Turning Point 15
The bait shop smelled like WD-40 and the ghost of minnows. I stood behind the counter, sorting hooks into rusted compartments, because sorting hooks was easier than looking at Theo. He was at the workbench, his back to me, sanding the edge of a wooden lure that didn’t need sanding. The radio played something tinny and old, a country song about a river that had never run dry. I wanted to smash it.
“We have to go public,” I said. “Today. Tomorrow at the latest.”
Theo’s hand stopped moving. The sandpaper hung in the air, a pale crescent against his knuckles. “We talked about this.”
“We talked about it. We didn’t decide anything.”
He turned. His face was smudged with sawdust, and there was a new cut on his forearm from the shattered window glass, still pink at the edges. He looked like someone who’d been sleeping in his clothes, which he had. We both had. The last three days had been a blur of photocopies and whispered phone calls and the constant, grinding fear that Cole or his father would figure out what we’d taken from the mayor’s office before we could use it.
“My mother works at town hall,” Theo said, slow, like he was explaining something to a child. “She’s been there for twenty-two years. She doesn’t know about the ledgers. She doesn’t know about the contract. If we go public without warning her, she’s going to be standing in the middle of a firestorm with no idea why.”
“She’s going to be standing in the middle of a firestorm anyway,” I said. “The contract names her department. It has her signature on the routing forms.”
Theo’s jaw tightened. “She signed those because she was told to. She doesn’t know what they were for.”
“That’s not going to matter to the town. They’re going to see her name and they’re going to assume the worst. You know how this place works. Guilt by proximity.”
He threw the sandpaper down. It skittered across the workbench and landed in a pile of wood shavings. “You don’t get to lecture me about how this place works. You left. You’ve been gone for three years. You don’t know what it’s like to live here, to have these people look at you every day and remember your brother’s face on the news.”
The words hit like a slap. I felt the heat rise in my chest, that familiar, ugly anger that I’d been carrying around like a stone in my pocket. “I remember his face,” I said. “I’m the one who put it there.”
Theo flinched. For a second, he looked like the boy I’d known at fourteen, the one who’d taught me how to skip stones across the lake’s glassy surface, who’d laughed when I’d gotten my foot stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out by my wrists. Then the hardness came back, and he turned away.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said.
“It’s what you said.”
“It’s not what I meant.”
I set down the hook I was holding. It clinked against the counter, a small, final sound. “You think I don’t know what it’s like to be looked at? You think I don’t know what it’s like to walk into the diner and have everyone go quiet? I’m the girl who sent Danny Hale to prison. I’m the girl who killed her own sister. That’s my whole biography in this town. That’s all I am.”
Theo’s back was still to me. His shoulders were rigid, the muscles in his neck standing out like cables. “You didn’t kill your sister.”
“I testified against the wrong man. I let the real ones walk. That’s the same thing.”
“It’s not.”
“It feels like it.”
The radio crackled, the song shifting to something slower, a ballad about a lighthouse keeper waiting for a ship that never came. I hated that song. I hated the way it made me feel like I was drowning in someone else’s sadness.
“My mother,” Theo said, his voice quieter now, almost a whisper. “She’s all I have left. Danny’s gone. My dad’s been gone since I was nine. If I destroy her, I have nothing.”
“You have the truth.”
“The truth doesn’t keep you warm at night.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that the truth was the only thing that had kept me going for the past three years, the only thing that had made me get on that Greyhound and come back to this dying town. But I knew that wasn’t true. The truth hadn’t kept me warm. It had kept me awake, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster like they were the lines of a map I couldn’t read.
“Danny would want you to do this,” I said.
Theo turned. His eyes were red, but he wasn’t crying. He looked like he’d forgotten how. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t use my brother against me.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you what he’d want. He was going to expose the council. He was going to tell everyone about the water. He died for it—or he went to prison for it, which is worse. And you’re telling me we should wait because your mother might be embarrassed?”
The word hung in the air between us. Embarrassed. It was too small, too soft for what we were talking about. This wasn’t embarrassment. This was the kind of truth that could tear a family apart, that could turn a town against itself, that could make people look at their neighbors and see enemies instead of friends.
