Chapter 1: The Bones of the Past

I don't know why I came back.

Maybe it's the pull of the sea—that nagging ache in the pit of my belly, both soothing and suffocating. Or maybe I've spent five years fleeing specters—cases that were useless and didn't deserve solution—and somehow, this one cuts me deeper. This one bites.

The bones were real, fresh, and the remains of a person I knew.

Haven's Cove is unchanged since I left. Air is still thick with the smell of rotting kelp, sea salt, and something older—something blacker that clings to your clothing, hair, and skin. Every night without fail, fog seeps in and washes over the streets, wrapping the town in its big gray fingers. The lighthouse stands a good ways off, no longer high but battered, paint peeling like scabs from rusty walls. And the natives? They still hide behind curtains, muttering to each other as you pass by, eyes following but pretending not to know what they know better than they say. Always watching. Haven's Cove never liked strangers, but it will not let go once it gets its claws in you.

I should have stayed away. Should have listened to my own damn good advice. But the past pulled me back like a rip tide—my mother's obsession, my aunt's disappearance, the town's unspoken conspiracy of silence. And now I'm here.

My childhood bed's lip creaks under my body as I regard walls that were not recently repainted since before I learned to drive. My hands trace along the wooden rim of the nightstand, catching on splinters as they find a small, dog-eared book—my mother's journal.

The one she kept from me. Before I found it.

It is sacrilegious to open one. The opening page reveals to us her distraught writing, letters so inscribed they can almost cut into the page:

They drowned her, but the tide always retrieves what's real.

Her last message, written weeks before they discovered her dead and cold. She never ceased searching for Clara, never ceased scratching the wound of my aunt's vanishing. I wish I knew why. Then, I had my own nightmares. Now, those nightmares were children's fancies compared to what is coming for me here.

I shut the journal, my hands betraying me with trembling. This town. These people. This goddamn mystery. Too much. But there's no going back.

The bones were only the beginning.

Swirling up from bed, I migrate to the window. The horizon punches me in the face with its familiarity—ruined piers extending out into fog-grimed waters. The same docks where Mom inculcated me with how to bait fish hooks. The same waters which devoured Clara and left just a hollow-eyed specter of my mother remaining. For a decade, I asked myself whether I'd ever know the answer. Now, questioning is an extravagance that I can ill afford.

There's a knock on the door—a three-tap soft knock that makes my heart skip beats for reasons I'm not ready to admit. I know that knock.

"Mac," I whisper, though "Thomas MacAllister" is the name that suits all these years later. The retired detective who botched my aunt's case. A man who tips on guilt and carries his failures around like a second skin. For all his broken pieces, Mac has something I need: answers.

My feet drag across creaking boards to the door. When I push it open, he stands in the way—broad-shouldered and tall, his face a topographic map of regret. His gray hair stands up where worried hands have combed through it, and those same hands now fill the pockets of his dirty jacket. He doesn't say anything at first, only studies me like a crime scene that he's attempting to read.

"You don't belong here, Ellie," he finally growls, his voice like crushed gravel.

"Hilarious," I say, sidestepping into silent offer of space. "I thought I was the one who quit."

He stands where he is, his eyes scanning over my shoulder as if for the exit signs.

"This place hasn't changed," he grumbles, but we both know he means it about something more than frayed wallpaper or clogged corners.

I face back toward the desk where Mom's journal is, without pausing to check if he follows me. "I'm not going to tell you to go away, Mac. But you might want to think twice about wading any deeper."

His boots creak on the floorboards as he steps in reluctantly. His eyes are on the journal, then on my face.

"You can't trust anyone here," he mutters, barely loud enough to be heard. "Not even me."

I smile, even though there is nothing funny here. "You might be the only honest man in Haven's Cove, Mac. You take ownership of your lies from the beginning."

A silence between us, pulled as tight as the fishing line. When he finally speaks, his voice shakes. "I shouldn't help you. This town—Christ, Ellie—it's built on bones and bullshit."

"I know."

I slam the journal closed with a crack that startles him. The words are burned into my brain. The lies. The secrets. And one truth: Clara did not vanish. She was taken.

"Then why come back?" Mac asks, something close to pleading in his tone.

I stare at him, really look, for the first time since I came back to this trap of a town. "Because someone has to get to the bottom of this thing. And you're the only one who can help me."

He takes a breath, his shoulders dipping as though he's just carried an extra load. I see the years of guilt in how he stands, in how he can't look at me. He doesn't want this—not to awaken old wounds or face what he tried to drown in alcohol. But Mac can't refuse me. He never could.

"Alright," he permits, resignation pulling on the word. "But we do it my way. No stunts. No riling up hornet's nests until we know what we've got. You hear me?"

I give a nod, but we both know it's a lie. Mac might've once had a badge, but I've come to follow streams of blood wherever they lead. No matter how many doors I have to force open.

The truth is hidden in this town's rotten center, rotting there for decades in the darkness. And I'm here to excise it.

Outside, there is a tempest howl of wind through warped window frames and a trembling of glass too frequently witness to storm. The tide comes in. Those remains might have been washed up on the beach, but whatever pulled them on has waited out there down below in fog and shadow.

The Ferryman watches. So do I.

I stand in front of the window once more. Twilight creeps into the sky as the lighthouse stands dark against the approaching night. Out there, somewhere, truth is waiting. But Haven's Cove will not yield its secrets without a fight.

The Ferryman will not let me find them without a fight.

And I'm ready for that fight. I have to be. The clock keeps ticking, and the tide does not care about anyone.