He didn't let go of my arm. Not when we reached the railing. Not when I tried to twist away, my feet slipping on the wet deck. Not when I sobbed his name one last time.

He just shoved.

The world inverted. Sky became water became sky. I saw the yacht's white hull tilt sideways, saw faces lean over the railing in a slow-motion blur, and then the Atlantic hit me like a fist.

Cold. God, the cold. It punched every thought out of my head and replaced it with animal panic. My mouth opened to scream and salt water poured in, choking, burning. My dress tangled around my legs. The diamond necklace was a weight dragging me down.

I clawed at the surface. My arms thrashed. My lungs were on fire.

I wasn't in the Hamptons anymore. I was eight years old on a muddy riverbank, watching the East River swallow my father whole. I was pressing his whistle into my palm so hard it left marks. I was waiting for him to come back. Waiting. Waiting.

He never came back.

The water closed over my head and I went under. Darkness. Pressure. The muffled thud of my own heartbeat in my ears. I kicked and broke the surface again, gasping, choking, screaming words that came out as nothing but salt and terror.

"Jett!" I tried to yell. "Jett, please—"

Above me, the yacht's lights blurred into smears of gold. Faces lined the railing. I couldn't tell if they were watching or looking away. I couldn't tell if anyone was moving. The music still played. I could hear it, faint and distorted, bleeding through the water like a dream I couldn't wake up from.

Then I heard the splash.

Relief flooded through me, hot and desperate. He came. He came for me. He was going to pull me out. He was going to say he was sorry. He was going to hold me and tell me it was over and I would forgive him because I always forgave him, because that's what love was, wasn't it? Enduring. Forgiving. Waiting.

I saw his head break the surface ten feet away. Water streamed off his hair. His eyes locked onto mine.

They weren't soft.

They weren't scared.

They were furious.

He swam toward me with hard, efficient strokes, and I reached for him, my hand outstretched, fingers grasping at nothing. "Jett, I can't—I can't swim, please, I—"

He reached me.

His hand closed around the back of my head.

And he shoved me under.

The world exploded into black. Water filled my nose, my mouth, my throat. I tried to scream and choked on salt. My hands flew up and found his wrist, his forearm, clawing, pulling, trying to break free. He didn't let go. His grip was iron. His fingers tangled in my hair and held me down like I was something that needed to be drowned, something that needed to be silenced.

I thrashed. My nails dug into his skin. My legs kicked at nothing. The pressure in my chest built and built until I thought my ribs would crack.

This wasn't an accident.

This wasn't a rescue.

This was punishment.

My vision started to gray at the edges. My lungs screamed. My body begged me to open my mouth, to breathe, to take in anything even if it killed me. My hands were still on his wrist but they were weakening, the strength draining out of me like water through a sieve.

And then my fingers found the chain at my throat.

The diamond necklace. The one Jett had given me. The one I wore over the whistle because he told me to, because he said the whistle was garbage, because he said if I wanted to be a Patterson I needed to stop clinging to trash.

But the whistle was still there. Hidden. Always hidden.

My hand closed around it.

The metal was cold and small and battered, and I held it the way I'd held it fifteen years ago on a riverbank with mud sucking at my shoes and my father's voice in my ears—*hold onto this for me, sweetheart*—and I gripped it so hard the edges cut into my palm.

I held it.

I held it.

I held it.

The gray at the edges of my vision turned black. The pressure in my chest stopped hurting. My body stopped fighting. My hands went slack around the whistle but my fingers stayed closed, locked, like rigor mortis setting in early.

Somewhere far above me, Jett let go.

I felt his hand release my hair. Felt the water shift as he kicked away. Felt myself sinking, slow and heavy, the yacht's lights fading into pinpricks and then nothing.

I sank.

And the last thing I held onto in this world was my father's whistle, the one he pressed into my hand before the water took him.

The same water that was taking me now.

Daddy's coming right back, he'd said.

