Together, they leaped for one of the arms of the dock, scrabbling against the rough wood for purchase. The Styrofoam under the wood squeaked, crumbling to bits under their feet. In a panicked surge of strength, June got a foothold on the dock and wrenched herself up. Her nails felt like they’d be torn from her fingers by the effort of hanging on to the wooden pillar. She reached for Lark, who was hanging, quickly losing purchase above the water. She screamed again, but it might as well have been a silent film in that noise. Their boat spun in a slow-motion swizzle away, toward the oncoming danger, then, picked up in its approach, it came hurtling back toward them like a missile.

  June caught Lark’s wrist. All that energy that never knew where to go, all that bundled fire, June unleashed it and yanked Lark up beside her, anchoring them together with an arm around Lark’s waist. Stay. The word—the need—thrummed through her body. Stay with me.

  “Brace for impact,” a man yelled from the end of the dock. People ran again, abandoning their boats, scattering for safety.

  As one bore down on the other, the movement of the dock seemed almost sluggish, a smooth, slow-motion arc. June held Lark closer, bracing them together. The remaining boats of F Dock seemed to strain away, pushing and pulling on ropes that held dreadfully steady.

  “Close your eyes,” June pleaded. And with a screech that shook the air, the docks crashed together.

  Wood splinters the size of tire irons exploded around them, the unholy screech of metal rending against metal, glass shattering, a sudden flare of boat horns. Beneath their feet, planks cracked, and they were suspended in air—then falling—when the dock beneath them folded. And June wrapped Lark tighter until they could have fused, bone to bone, rib to rib, heart to heart.

  Still, her body screamed: Stay. Stay.

  Stay.

  Stay.

  * * *

  Face-to-face with a thunderstorm, Cassie froze. Catfish’s eyes, this close, were pieces of flint. Catfish took a breath, and with it, lightning crashed dangerously close, enough that Cassie felt it sting across the surface of her skin.

  Catfish didn’t want to leave the water. She was not its. It was hers. She had loved it, and now, she was everywhere in it, and not a thing happened on the lake that Catfish didn’t feel.

  “Then what do you want from me? If you don’t need help, why do you need me? Please,” Cassie asked, settled on her heels. “Is it because I’m—I’m his granddaughter? Just tell me. I don’t know what to do, Catfish.” She was begging now, five years old again and afraid to be left alone by the older girl. “Help me understand.”

  Catfish’s eyes were so intent, boring into her like fishhooks, and Cassie reached farther over the water.

  Catfish’s lips parted, and though they didn’t move, Cassie heard it, a thread of a sound on the storm’s back. “Give.”

  A warm hand touched her shoulder and pulled her back. “Cassie.”

  She turned, blind with rainwater. Bolt stood on the shore so close behind her that she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t heard him. Compared to everything else, and the water soaking through her, he was startling, a blanket after a snowstorm, a mug of hot chocolate in the dead of a winter night.

  “Come out of the water.” His grip on her twitched tighter. “Please. You don’t like it.”

  “But she—but she’s there,” Cassie pleaded with him. “I swear she is. She’s right there, Bolt.”

  “I know.” Bolt’s mouth was grim and flat—pained, Cassie realized after a moment. Why was he in pain? His gaze slid past Cassie to the girl in the water and immediately away again, his face blanched and ill, just on the verge of panic. “I see her. Cassie. Please.”

  But Cassie felt that cold whisper again. “Give me.” She let the water draw her back, away from Bolt, to Catfish’s angry stare.

  And she fell again out of time and into Catfish’s grip.

  Into a warm, sunny day and dry land, high above a riverbank, where at the base of a flowering sapling, Catfish sat curled around something she held in her lap—a box of smooth, polished wood with bright brass fixtures. There was a knife in her hand. She was carving into the box, and Cassie already knew the word.

  Pearl.

  And she knew what had stirred Catfish so deeply that the lake had bled, that her fragile peace had shattered, that ghosts long laid to rest had risen again.

  Somewhere, either beside her or decades away, Bolt screamed her name, pulling on her shoulder. Cassie fumbled back, found his hand, and squeezed. “There’s a box in my bedroom. Please get it.”