Theo’s hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists, then unclenched them, then clenched them again. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ve never had to choose between the people you love and the thing you know is right.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. You left. You didn’t have to stay and watch what happened. You didn’t have to see my mother cry at Danny’s sentencing. You didn’t have to sit across from her at Thanksgiving and pretend everything was fine when we both knew you were the reason her son was in a jumpsuit.”
The words hit me like a wave. I felt the air leave my lungs, and for a second, I couldn’t speak. The shop was silent except for the radio, which had moved on to a commercial for a car dealership in the next county over.
“I know,” I said finally. My voice sounded strange, like it was coming from somewhere far away. “I know I did that. I know I’m the reason he’s there. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry every day. But that doesn’t change what we found. That doesn’t change the fact that the council is killing this town, and they’re going to keep killing it unless someone stops them.”
Theo took a step toward me. His face was close now, and I could see the stubble on his jaw, the way his eyes had dark circles under them, the small scar on his temple from the night Cole had caught us. “What if we’re wrong?” he said. “What if we go public and it doesn’t matter? What if the lake stays dry and the town dies anyway, and we’ve just made everything worse for everyone?”
“Then at least we tried.”
“Trying isn’t enough. Trying doesn’t bring back the water. Trying doesn’t bring back Danny. Trying doesn’t bring back your sister.”
I felt something crack inside me. It was small, like a hairline fracture in a glass that had been holding too much for too long. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t bring her into this.”
“Why not? You brought Danny into it.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
I didn’t have an answer. I stood there, my hands pressed flat against the counter, feeling the grain of the wood under my palms, the faint vibration of the radio through the floorboards. The shop smelled like dust and old bait and the particular mustiness of a place that had been closed for too long.
“I testified because I was afraid,” I said. The words came out before I could stop them. “I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. The police had already decided it was Danny. They had the evidence. They had the timeline. They had my sister’s blood on the bow of his boat. And I was seventeen, and I was scared, and I thought if I just said what they wanted me to say, everything would be okay.”
Theo was very still. “And was it?”
“No.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Because I didn’t know what else to do.” I looked up at him, and for the first time, I let him see all of it—the guilt, the shame, the fear that had been eating me alive for three years. “I didn’t know the boat had been tampered with. I didn’t know about the ledgers. I didn’t know any of it. I just knew that my sister was dead, and someone had to pay, and Danny was the one they were pointing at. So I pointed too.”
Theo’s face was unreadable. He stood there for a long moment, his arms at his sides, his breath slow and even. Then he said, “You were a kid.”
“So was Danny.”
“He was older. He should have known better.”
“He didn’t know anything. He was trying to save the town, and I put him in prison for it.”
Theo shook his head. “You didn’t put him in prison. The council did. They’re the ones who sabotaged the boat. They’re the ones who killed your sister. They’re the ones who made sure Danny took the fall. You were just a piece of their game.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to let the words wash over me and feel clean. But I couldn’t. The guilt was too deep, too old, too much a part of who I was.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters is what we do now. We have the evidence. We have the contract. We have the ledgers. If we wait, Cole is going to find out we took them, and then it’s over. He’ll destroy the copies. He’ll destroy us.”
Theo ran a hand through his hair. It was longer than it had been when I’d first arrived, curling at the ends, and it made him look younger, more like the boy I remembered. “I know,” he said. “I know we can’t wait forever. I just need a few more days. I need to figure out how to tell my mother.”
“You can’t tell her.”
“What?”
“If you tell her, she’s going to try to stop you. She’s going to be scared, and she’s going to do something to protect herself, and that’s going to put us all at risk. We can’t tell anyone. Not until the evidence is out.”
Theo’s eyes narrowed. “You’re asking me to let my mother walk into a fire without warning her.”
“I’m asking you to trust me.”
“Why should I?”
The question hung in the air between us. It was fair. It was more than fair. I had given him every reason not to trust me, and he had given me every reason to trust him, and I had repaid him with suspicion and fear and the weight of my own guilt.
