded and let his voice soak into my skin. It helped—more than I wanted to admit.
I lifted another stack of photos, flipped through them slowly, and tried to take in faces I’d never known I was missing. My fingers brushed a picture of Bernice painting on a porch somewhere, her hair wild and her smile bright.
She felt familiar in a way that made my heart ache.
Pearl gasped suddenly.
“What?” Anchor asked sharply.
Pearl held up a yellowed, wrinkled piece of newspaper. “I didn’t know… I didn’t know there was a murder on the island?”
Anchor’s entire posture changed.
He sat forward. “What?”
“Here.” Pearl shook the clipping a little. “It says Caleb Token died from drowning on the island. They think it was suspicious, but they didn’t have enough information to say more.”
Caleb? That was a name I had never heard before.
Prime leaned over and grabbed the clipping. “That was twenty-three years ago.” His voice lowered as he looked at me. “You would’ve been three, right?”
My mouth went dry.
Pearl’s brows pulled together. “You don’t think… this is what your memory is about, do you?”
I closed my eyes.
And just like that, the darkness behind my lids flickered into pieces of something half-real, half-buried.
A woman screaming.
A man yelling.
The sound echoing through trees.
I dug deeper. Pressed harder.
Lights.
Headlights pointed at the water.
Shadows spilled across the lake. Lanterns, maybe? Or flashlights?
There was chaos in the memory, but everything was blurry and out of reach, like I was watching it through water.
“Shay?” Prime’s voice called me out of my haze.
“I can’t see anything else,” I whispered, and opened my eyes.
Pearl scooted closer. “What about what the person was saying? Were they words? Or just screaming?”
I searched the edges of the disappearing memory harder than I should have.
“The guy was just… screaming,” I said slowly. “Like he was in trouble. Or… hurt.”
“What about the woman?” Prime asked quietly.
I squinted and tried to pull her voice from the foggy edges of the memory. But it was just noise—sharp, terrified noise. “Just screaming too,” I whispered. “I can’t remember if she was saying anything.”
The frustration hit me all at once.
I opened my eyes and let out a shaky breath, defeated. “I’m sorry.”
Prime’s hands moved gently up my arms. “Hey. Don’t apologize. Memories don’t work on command.”
I leaned back again and looked up at Prime. “I want to remember. I want to know.”
“I know,” he murmured. “And you will. Or we’ll find out another way.”
Pearl pointed to the newspaper clipping. “You might not have to remember everything. If they have an article about it, there has to be a police report somewhere.”
Anchor nodded slowly from the recliner. “Vin can reach out to his contact at the station. See if he can dig up anything old enough to match this.”
He stood, stretched his back, and reached a hand down to Pearl. She grabbed onto it and let him haul her up to her feet. She leaned into him and sighed contentedly. “There are a ton of clippings in there,” Pearl said. “I can go through more tonight.”
“I can help,” I offered and shifted the photo box off my lap.
“No,” Prime said immediately.
I craned my neck to look up at him again. “What? Why not?”
“Because,” he said, voice firm but warm, “you need a break from this. All of it. You had more dumped on you today than anyone should in a lifetime.”
“I can handle it,” I said, even though my body felt like overcooked spaghetti.
Prime raised an eyebrow. “Can you?”
I wilted. “I mean… probably?”
Pearl snorted.
Prime leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, and his eyes locked onto mine. “You can help tomorrow. Tonight, you’re taking a break.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but the exhaustion hit me like a truck.
The emotional heaviness.
The shock.
The confusion.
The grief for a grandmother I never knew I lost.
The fear.
The hope.
All of it tangled together until my body wanted to shut down and reboot.
So instead of pushing back, I let my shoulders drop.
“Fine,” I said quietly. “But what am I supposed to do tonight?”
Pearl grinned. “Have a movie night,” she said, with a wiggle of her eyebrows. “Just you and Prime.”
Heat shot through my face so fast my ears burned.
Prime went very still behind me.
Anchor blew out a long-suffering sigh. “Pearl…”
“Nope.” Pearl crossed her arms. “They deserve something nice tonight. And I’m tired of watching these two orbit around each other like confused planets. Let them relax.”
Prime cleared his throat behind me. “We—uh—we don’t have to—”
Pearl waved him off. “You’re doing it. End of discussion.”
Anchor shook his head like a man defeated. “Christ.”
I stared at my hands, with my cheeks still flaming.
A movie night with Prime. Just us.
My stomach fluttered with nerves, and warmth twisted together in something soft and terrifying.
Prime shifted behind me, and his knee brushed my shoulder.
“Only if you want to,” he murmured.
I turned and met his eyes.
I did. God, I did.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I want to.”
His lips twitched into the smallest smile.
Pearl clapped her hands once. “Perfect! Movie night it is.”
I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring or what the past would uncover next, but for tonight I wasn’t going to drown in memories or fear.
Tonight belonged to Prime and me.
And for the first time since stepping foot on this island, I was looking forward to something.