  Pearl.

  That pearl rush was like a miracle. Not just an accident, Grandad had said. Gave us all some hope for the future.

  To mark what the box held? What was it for? Catfish, the girl of the pearls, the girl who could dive fifty feet, the girl who could crack open a freshwater mussel and find riches inside, who had found so many that people said they spilled out of her pockets in a frozen rain.

  But when Catfish raised her head from the chest, it was to wipe tears off her cheeks. She bent over it again, working on the curve of the fourth letter.

  She was already sick with yellow fever. The end couldn’t be far from her now.

  Catfish had already dug a hole. Upturned, new dirt piled around the tree roots, a muddy trowel laying at her side. It was a deep hole. Dirt clung to her skin almost to her shoulders.

  To bury riches, she must have worried they would be stolen from her. She carved her secret into wood, for everyone to see, but then buried it in as deep a hole as a girl could dig. Was this what she’d urged Grandad to find? A box buried under the tree where the two of them liked to meet? Grandad had said the final lake was bigger than intended after a terrible storm. A problem, he said, with the locks. A freak accident, flooding the land too soon after three days of stormy weather.

  It was Catfish’s salvation, her hope for the future, never meant to be buried so deep that it might have never been found but for a single girl disturbing the waters for a single night in a faraway summer.

  “I don’t understand,” Cassie said desperately, though Catfish wouldn’t hear.

  Catfish finished the last letter and kissed the top of the box. Her tears caught in the wood grain. She reached into her collar and pulled out a key that hung around her neck. She held the key to her lips so tightly, Cassie wondered if Catfish was keeping herself from opening the box again to see its treasure one more time. She bent over it again, and silently, her shoulders shook.

  White petals drifted to catch in her hair.

  Lightning crashed so close, Cassie felt it rattle her spine, and Catfish was there again, her anger shrieking on the wind. She had retreated further into the water, hands clutching at her face, bent like reeds in the wind.

  Cassie was half drowned in Catfish’s memories and still so lost. “Is it the pearls?” Cassie asked. “You want the treasure back? The one you meant for you and my grandfather?”

  For a long, furious moment, Catfish didn’t say a word.

  “The pearls aren’t in the box,” Bolt said from behind her. Despite his obvious fear, he’d done as she’d asked. In his hands was the box. He stared down at it, eyes black with pain and fear. “Grandad found them in one of his fish traps. I saw—” He looked from Cassie to Catfish. “This is what she wants?”

  Catfish’s lips trembled. “Give me—give back—back to me—give her—give her back to me.”

  Cassie looked at Catfish again. Her eyes were fixed on the box in Bolt’s arms with fierce need. The water was eternally cold out here, even in the sun, because the lake was so deep, more than two hundred feet in places now, Grandad had once told her. She could still imagine a summer day in her earliest, most sun-soaked memories, her in a puffy life vest, and Grandad, his knobby knees sticking out from damp shorts, fishing worms out of the old Crisco tin he used as a bait box and tossing lines. Do you know how deep one hundred feet is, Cassie? I used to fish this lake with my girl, and she could dive almost half that, straight down, no fear. Cassie had wanted to know if he meant Grandma, and his face had turned worn. No. Not Grandma. A childhood sweetheart.

  Catfish had come, again and again, to the shore visible from the porch of the double-wide. The porch where Grandad had liked to watch the light change. Where he had been found after the last, biggest heart attack. He was sitting in a lawn chair and gazing at the water. Cassie’s mother brought him another beer and went back inside. It had taken finding the bottle sun warm and untouched an hour later for her to realize he was gone.

  He had told Cassie so much, without saying what mattered. A childhood sweetheart. His purchase of land along the lake. A secret stash of treasures—Catfish’s treasures—kept safe in one of Grandad’s traps, their plans for a future as bright as hope, as pure as milk.

  “Oh.” Cassie realized, and in the span of a heartbeat, the rain, the thunder, the lightning, even the waves, all stopped. Cassie had held the chest in her arms. She’d soothed it with every trick she knew, every beeswax lullaby she had in her repertoire, built over years trying to rescue treasures from the deepest places. But she could not mend this hurt.