“Because I’m not the same person I was,” I said. “Because I came back here to bury my grandmother, and instead I found the truth. And the truth is the only thing that’s going to save this town. Not the council. Not the mayor. Not the conglomerate. The truth.”
Theo was quiet for a long time. The radio had moved on to another song, something upbeat and false, a pop tune about summer love. I wanted to turn it off, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place, waiting for him to decide.
Finally, he said, “My mother is going to hate me.”
“Maybe.”
“She’s going to lose her job. She’s going to lose her friends. She’s going to lose everything she’s built for the past twenty years.”
“Maybe.”
“And it’s going to be my fault.”
I stepped out from behind the counter. The floorboards creaked under my weight, and I could feel the heat of the afternoon pressing against the windows, the sun slanting through the dusty glass. I stopped in front of him, close enough to see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes, the way his jaw was set against the words he didn’t want to say.
“It’s not going to be your fault,” I said. “It’s going to be the council’s fault. It’s going to be the mayor’s fault. It’s going to be the fault of every person who looked at that lake and saw dollar signs instead of water. You’re just the one who’s brave enough to tell the truth.”
Theo let out a breath. It was shaky, uneven, like he’d been holding it for years. “You really think we can do this?”
“I think we have to.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached out and took my hand. His palm was rough, calloused from years of working with rope and wood and the stubborn, unyielding materials of a dying town. His fingers closed around mine, and for a second, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I felt like I wasn’t alone.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We do it. But we do it my way.”
“What’s your way?”
He let go of my hand and walked over to the workbench. He picked up the lure he’d been sanding, turning it over in his hands. It was shaped like a minnow, painted silver, with a single hook at the tail. It was the same kind of lure he’d left on my grandmother’s grave.
“We do it at Founder’s Day,” he said. “The whole town will be there. The mayor will be there. Cole will be there. We project the evidence on the old drive-in screen, and we let everyone see it at the same time. No warnings. No chances for them to spin it. Just the truth, all at once.”
I thought about it. The drive-in had been closed for years, the screen still standing at the edge of town like a monument to a past that no one could afford to remember. It was the perfect place. Public. Symbolic. Impossible to ignore.
“How do we get the projector?” I asked.
“The old booth is still wired. My dad used to run it when I was a kid. I know how to work it.”
“And the evidence?”
“I’ll make copies. Three sets. One for the screen, one for the police, one for the newspaper in the county seat. Even if Cole destroys one, he can’t destroy them all.”
I nodded. It was a good plan. It was a risky plan. It was the only plan we had.
“When?” I asked.
“Saturday. Founder’s Day. Three days from now.”
Three days. It felt like both an eternity and no time at all. I thought about my grandmother, about the ledgers she’d hidden in the attic, about the way she’d marked the margins with her careful, precise handwriting. She had been waiting for this. She had been waiting for someone to finish what she started.
“Okay,” I said. “Saturday.”
Theo set the lure down on the workbench. It caught the light, glinting silver, and for a second, I could almost imagine it swimming through water that no longer existed.
“There’s one more thing,” he said.
“What?”
He looked at me, and there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t quite read. “If this goes wrong—if Cole finds out before Saturday—you need to promise me you’ll run. You’ll take the copies and you’ll get out of town, and you won’t look back.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You might not have a choice.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he shook his head. “Promise me, Wren. Promise me you’ll run.”
I didn’t want to promise. I wanted to tell him that we were in this together, that I would never leave him to face the council alone. But I looked at his face, at the lines of exhaustion and fear and hope that had been carved into it over the past week, and I knew that he needed this. He needed to know that someone would survive, even if he didn’t.
“I promise,” I said.
Theo nodded. He picked up the lure and slipped it into his pocket. Then he walked to the door and held it open for me, the afternoon light spilling in around him like water.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”
I followed him out into the heat, the door swinging shut behind us with a creak of old hinges. The street was empty, the town quiet, the lake a white scar in the distance. But somewhere beneath the cracked earth, the spring was still flowing. I could feel it, a pulse of cold water moving through the dark, waiting for us to set it free.
