THEY SAY SUNLIGHT increases serotonin by up to fifty percent. So why, after three weeks of cloudless skies and turquoise waves rolling in just feet from my door, did I still feel like I was drowning?
Mom was so certain this place would help. A fresh start, a new town, ocean views. But the move didn’t fix anything; time still ran on, and every sunrise was a reminder that I was the only half of my whole who would ever wake again. And little by little, I began to realize the dead live in memory and the living in tomorrow, but grief was somewhere in between where both go adrift.
Magnolia Point wasn’t big—population: 2,843. But, even I had to admit, it wore its smallness like a charm. Roads unfurled in shades of peach, mint, and pale yellow, flower boxes spilled petunias over windowsills, and the air was sun-washed and painted in watercolor.
From a distance, it looked pleasant enough. But paradise meant nothing when a storm lived in my mind, somewhere no postcard town could reach. I carried it down the picture-perfect streets, past tourists with cameras and locals with serene smiles, past hand-painted signs that promised a joyful visit in cursive. I even carried it through the shop I’d been working at, like luggage I couldn’t set down.
The bell over the door at Seaside Blooms chimed a slightly off double note. Cool air pressed against the back of my neck, and the scent of sugar and wet grass hit my nose. Metal buckets stood shoulder to shoulder on the white tile, brimming with roses, lilies, daisies, and ranunculus. Anything you could think of. Their stems grazed my arm in passing.
I tied on my apron, the loose strap slipping off my shoulder, and tucked a pen behind my ear. “Busy hands could quiet the mind,” Mom always said.
From the office came Mr. Chapman’s voice, gravelly, as if he’d been chewing the same pencil since 1983. “Taylor!” Always my last name. Never my first. “Don’t pour. Mist. You’re over-watering the ranunculus.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered. Then, softer, to the flowers, “sorry.”
He appeared in the doorway to glare at my watering can. Time had sagged his face, and his frown only further emphasized the creases that cluttered it. He pressed two fingers to his sternum once as if he might cough, but nothing came of it. Bronchitis, my brain guessed. Acid reflux, maybe. I couldn’t help diagnosing.
“Squeeze the spout before you hit the rim. You’ll drown them.”
“Yes, sir,” I said again. “Sorry,” I added, this time to him.
His gaze lingered. “Flowers know,” he muttered, half to himself. “They’ll tell you if you pay attention.” Then the office door shut, and the narrow pane of glass dulled to gray.
I lifted the can and let the arc unravel into a fine rain. The first bucket drank it in.
By ten a.m., I’d already clipped and stripped a dozen bouquets. Green flecks clung to my wrists and webbed between my fingers. When a thorn pricked the pad of my thumb, the sting startled more than it hurt. I slipped the finger into my mouth, and a metallic tang spread across my tongue. I wiped the dot of red onto my apron.
“Taylor!” Mr. Chapman called again, his voice carrying through the wall. “Check the cooler. The hydrangeas look thirsty.”
“Okay.”
The cooler’s hum rattled in my chest like a tiny motor. Cold air slid up my sleeves, prickling every hair. I misted the hydrangeas until their heads lifted. My phone buzzed in my pocket, and my eyes widened at the name floating on my lock screen.
Melissa: can we talk?
With one line, my stomach folded in on itself. I stared until the letters blurred.
I unlocked my phone and typed: Not right now. Deleted. Maybe later. Deleted that, too.
For one awful second, my fingers spelled out: Of course… I miss you, Mel. But I erased it before I could think.
My fingers trembled against the glass, and my phone felt heavy in my hand. My thumb hovered as if I might type something else. I clicked the side button and let the screen go dark, shoving the phone into my pocket.
I boxed a sympathy arrangement for a customer’s order: white roses, spray chrysanthemums, eucalyptus with its silver coins. I set it on the counter for pickup. Grief seemed to sell regularly here.
The bell over the door chimed again. A woman stepped in, perfume sharp and citrusy, clashing with the damp sweetness of the shop. For a second, my heart lurched. 
Mel?
The same hair pulled high, the same habitual way of checking her phone.
But then she looked up. Definitely not Melissa. She was taller, definitely older, and more put-together, with her crisp linen dress, lipstick the exact red of the roses. The lack of resemblance made me shake my head at myself. My brain couldn’t be this desperate.
“It’s my sister’s birthday. I need something simple but pretty,” the woman said, tapping her manicured nails against the counter. “Nothing white, but still elegant.”
“Sure,” I said, my hands reaching for roses, but Melissa’s text pulled at the back of my mind.
Can we talk? Three weeks of nothing. Not a single text, call, or even a like on my old posts. Radio silence since the day I told her we were moving. Why would now, of all times, be a good time to talk?
“Maybe something in pink?” the woman suggested. “Or yellow?”
My fingers closed around a stem of white roses. White. She’d just said no white. I set them back down, heat crawling up my neck.
What did Melissa want to talk about? The funeral? How I’d barely spoken to anyone there, including her? How I’d packed up and left, barely saying goodbye?
