For Sloane there had always been something mature about not drawing a severe line between genders and marking your predilections on either side.

On the heels of deathcall there’s a great flood, biblical in its scope and timing.

Lina’s hormone doctor told her that if people are denied certain parts of relationships they need as children, they hunt for these parts as adults.

She understands it’s because she fears aloneness more than she fears death.

Maggie’s destiny arrives one afternoon without a clarion call. It comes on cat feet, like everything else in the world that has the power to destroy you. She had

Sloane decided on the boat that day that she wanted to be unflappable. To be unmoved by the tides that might shift around her. To hold herself in her own hands.

This is an outlandish notion only if you don’t know how a person can destroy you by the simple act of disappearing.

propriety.

Now Lina gets these pains, and she believes in her clearer moments that the pains are the heartaches of the past, of being lonely for eleven years. Of being raped. Of being lonely her whole life.