Three days. We had three days to save the town, or destroy it.
I didn’t know which one we’d find.
“We have to go public,” I said. “Today. Tomorrow at the latest.”
Theo’s hand stopped moving. The sandpaper hung in the air, a pale crescent against his knuckles. “We talked about this.”
“We talked about it. We didn’t decide anything.”
He turned. His face was smudged with sawdust, and there was a new cut on his forearm from the shattered window glass, still pink at the edges. He looked like someone who’d been sleeping in his clothes, which he had. We both had. The last three days had been a blur of photocopies and whispered phone calls and the constant, grinding fear that Cole or his father would figure out what we’d taken from the mayor’s office before we could use it.
“My mother works at town hall,” Theo said, slow, like he was explaining something to a child. “She’s been there for twenty-two years. She doesn’t know about the ledgers. She doesn’t know about the contract. If we go public without warning her, she’s going to be standing in the middle of a firestorm with no idea why.”
“She’s going to be standing in the middle of a firestorm anyway,” I said. “The contract names her department. It has her signature on the routing forms.”
Theo’s jaw tightened. “She signed those because she was told to. She doesn’t know what they were for.”
“That’s not going to matter to the town. They’re going to see her name and they’re going to assume the worst. You know how this place works. Guilt by proximity.”
He threw the sandpaper down. It skittered across the workbench and landed in a pile of wood shavings. “You don’t get to lecture me about how this place works. You left. You’ve been gone for three years. You don’t know what it’s like to live here, to have these people look at you every day and remember your brother’s face on the news.”
The words hit like a slap. I felt the heat rise in my chest, that familiar, ugly anger that I’d been carrying around like a stone in my pocket. “I remember his face,” I said. “I’m the one who put it there.”
Theo flinched. For a second, he looked like the boy I’d known at fourteen, the one who’d taught me how to skip stones across the lake’s glassy surface, who’d laughed when I’d gotten my foot stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out by my wrists. Then the hardness came back, and he turned away.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said.
“It’s what you said.”
“It’s not what I meant.”
I set down the hook I was holding. It clinked against the counter, a small, final sound. “You think I don’t know what it’s like to be looked at? You think I don’t know what it’s like to walk into the diner and have everyone go quiet? I’m the girl who sent Danny Hale to prison. I’m the girl who killed her own sister. That’s my whole biography in this town. That’s all I am.”
Theo’s back was still to me. His shoulders were rigid, the muscles in his neck standing out like cables. “You didn’t kill your sister.”
“I testified against the wrong man. I let the real ones walk. That’s the same thing.”
“It’s not.”
“It feels like it.”
The radio crackled, the song shifting to something slower, a ballad about a lighthouse keeper waiting for a ship that never came. I hated that song. I hated the way it made me feel like I was drowning in someone else’s sadness.
“My mother,” Theo said, his voice quieter now, almost a whisper. “She’s all I have left. Danny’s gone. My dad’s been gone since I was nine. If I destroy her, I have nothing.”
“You have the truth.”
“The truth doesn’t keep you warm at night.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that the truth was the only thing that had kept me going for the past three years, the only thing that had made me get on that Greyhound and come back to this dying town. But I knew that wasn’t true. The truth hadn’t kept me warm. It had kept me awake, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster like they were the lines of a map I couldn’t read.
“Danny would want you to do this,” I said.
Theo turned. His eyes were red, but he wasn’t crying. He looked like he’d forgotten how. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t use my brother against me.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you what he’d want. He was going to expose the council. He was going to tell everyone about the water. He died for it—or he went to prison for it, which is worse. And you’re telling me we should wait because your mother might be embarrassed?”
The word hung in the air between us. Embarrassed. It was too small, too soft for what we were talking about. This wasn’t embarrassment. This was the kind of truth that could tear a family apart, that could turn a town against itself, that could make people look at their neighbors and see enemies instead of friends.