  Catfish didn’t take her eyes off that little sacred chest. Why would she? What would her life have been, if yellow fever hadn’t come, if she hadn’t succumbed to illness and drowned in a schoolhouse, locked in with the sick and dying? She would have made a new start with her lover, with their secret intact and growing inside her. They would have found themselves a new corner of the world, somewhere else with water, and had their honeymoon surrounded by so many pearls, they couldn’t all be kept in a cabinet. They would roll underfoot, forming new freshwater constellations on the floor all the time. So many that a little girl with Mediterranean skin, Fairchild eyes, and a swimmer’s heart could’ve used them as marbles, could have looped a few of her favorites on a string and given them back to her mother.

  Cassie scrambled up the bank to him. “Give it to me, Bolt,” she said.

  The rain fell again, clapping against the water, and Bolt shook his head, eyes catching on Cassie. “Don’t go out there.”

  “Bolt.” She caught his wrists, noticing blood down the side of his soaked shirt. “It’s okay now. She won’t hurt me.”

  He didn’t want to let it go, and Cassie fought for a grip on the chest, water catching in the letters Catfish had carved so long ago, the only memorial she could offer. The only gift she could give in her sickness and isolation: a name.

  Bolt gave in, his grip loosening, and Cassie cradled the chest as tenderly as she could. She waded out to the water to meet her oldest friend.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Lark didn’t open her eyes.

  F Dock’s collision sounded like a fifteen-car pileup in the Lincoln Tunnel. There was the roar of the storm, the low, bony boom of dock hitting dock, the twist and shriek of contorting metal. Clinging to each other, Lark’s face hidden in June’s neck, they huddled in the rain, waiting.

  Lark held her breath. She was afraid the next inhale would be water. June was limp in her arms.

  She realized, dimly, that it was quiet now. Dragging in a breath of new green air, she finally forced her eyes open. At first, it made no difference; the static chaos of what she saw was more confusing than the noise had been. “June,” she rasped. “June. What—”

  She didn’t answer, but Lark felt her warm breath against her neck, ragged, exhausted huffs. Lark looked about again. Somehow, they weren’t dead. A dog was even barking somewhere near. They’d been passed over.

  The docks were no longer at the water’s whim but firmly caught and held at that point of impact by a series of strong, impossibly thick roots wrapped around poles, clutching dock arms, and braced between E and F Dock like heavy clamps. In the crash zone, boats still leaked and crumpled; some were even up out of the water completely, with their prows in the air, crunched on top of one another. And yet it all hung there, suspended, the disaster halted halfway through.

  And in the center of the new growth, cradled above the surface of the water, June and Lark were sheltered so safely, so securely that there was no doubt in Lark’s mind about what had happened. After years of running, place to place, June had found her roots.

  Their salvation was half fainted in Lark’s arms, June’s breath coming out in shallow pants. Several people had screamed, and a child’s cry lingered long after the last roll of thunder overhead. Even after the hard shakes of impact and the interminable trembling of aftershock subsided, Lark hid in the ozone scent of June’s skin. The damage was bad. But it should have been catastrophic.

  With a flinch, June began to come to, a flush already high on her cheeks. Beyond a few scrapes and splinters, no damage done. Her eyes found Lark’s like moths kissing the flame. “Are you okay?”

  Lark had to laugh. “Oh, sweetheart. Am I okay? Look what you did.”

  June sat up. Tiny pink buds bloomed just behind her ear, blue ones across her forehead. As she inhaled the details of their shelter, gulped in the sight of the docks’ new architecture, Lark watched wonder sprout across her face. Around them, people stared, befuddled at the strangeness of the roots that locked the docks down and yet fused them together at that point of impact. One girl—Sammy, Mabel’s granddaughter—was bravely stepping over them toward Joe’s place, his petrified, trembling ferret held carefully in her hands.

  “I…?” June trailed off, overwhelmed.

  They might’ve hung like that forever, in their shelter of roots—except neighbors needed help. Numbed, with one stolen glance at each other, Lark and June hurtled into action, ducking between the tendrils of their protective cage to rush toward the center of the destruction. The ramp down to Echo was loose and rickety, and they slowly descended into the darkness.