“Um, pink sounds—”
The thorns bit my thumb as I grabbed another stem. I jerked my hand back, a bead of blood welling up. From the office door, Mr. Chapman appeared, wiping his palms on his polo. He took one look at me sucking my thumb, at the woman’s raised eyebrows, at the scattered roses on the counter.
“Taylor, check the cooler again,” he said, already reaching for a spray of pink carnations. “I’ll handle this order.”
My head dropped, but I obliged. Avoiding all eyes, I slipped into the cooler; the cold hit me all at once. Inside, I pressed my hands against the steel shelving, breath shaky, and sucked the metallic tang from my thumb. Through the glass, I watched Chapman finish the bouquet with practiced movements, the ribbon curling just so. He slid it across the counter with a nod, already reaching for the next slip of paper before she was out the door.
When the bell chimed her exit, he turned toward the cooler. He held the cooler door open as I came out, and rather than heading straight back to his office, he stayed, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. I was beginning to understand that when he lingered, he had something more to say.
“When your mind’s somewhere else, start with your hands,” he said. “Touch the stems, feel the petals. Let the work bring you back.”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d been somewhere else entirely.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “I’ll try that.”
He continued to linger.
My eyes moved around the room before landing on a bucket of flowers behind him, their colors bleeding into each other. I grabbed the dirt-stained watering can from the floor and poured.
Still lingering.
“Your mother ever tell you about the island curse?”
My hands froze, and my eyebrows scrunched together. I glanced back at him for a teasing look, but his face was grave as ever. I set the watering can down. “Sorry?”
“The island curse.” He said it in the same flat way he said everything. “Old story. Goes back to the early settlers. The island keeps what it wants, they used to say. People come here carrying all this baggage with them, like some unfinished business. And the island has a way of making sure it gets finished.” He picked up a stray stem from the counter and turned it over in his fingers. “Some folks say it heals you. Others say it just won’t let you leave until whatever you’re carrying finds its way out.”
I blinked. “You’re serious?”
“I’m always serious.”
“That’s…” I almost laughed, but nothing came out. “That’s not a real thing.”
“Chris never mentioned it?” Something in his expression said he wasn’t entirely surprised. “She was here long enough to hear it a few times.”
“My mom told me this place had good weather and a nice school,” I said. “She left out the curse.”
“She always did have a talent for selective information.” The corner of his mouth moved in something approaching a smile, but it disappeared before I could confirm it. “Maybe she didn’t believe it either.”
“Maybe because it’s…” My voice grew soft as I tried to keep nice. “Just not real?”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“I’ve lived here forty years,” he said. “I’ve watched enough people walk onto this island with a broken heart and walk off with a mended one.” He set the stem down and moved toward the back office. “Make of that what you will.”
The door swung shut behind him. I stood there looking at the buckets of flowers. The word turned over once in my mind: curse. I pushed it back out just as fast. I picked up the watering can and went back to work.
By closing time, the shop was warmed by the bodies of a hundred flowers. I wiped the counter spotless, although I had already cleaned it. I coiled the ribbon and sorted the twine. Counted the tags twice. Mr. Chapman came out of the office and pulled a bottle of water from the mini-fridge behind the counter. Without looking at me, he held it out.
“For the bus,” he said.
“I walk.”
“For the walk, then.”
But when my hand finally closed around the bottle, his eyes flicked to me once, before he turned toward the till.

The street stretched open toward evening. A single wind chime on the porch tried one note, then quit. I took the long way home, cutting down toward the beach. The sidewalk ran right beside the parking lot for Tybee Pier, perched above the sand, so close that the tide sometimes carried sand straight across the asphalt. Small drifts crossed the curb and crunched under my shoes. The air turned cooler as the shoreline came into view, salt thick enough it coated the back of my throat. Magnolia Point opened wide beside me, the water flat and pale under the sinking light, gulls tracing slow arcs overhead. A banner for Magnolia High School sagged across a lamppost, its letters peeling but refusing to fall.
On the far side of the road, pastel houses kept their practiced line: blue, lemon, mint, coral. They looked identical except for their coats of paint, each with its own square of clipped grass, hedges trimmed to the same height. Like someone had built the street from a single template and shuffled the colors. At the end of the row sat ours, an almost cottage-like house, the shade of a soft pink like a fading blush, not candy.
I pushed the door open to find Mom at the counter, sorting papers into stacks as if order might follow. She glanced at the stains on my hands, the green smudge on my arm, then dropped her eyes.
“How’d you like your first week of work?” she asked. “You have fun with Chapman?”
“Define ‘fun.’” I slammed down the half-empty water bottle on the countertop. My words came out snappier than I meant, but I softened my tone anyway. “It was fine. Not too busy. Kinda boring.”
“Mm. But I bet it smells nice,” Mom said with a playful wink.
“Yeah. I guess.” I shrugged, keeping my lips straight. “Was he as uptight when you worked there?”