I waited.

I waited.

And then I stopped waiting.

I let go.

I didn't feel myself leave my body. One second I was sinking, my fingers locked around the whistle, and the next second I was above the water, looking down at everything like a bird that had forgotten how to want anything.

I saw Jett first. He was hauling himself up over the railing, water sheeting off his shoulders, and a crew member was already there with a towel, holding it out like this was normal, like this happened every night. Jett took it. He rubbed it over his hair, once, twice, and then he smoothed his collar flat with two fingers. His hands moved fast. Practiced. The same way they moved when he checked his reflection in a dark window before walking into a room.

He didn't look at the water. Not once.

I watched him turn toward the party like a man walking back onstage after a costume change, and I thought, *he's not even going to look for me.* I waited for the thought to hurt. It didn't. I just noted it, the way you'd note the weather.

Blair was already moving toward him, champagne flute in hand, the bubbles catching the deck lights. She had a smile on her face like she'd been rehearsing it the whole time he was under.

"She'll surface," she said, and laughed, soft and easy. "She always makes everything so dramatic."

Jett took the glass from her hand. His fingers were still wet. He didn't say anything back, but he didn't correct her either.

The music started again. Somebody had paused it, I realized. Now it came back up, the bass sliding under everyone's feet, and people who had gone quiet a minute ago picked their conversations back up like nothing had snapped in half.

I hung there above it all, weightless, and looked for myself in the water. I found her — found *me* — a pale shape drifting below the surface, dress ballooning slow around her legs, hair fanned out like something growing in the dark. My hand was still closed. Even from here I could see that. Fingers curled tight around nothing anyone else could see.

I thought I would feel something looking at that. Grief, maybe. Fear. I had spent fifteen years afraid of water and now I was floating over an entire ocean of it and I felt nothing. Not one thing. It was the first time in fifteen years my chest didn't ache.

Blair's phone was still up. I could see the little red dot glowing on the screen from here, the counter ticking upward, and underneath it a river of comments scrolling too fast to read — question marks, then more question marks, then something that looked like *wait what* typed over and over by different strangers in different corners of the world who understood, before anyone on this boat did, that something had gone wrong.

Trevor's phone was in his pocket. Whatever he'd filmed was already saved there, sitting quiet, waiting.

I watched Jett laugh at something someone said. It came out too loud, cracked at the edges, like a pane of glass right before it goes. He drank. He laughed again. He was performing ease so hard I could see the seams of it from up here, and I thought, distantly, *he's scared.* Not for me. For himself. For the story he was going to have to tell.

Minutes went by. I don't know how many. Time didn't move the same way anymore.

The laughter kept getting louder, and then it started to fray. I watched him glance toward the railing. Just a flick of his eyes, quick, like checking a stove he thought he'd left on. Then another glance. Then he wasn't talking to anyone anymore. He was just standing there, glass tilted in his hand, staring at the black water like it might give something back if he looked hard enough.

"Saige?" His voice went out over the railing, light at first, almost bored. Nothing answered but the slap of the hull against the waves.

"Saige." Sharper now. His knuckles went white around the flute.

I watched the crack finally reach his voice. Just a hairline. Just enough.

He turned back to the deck fast, too fast, and smiled at no one in particular. "She's fine," he said. "She's just being dramatic. She always does this."

Nobody answered him.

I could see it from up here — the way his hand shook so hard the champagne rippled against the glass, little gold waves catching the deck lights. A few guests had stopped talking. A woman near the bar had her arms crossed tight over her chest, watching him instead of the water, like she already knew which direction the danger was actually coming from.

I looked at him — really looked, the way I used to look at him when I thought looking hard enough would make him look back — and for the first time, I didn't feel anything reaching toward him at all.

Below us, the water kept holding what was left of me, patient, the way it had been patient with my father fifteen years ago.

It would give me back eventually.

It just wasn't in a hurry.