  Immediately there were things to do. Several pets had escaped, panicked in the darkness. Some people hadn’t woken in their boats until the collision. At least one person was trapped beneath a fallen beam. Lark fumbled her phone light on and spotted the twins still reeling in the blackness. “Call 911,” she said to them. “Let’s see what we can do.”

  Eventually, dawn pulled itself free of the murk and bloomed on a pale steaming horizon the morning after the storm. She got Aunt Valerie on the phone, and within fifteen minutes, she and Diego were there with giant thermoses of coffee and paper cups. Mitch came a few minutes after, wearing the same clothes as the day before. They all gaped at the sculptural tangle of protective roots for a few moments, found no question worth asking, and then jumped into action.

  The rest of the hours of the night were taken up with the first response, and all of them were busy enough to avoid looking at the Big Dipper at all. The people of F Dock were in the worst state, and Valerie lent a hand as those who could climbed awkwardly onto E Dock to make it to shore. Diego managed to salvage Lou, a retired veterinarian and eager fisherman, out of his boat, which was leaking gasoline and sucking in water. Mable, who’d slept through the whole thing, found her boat loose from the dock and drifting into the lake, so Mitch went out in his fishing boat to rescue her. Some slips were just empty. The boats closest to impact were already half-sunken, back ends crumpled like tin cans. Through the blur of destruction, one that only became clearer as the sky lightened, Lark helped where she could. Firefighters and the sheriff’s department arrived through the deluge about the time that June (against Lark’s advice) was clambering up a half-toppled pillar to catch someone’s lost parakeet.

  There were many injuries. Apparently, as they learned in the minutes and hours that followed, there had been only one casualty. Jeff Daley had dived out into the storm and been crushed between a cruiser and the back of his own boat.

  By the time firefighters streamed around Lark, June had returned, splinters in her palms, one hand cupped around the parakeet clinging to her shirt. There was a mark on her neck that Lark had left there. She was so desperate to finally talk with June, to unpack the strangeness of what they had seen, to check her over for scratches, to rediscover themselves on solid ground.

  But June’s face was tight, and Lark could see before she spoke that she couldn’t stay. “I’m so sorry,” she said, squeezing both her hands. “I have to go. I promised Eliza I wouldn’t run off, and after this storm, she’s got to be worried.”

  “Thank you for staying so long. And for, you know. My life.” Lark tugged the jeweler’s loupe from around her neck and pressed it into June’s hand. “I’ll see you later.”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” June promised and darted forward, pressing two featherlight kisses against Lark’s brows, one over each eye. “First thing tomorrow.”

  Then the current of people carried them different ways. Lark nearly collided with Deputy Cyril, who was setting up a barrier between the Godfather and the rest of E Dock. “I’m sorry, but this end is off-limits,” he managed, blocking her. “This is an active investigation.”

  Aunt Valerie wrapped a bracing arm around Lark. “C’mon, honey,” she said, pressing a cup of scorching coffee into her hands. “Time to go check on your parents’ boat.”

  Lark shivered as they walked back to the boat she’d avoided for as long as dusky early morning allowed. She skimmed her hand over the front rails, keeping her eyes down. But at first glance, the Big Dipper seemed unharmed. Only one of the fraying old ropes had failed, leaving her skewed in the slip, back end slightly catty-corner. There were several long painful gashes in the faded paint. But the boat was sound—no leaks, no fatal injuries. Miraculously, Lark’s dinghy was clinging on by a thread. It was strings away from being long gone, either to the bottom of Prosper or skimming around on its own way in some hidden cove—but it had held on stubbornly and bumped its nose against the dock with every wave when she arrived.

  But the telescopes.

  Lark’s stomach buckled as they picked their way onto the front, where the first of the casualties lay in plain view. Broken glass twinkled in a Milky Way across the deck carpet. Not a single telescope turned on its tripod to watch them. “It’s not all of them,” Lark said to Aunt Valerie automatically, her throat dry. “I’ve packed so many. Twenty boxes, maybe—all safe. These are just…”