Clara Hale painted the sea as a fanged thing.
Thirty years ago, her mother rowed into Hurricane Imogen and never returned—leaving behind only a skeleton key, sealed in a jar of salt. Now, as another storm gathered on the horizon, Clara’s canvases whispered warnings: shadowy figures in the waves, a child’s laughter tangled in the fog.
The islanders muttered about Imogen’s Bride—a spirit that comes with the storms, claiming the guilty.
In her mother’s abandoned lighthouse, Clara unearthed journals filled with brittle ink and terrible secrets: The sea takes a life to spare the town.
But whose?
The fisherman she had loved and left, now a widower, spat at her feet. “You left us. Just like her.”
As the winds howled and the tide clawed at the cliffs, Clara unraveled the truth—her mother had never left. Trapped in the lighthouse lens, her ghost screamed through fractured glass.
"I chose you."
The sea wanted balance.
Clara gripped her brush, painting the storm as it was and as it had been, past and present bleeding together in salt-streaked hues.
At dawn, the storm receded. The key fit a lock buried in the tide pools. Inside: a child’s bracelet, twin to Clara’s own.
The sea kept its secrets.
She kept the ghosts.