Theo’s hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists, then unclenched them, then clenched them again. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ve never had to choose between the people you love and the thing you know is right.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. You left. You didn’t have to stay and watch what happened. You didn’t have to see my mother cry at Danny’s sentencing. You didn’t have to sit across from her at Thanksgiving and pretend everything was fine when we both knew you were the reason her son was in a jumpsuit.”
The words hit me like a wave. I felt the air leave my lungs, and for a second, I couldn’t speak. The shop was silent except for the radio, which had moved on to a commercial for a car dealership in the next county over.
“I know,” I said finally. My voice sounded strange, like it was coming from somewhere far away. “I know I did that. I know I’m the reason he’s there. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry every day. But that doesn’t change what we found. That doesn’t change the fact that the council is killing this town, and they’re going to keep killing it unless someone stops them.”
Theo took a step toward me. His face was close now, and I could see the stubble on his jaw, the way his eyes had dark circles under them, the small scar on his temple from the night Cole had caught us. “What if we’re wrong?” he said. “What if we go public and it doesn’t matter? What if the lake stays dry and the town dies anyway, and we’ve just made everything worse for everyone?”
“Then at least we tried.”
“Trying isn’t enough. Trying doesn’t bring back the water. Trying doesn’t bring back Danny. Trying doesn’t bring back your sister.”
I felt something crack inside me. It was small, like a hairline fracture in a glass that had been holding too much for too long. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t bring her into this.”
“Why not? You brought Danny into it.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
I didn’t have an answer. I stood there, my hands pressed flat against the counter, feeling the grain of the wood under my palms, the faint vibration of the radio through the floorboards. The shop smelled like dust and old bait and the particular mustiness of a place that had been closed for too long.
“I testified because I was afraid,” I said. The words came out before I could stop them. “I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. The police had already decided it was Danny. They had the evidence. They had the timeline. They had my sister’s blood on the bow of his boat. And I was seventeen, and I was scared, and I thought if I just said what they wanted me to say, everything would be okay.”
Theo was very still. “And was it?”
“No.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Because I didn’t know what else to do.” I looked up at him, and for the first time, I let him see all of it—the guilt, the shame, the fear that had been eating me alive for three years. “I didn’t know the boat had been tampered with. I didn’t know about the ledgers. I didn’t know any of it. I just knew that my sister was dead, and someone had to pay, and Danny was the one they were pointing at. So I pointed too.”
Theo’s face was unreadable. He stood there for a long moment, his arms at his sides, his breath slow and even. Then he said, “You were a kid.”
“So was Danny.”
“He was older. He should have known better.”
“He didn’t know anything. He was trying to save the town, and I put him in prison for it.”
Theo shook his head. “You didn’t put him in prison. The council did. They’re the ones who sabotaged the boat. They’re the ones who killed your sister. They’re the ones who made sure Danny took the fall. You were just a piece of their game.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to let the words wash over me and feel clean. But I couldn’t. The guilt was too deep, too old, too much a part of who I was.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters is what we do now. We have the evidence. We have the contract. We have the ledgers. If we wait, Cole is going to find out we took them, and then it’s over. He’ll destroy the copies. He’ll destroy us.”
Theo ran a hand through his hair. It was longer than it had been when I’d first arrived, curling at the ends, and it made him look younger, more like the boy I remembered. “I know,” he said. “I know we can’t wait forever. I just need a few more days. I need to figure out how to tell my mother.”
“You can’t tell her.”
“What?”
“If you tell her, she’s going to try to stop you. She’s going to be scared, and she’s going to do something to protect herself, and that’s going to put us all at risk. We can’t tell anyone. Not until the evidence is out.”
Theo’s eyes narrowed. “You’re asking me to let my mother walk into a fire without warning her.”
“I’m asking you to trust me.”
“Why should I?”
The question hung in the air between us. It was fair. It was more than fair. I had given him every reason not to trust me, and he had given me every reason to trust him, and I had repaid him with suspicion and fear and the weight of my own guilt.
“Because I’m not the same person I was,” I said. “Because I came back here to bury my grandmother, and instead I found the truth. And the truth is the only thing that’s going to save this town. Not the council. Not the mayor. Not the conglomerate. The truth.”
