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Summary
It begins, like most dangerous things do, with something small and strange and almost sweet: a broken nose, a stolen night, a doggy bag pressed into the hands of a boy who should’ve been nothing more than a memory.
But she keeps him. Not in the way people keep lovers or secrets or sins. No, she keeps him the way you keep a seashell in your back-pocket. Something sharp and improbable, something that hums faintly of the ocean even when you’re miles away from it.
Baz is a tide in her life. He comes in. He pulls back out. Years pass in the space between his visits, but he always returns, drawn by something he doesn’t name, maybe the scraps of kindness she offers without asking for anything in return. Maybe the fact that she never tries to hold him still.
They are not lovers. Not family. But when the world cracks open beneath him, when Cath leaves, she arrives like she always does. Unannounced. She tells herself it’s just a visit, just time to fill, just a borrowed stretch of days while her employers sip wine in Greece and forget she exists.
But Oceanside doesn’t let you stay untouched. Not when the Codys are a current running beneath everything. And not when there’s... Pope.