Mom looked up with a small sigh. “Hm. I’d say so. I never saw him laugh at a single joke throughout my entire high school career. Which is weird because I’m hilarious.”
I set my bag on the counter and pulled the hair tie from my wrist, and Chapman’s words drifted back up unprompted.
“He mentioned some island curse,” I said. “Is that actually something people believe around here, or was he testing the new girl?”
Mom’s hands went still on the papers.
“Mom.”
She picked them back up and squared their edges against the counter. “Chapman always did like that story,” she said, in the voice she used when she was answering a question without really answering it.
“So it’s just a story.”
“It’s an old local thing.” She didn’t look at me. “Some people take it seriously, some don’t. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Which was not the same as saying it wasn’t real, and we both knew it, and neither of us said anything else about it.
She cleared her throat, and the corners of her lips turned down. “So, I, uh, made some tea.” She held up a mug like a peace offering. “Chamomile. Lots of honey. Just how you like it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take it upstairs.”
“Wait, Val!” She set the mug down, hands resting flat on the counter. “We haven’t talked since the move. It’s a new school, a new job, a lot all at once. Maybe we could sit for a minute.”
“I should get some studying done,” I cut in quickly, reaching for the mug. “My teachers keep telling me Magnolia’s tougher than what I’m used to.”
Her eyes searched mine for a moment. “Another time, then?”
“Yeah.” I was already edging toward the stairs. “Another time.”
Upstairs, I flicked on the light. The room blinked into brightness, soft pastel-pink walls under a fresh coat of paint. I wanted something plain, like cream or eggshell, but Mom had insisted. “How can anyone be sad when they’re literally surrounded by pink 24/7?” she’d joked.
Half-unpacked boxes leaned against the walls, clothes spilling over the edges. The corkboard already held pressed petals, ticket stubs, and a couple of Polaroids. The bed sagged with twisted sheets, a hoodie thrown across the pillows. It looked halfway between a moving-day mess and something trying to be mine.
Before anything else, I knelt and reached under the bed. My fingers brushed cardboard, and I dragged the shoebox into the light. I opened it as I always did at the end of the day. Inside were envelopes I’d stacked in neat rows, and at the very bottom were folded notes in Rowan’s messy handwriting.
Val, bet you can’t go the whole period without correcting Mr. Alden’s grammar. If you last until the bell, I owe you a Coke.
Another: Wake me up if I drool in class.
And another: Did I leave my cleats at your place again?
My throat tightened. All these notes he’d slipped me under desks, shot across the room when teachers weren’t looking. And I’d kept every single one, tucking them away like treasures. But I’d never written back. Not once. Every time I started to, my stomach would twist at the thought of getting caught, of Mrs. Henderson snatching a note from my hands and reading it aloud to the whole class. So I’d just smiled at him instead, or whispered a quick response when no one was listening.
I’d always planned on writing him back… eventually. But I postponed it the way we all do. Hoarding a list of one-days and laters until the day our basement fills to the brim with promises we never kept, and the person we kept them for is no longer around to receive them. So we sit in a house full of things we wanted to say to them, give to them. But never did.
Now the words I’d rehearsed in my head had nowhere to go. He would never read anything I wrote. But somehow, writing to no one made it easier to say. So I pulled out a piece of paper from my backpack, snatched a pen from the top of my desk, and my fingers began to tremble.
Rowan,
Do you remember that day? You did owe me a Coke. I was always too scared to write back before. Stupid, I know. But I kept every note. I don’t even know why I’m writing this now. It’s not like you can answer me… but I miss you. A lot. And I don’t know what to do.
Only yours, Valentina
I folded the note small, slid it into the shoebox, and tucked it between his letters. My first note back to him, and he’d never see it.
When I finally put the box away, my phone read midnight.
I flicked off the overhead light and crawled under the covers. The room collapsed into shadow, with only faint streetlight softening the edges. Headlights from passing cars swept across the walls in flashes before vanishing again. Each time the glow left, the darkness pressed closer.
I turned onto my side and let my eyes drift closed.
Until the mattress dipped.
My eyes snapped open.
Springs groaned beneath me. The entire bed frame creaked once, slow and deliberate. Someone had unmistakably just sat down beside me.
The air changed. Not a draft, but something else. A chill that raised every hair on my arms.
My heart hammered against my ribs.
Every instinct screamed at me not to move, not to let whatever was there know I was awake. Still, the cold spread, creeping along my spine and up my neck, hovering just inches from my skin.
Move, I told myself. Just turn around and look.
But I couldn’t. My muscles had locked solid with terror.
So quiet, I almost missed it: breathing that did not belong to me, right behind my ear. Slow and steady. A breath so cold it stung.
I shot upright, whipping around.
Nothing.
The room was exactly as I’d left it. Naked bay window. Half-hung fairy lights above the bed. Boxes casting shadows on the dusty wooden floor. But frost clung to the air where I’d felt the breath. And in the silence after, I swear I heard the faintest whisper of my name, spoken by a voice I knew all too well…

“Valentina.”