Page 4 of What We Bury

“I want to.” Easy. Open. “I was hoping to keep talking.”

Tyler chimes in from his sand throne. “Brock’s a renowned gentleman. Boy scout. Helps old ladies. Adopts felonious dogs.”

Amy bounces. “Yes. Please, Sage. I’ll sleep better.”

I open my mouth to argue and find nothing there. Every objection I have is about the last guy, not this one—and none of them are things I can say at a party without clearing the deck.

“Fine,” I say. “But if I trip in these shoes, you’re not allowed to tell anyone.”

Brock raises two fingers to his brow. “Scout’s honor.”

We do the rounds, and then it’s just us, stepping out into the warm night. The party recedes behind us, music thinning into the surf. The bluff path is sketchy in the dark—crumbling grass, switchbacks of loose gravel—and Brock falls in just behind me without comment, letting me lead.

The path ends, and the boardwalk picks up, weathered wood under my borrowed shoes. The moon is nearly full. The oceanis a sheet of dark glass exhaling white lines that dissolve at the shore. The air smells like salt and seaweed.

“So,” he says, hands in his pockets. “What brought you out here?”

“I needed a change. Amy had a room. Timing worked out.”

“From?”

“Up north.”

“Mysterious.”

“Boring. Very boring reasons. Zero intrigue.”

“I don’t believe you for a second.”

I bounce a shoulder and tuck my dark hair, tangled from the breeze, behind my ear. “You ever get used to it?” I nod at the horizon where water meets nothing. I look into the vast, inky black where the ocean meets the night and know that if you waded in and kept going, you’d never come back. Sometimes that’s a comfort.

“The beach?”

“No. The quiet.”

Brock glances at me, his face silver in the moonlight. “You find the ocean quiet?” His tone’s not mocking—it almost sounds genuinely puzzled, like I just called a bullhorn a lullaby.

“Compared to the city, this place is a whisper,” I say.

“I’ve never thought of it that way.”

We walk. My hands have come loose at my sides. My pulse calming to something almost normal.

This is good. This is fine. I’m fine.

Then he stops.

“Want to see something cool?”

He’s already veering off the boardwalk, hopping the wooden slats and landing soft in the sand. He nods toward the dark hump of the concrete jetty stretching out into the surf.

I stop on the boardwalk, torn between the warning in my gut and the pull to act normal.

“What’s over there?”

“There’s this plankton around here that’s bioluminescent. Disturb the water and it lights up—like stars in the ocean.” His excitement is infectious, boyish. “I found it under the jetty my first week back. It’s freaking cool.”

I look at the jetty.