This is probably the last time we'll see Claire's POV for a bit. Because I'm evil, but also because she's getting on my nerves too. She's definitely going to have to save a cat later (IYKYK).

Breaking your heart breaks mine. Over-the-ocean call is how I told him… "Over-the-Ocean Call" by Lizzy McAlpine

Claire – October

I probably shouldn't have opted out of taking a foreign language in high school. Or, at the very least, downloaded a translation app.

It's not the most economical, but I've been doing some island hopping. It is much less glamorous than it sounds. After my teary porch session with Becca over Fourth of July weekend, I knew I'd overstayed my welcome. Or gotten all I was going to from staying there, at least. My mother wasn't on that island. It seemed she wasn't anywhere anymore, and I didn't know how to reconcile that to the place in my heart that aches to find her. I still don't.

So I moved on to Australia, surfing my way around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. My island hopping was aided by entering—and winning—some amateur surf competitions. I came away with five hundred bucks and a few friendly invitations for dinner. I turned them all down.

From Australia, I backtracked to Samoa, earning a free stay with Solomon Finau's extended family. His aunt called me Fiva, which is Samoan for fire. I wondered what she saw in me that I couldn't see in myself.

The hospitality I kept encountering was starting to convince me I could somehow make my way around the entire world without running out of money. If everyone I met knew a friend, a friend of a friend, and I could keep surfing my way into some cash, maybe one day I could surf all the way back to Washington.

Samoa was nice. Different than what I was expecting, more tropical than Hawaii. The plants were greener, the colors thicker and richer. I saw birds and animals and stray dogs and stray children everywhere I looked. I visited the American national park there, sent a few pictures to Seth and Katie. Quil.

He didn't text back.

Which is fair, I guess, because I didn't respond to his texts about Bethany and Embry's baby boy Parker for a few days. Partly because I didn't see them, but partly because I didn't want to see them. It's hypocritical, but it put me in a weird place to know life was moving on without me.

So I surfed and snorkeled in Samoa-blue waters and hiked to the top of Mount Silisili, a place my mother always wanted to visit just because the name, she would always say, was silly silly. Twice the silly. One for me and one for Callie.

If I hear from Quil a microscopic amount, I hear from my sister even less. I do talk to my father, occasionally, when he has the capacity to miss someone other than my mother.

The thing is, I know. I know what I'm doing to the people I love. I just don't know how to stop. My mother would be able to tell me how to feel better, but she is not here.

Or, at least, I haven't found her yet.

Which is why I'm in Fiji now.

Lost as fuck in more ways than one.

I've been in Suva, a resort town on the Southeastern side of the island, but thought I would make my way to Nadi (I could only imagine the jokes my mother would make at this). I scheduled a taxi at my hotel's front desk, but decided I'd catch one at the airport instead. If something else caught my fancy, I could go there. Nothing really catches my fancy these days.

I remember, in the early days of losing Mom, it was like drowning. Now I don't feel I'm drowning so much as I'm underwater on purpose, the way you are after cliff diving. Like I will never reach the break. I will never breathe right again.

It takes me a second to recognize is speaking to me in an indecipherable language, one I can only take to be Fijian or Hindi.

When I turn, I encounter a gray-haired woman. The skin of her face is somehow both droopy and stretched tight, and although she's facing me, I can nearly see the hump at the top of her spine. It makes me straighten my own, even under the ever-growing weight of my backpack.

She repeats herself.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand," I say. I give her the biggest smile I can, which turns out to be tiny tiny tiny.

"American," she says, her eyes backlighting until they look like flame viewed through fog. She clucks her tongue. "Maile. Mai." She holds her hand to her chest, the universal gesture for this is me. "You?"

"My name is Claire," I say. I try to annunciate as clearly as I can.

She nods. "You lost?"

"I—" I am so lost, actually. Have you seen my mother? "I need a taxi," I say instead.

She tilts her head for me to follow her, and inexplicably, I do. She has that trustworthy air about her, the way my mother did.

"You wait," Mai says when we get outside, depositing me at a little sign I probably overlooked a hundred times today. She turns to go but suddenly looks back at me, her eyes narrowing. "Why you here?"

"Oh, well," I say, "I'm going over to Nadi, and—"

"No," Mai interrupts. "Why Fiji."

Oh. A much harder question to answer. I don't owe her my honesty—I don't even know her—but I find myself wanting to give it anyway. There's something in her face, maybe the eyes, that tell me I won't regret it.

I take a shaky breath. "My mother died in April." That never gets easier. To avoid looking at the pity in this kind stranger's face, my eyes wander and land on the world clock hanging above the door, one with the current date and time in all major cities around the globe.

Then I stop talking altogether, mostly because I lose the ability to focus. Okotova. I may not speak this language, but that translates clear as day.