Theo was quiet for a long time. The radio had moved on to another song, something upbeat and false, a pop tune about summer love. I wanted to turn it off, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place, waiting for him to decide.
Finally, he said, “My mother is going to hate me.”
“Maybe.”
“She’s going to lose her job. She’s going to lose her friends. She’s going to lose everything she’s built for the past twenty years.”
“Maybe.”
“And it’s going to be my fault.”
I stepped out from behind the counter. The floorboards creaked under my weight, and I could feel the heat of the afternoon pressing against the windows, the sun slanting through the dusty glass. I stopped in front of him, close enough to see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes, the way his jaw was set against the words he didn’t want to say.
“It’s not going to be your fault,” I said. “It’s going to be the council’s fault. It’s going to be the mayor’s fault. It’s going to be the fault of every person who looked at that lake and saw dollar signs instead of water. You’re just the one who’s brave enough to tell the truth.”
Theo let out a breath. It was shaky, uneven, like he’d been holding it for years. “You really think we can do this?”
“I think we have to.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached out and took my hand. His palm was rough, calloused from years of working with rope and wood and the stubborn, unyielding materials of a dying town. His fingers closed around mine, and for a second, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I felt like I wasn’t alone.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We do it. But we do it my way.”
“What’s your way?”
He let go of my hand and walked over to the workbench. He picked up the lure he’d been sanding, turning it over in his hands. It was shaped like a minnow, painted silver, with a single hook at the tail. It was the same kind of lure he’d left on my grandmother’s grave.
“We do it at Founder’s Day,” he said. “The whole town will be there. The mayor will be there. Cole will be there. We project the evidence on the old drive-in screen, and we let everyone see it at the same time. No warnings. No chances for them to spin it. Just the truth, all at once.”
I thought about it. The drive-in had been closed for years, the screen still standing at the edge of town like a monument to a past that no one could afford to remember. It was the perfect place. Public. Symbolic. Impossible to ignore.
“How do we get the projector?” I asked.
“The old booth is still wired. My dad used to run it when I was a kid. I know how to work it.”
“And the evidence?”
“I’ll make copies. Three sets. One for the screen, one for the police, one for the newspaper in the county seat. Even if Cole destroys one, he can’t destroy them all.”
I nodded. It was a good plan. It was a risky plan. It was the only plan we had.
“When?” I asked.
“Saturday. Founder’s Day. Three days from now.”
Three days. It felt like both an eternity and no time at all. I thought about my grandmother, about the ledgers she’d hidden in the attic, about the way she’d marked the margins with her careful, precise handwriting. She had been waiting for this. She had been waiting for someone to finish what she started.
“Okay,” I said. “Saturday.”
Theo set the lure down on the workbench. It caught the light, glinting silver, and for a second, I could almost imagine it swimming through water that no longer existed.
“There’s one more thing,” he said.
“What?”
He looked at me, and there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t quite read. “If this goes wrong—if Cole finds out before Saturday—you need to promise me you’ll run. You’ll take the copies and you’ll get out of town, and you won’t look back.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You might not have a choice.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he shook his head. “Promise me, Wren. Promise me you’ll run.”
I didn’t want to promise. I wanted to tell him that we were in this together, that I would never leave him to face the council alone. But I looked at his face, at the lines of exhaustion and fear and hope that had been carved into it over the past week, and I knew that he needed this. He needed to know that someone would survive, even if he didn’t.
“I promise,” I said.
Theo nodded. He picked up the lure and slipped it into his pocket. Then he walked to the door and held it open for me, the afternoon light spilling in around him like water.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”
I followed him out into the heat, the door swinging shut behind us with a creak of old hinges. The street was empty, the town quiet, the lake a white scar in the distance. But somewhere beneath the cracked earth, the spring was still flowing. I could feel it, a pulse of cold water moving through the dark, waiting for us to set it free.
Three days. We had three days to save the town, or destroy it.
I didn’t know which one we’d find.