Okotova.

October.

My phone rings not five minutes later. I'm frozen with fear in the airport bathroom. The shrill ringing wraps its icy fingers around my throat and squeezes tight. I snuck back inside after Mai said her goodbyes, my mind racing and blank all at once.

The call rings out and starts up again right away. Two more times, and I still don't answer. I can't.

It rings again, and I grab for it blindly, whispering into the receiver: "Yeah?"

A beat of hesitation follows, and then: "Claire?"

The familiarity steals my breath, and I have to cough before I can speak again. It's wet. So are my eyes.

It's funny how we can recognize the sounds of another person, simply because we've heard them all our lives. I once watched a video of blindfolded children picking their mother out of a lineup—this must be what they felt. I would know her sounds anywhere, even across an ocean.

"Callie?"

Neither of us speak right away, just listening to the other person. My breaths saw at my lungs with painful pinches.

"Are you okay?" she eventually asks. "I had a feeling I needed to call you."

And this is the thing about sisters. We are not okay, nowhere close, but we still share a bond that can't be severed. Can't be burned or run away from or abandoned.

"I'm not," I say, my insides closing in on themselves like a claw clip. "Callie, I'm not okay. I—I don't know what to do. I can't even—"

"Do you want to listen for a minute, then? While you figure out how to say what's wrong."

I nod. She doesn't see it, obviously, but she must know, because she takes a deep breath.

"I kissed Quil," she blurts, and the shock of it is almost enough to restart my heart. "Back in the summer. He pushed me off immediately, I swear." I can tell she's crying, and now I am, too. "And it's no excuse, but I was drunk and lonely. I'm so sorry, Claire. I'm madder at myself than you'll ever be at me."

On a different day, maybe I would have. Gotten mad, I mean. If my life wasn't hovering on a cliff's edge. But right now, and always, anger is too strong of an emotion. The Black acts like shackles around the bad things as well as the good. I am living in a cage.

"And I miss how life used to be," Callie sobs. "I miss Mom and you and the fucking normalcy of it all. I miss having garlic bread that wasn't black on the bottom. And music. I miss her music. Mine never sounds as good without her there to sing it with me."

She's been saving this stuff up, I can tell. For months, all the things we couldn't talk about. And there are lot of things I still can't say. But I can start with this.

"I can't listen to music at all," I tell my sister. "Just hearing it in public makes me shut down."

"Oh." The single syllable is a little breathy; she's still fighting through her own tears. "Is that the problem?"

Above me, through a skinny window, the sky is endlessly blue and clear, and my eyes train on it. If I look up long enough, maybe my tears will learn to fight gravity. "I'm late."

"I haven't had a period since Mom died either," Callie says. "It's okay. It's just stress."

My cheeks burn. "But what if it's not? Stress."

"But what—" She gasps into the receiver. "Oh, Sissy."

It's that word, that term of endearment, that rips my heart down the middle, and everything inside it—everything I can put words to—spills out of my mouth and into her ear.

The night of the funeral, Quil in my bed. How sex actually is, finally able to answer the question she'd asked me so many months ago. Leaving in the middle of the night because my heart was hurting so, so much, that I knew if I held still for too long it would kill me. Arriving in San Diego, Hawaii, Australia and Samoa and here, searching for our mother in places she will never be. My strained relationship with Quil, the chasm between us growing deeper and wider with every passing day.

Callie stays quiet, and by the time I've finished telling her everything my tears have dried out.

"Do you think it's because I kissed him?" she says tentatively. "That he's pulling away."

"No." I let my head fall back to the bathroom wall and clutch my backpack to my chest. My surfboard and raggedy secondhand suitcase lay at my side. "I think he's pulling away because I pushed him."

"So what are you going to do?" On her end of the call, she shuffles around, and I picture her hanging her head off the side of her bed, resting her feet on the wall. "About the thing."

I blow out a breath through my lips, and the woman washing her daughter's hands at the sink shoots me a sympathetic look. Another truth spills from my lips unbidden; there must be something in the water here: "I have no idea."

Quil – November

The words haunt me still.

"This isn't working anymore," she said, just over a month ago now. Her voice was tinny and far away, robotic in a way I couldn't chalk up to her trans-Pacific distance. No, this was something else. Darker, locked farther inside her than she'd ever let me see.

"What do you mean?" I'd said back. "This never worked in the first place."

I meant it as a bitter joke, but there was more truth in that statement than I realized, even then. She agreed with me without even taking the time to consider it. Without fighting.

I wanted her to fight, I realized. Wanted her to see me, what we had, as something worth fighting for. Things have been strained, sure. But having the tiny pieces of her were better than nothing at all.

She's my imprint; my wildfire. Fighting fires is my job—I was always meant to fight for her.

But the fire of Claire Young died with her mother.