Chapter 1
The water in the basement is new.
Not the pipes — I fixed those in September, which, yes, I’m aware is not a normal thing for someone whose biggest concern should be whether she’s going to pass Dynamics. I copper-sweated the joints myself while Mom held the flashlight and pretended the blowtorch didn’t freak her out, and honestly it was one of the more satisfying afternoons of my life, which tells you everything you need to know about me as a person.
But this isn’t the pipes. There’s water coming up through the foundation crack along the east wall — a dark, slow tongue of it spreading across the concrete — and when I crouch down and touch it, my fingers come back tasting like salt.
Like the ocean.
Which — no? We’re three blocks from the harbor but there’s a full seawall between us and the Atlantic. I watched the city crew repoint it two years ago and was weirdly fascinated by the mortar mix. For ocean water to reach our foundation it would have to come through or under that wall during a tide high enough to pressurize the entire water table, and high tide was at 2:17 this afternoon. Almost two hours ago. So this is probably just groundwater doing something weird.
It’s fine. Old house, cracked foundation. Pop’s been meaning to patch that wall since before I was born.
Bo crouches next to me because Bo does everything I do. He’s four. Mirroring is his whole personality. He sticks his entire hand in.
“Don’t drink that.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
He was absolutely going to. This is the kid who ate a ladybug last week — not accidentally, deliberately, with eye contact — and then cried for twenty minutes when I made him spit it out. He holds up his wet hand and studies it with this grave, scientific intensity, like he’s expecting the salt water to look different from the regular kind.
“It’s the ocean,” I tell him.
“In the basement?”
“Just a little bit.”
He considers this. Then, with the unshakable logic of someone who has been alive for fewer than two thousand days: “Does it have fish?”
“Tragically, no fish.”
“Then what’s the point?”
He’s got me there.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I pull it out one-handed, the other arm keeping Bo from putting his salt-water fingers in his mouth.
The group chat has forty-seven unread messages, which means either someone said something controversial or Dani saw a boy. I scroll.
Dani 🫠: ok but did you SEE him in the sieve lab today
Dani 🫠: sive
Dani 🫠: sieve
Dani 🫠: whatever the mesh one
Mika: we saw, Dani
Dani 🫠: rolled sleeves nova. ROLLED. SLEEVES.
Mika: she was elbow deep in dirt she didn’t see anything
Dani 🫠: it was not dirt it was a grain size distribution apparently
Jess: literally who cares about his sleeves when the TA in chem lab exists
Dani 🫠: blocked
Bo discovers a plastic stegosaurus under the utility shelf and goes silent with joy. I type back with my thumb.
me: i was literally elbow-deep in a grain size distribution i did not notice anyone’s sleeves
Dani 🫠: this is why you’re single
Mika: doing a thing at my place tonight, you coming?
me: can’t, home tonight. bo duty. tomorrow?
Dani 🫠: fineeeee. tell bo I say hi. tell the sleeves guy I say hi too
Jess: tell the chem TA I say hi
Mika: jess you have never spoken to that man
Jess: and yet
I pocket the phone. The sleeves guy is Whit — short for Whitaker, which should be an annoying name but somehow isn’t on him — and he’s in my Statics section and he is, objectively, very nice to look at, and I have said maybe eleven words to him total because apparently I can rewire a junction box but I can’t form a sentence in front of a boy with good forearms. It’s fine. It’s a whole thing. Dani has theories. Mika has counter-theories. Jess just sends me TikToks of people falling down and says “this is your love life.”
“Nova.” Bo is holding up the stegosaurus. It’s furred with dust and cobwebs and he is radiating happiness. “Can I keep this?”
“He’s all yours.”
“He’s called Steven.”
“Obviously.” I scoop him up, stegosaurus and all, and carry him on my hip up the stairs. He’ll let me do this when it’s just us, but the second Wren is in visual range he goes rigid and demands to walk because he’s four and four is basically an adult, apparently. He tucks Steven into my hoodie pocket and puts his chin on my shoulder, and he’s asleep in thirty seconds. His superpower. I would literally kill for it — I haven’t slept through the night since Dad left, but that’s a different thing, and I’m not thinking about it right now.
The kitchen is warm and smells like garlic and something with onions, which means Mom is making her thing — the pasta thing, the one she does on Tuesdays when she’s had a long day and wants to cook something she doesn’t have to think about. She cooks the way I fix things: by feel, by hands, by the stubborn conviction that her instincts are smarter than a recipe. NPR is on the counter, cycling through the background noise of a world that still thinks it’s fine — municipal budgets, something about a school board, a brief item about coastal flooding south of here. Nobody’s listening.
“Anything?” she asks without turning around.
“Salt water. Coming through the east wall crack.”
She half-turns. “Salt?”
“Yeah. Probably just the water table being weird. I want to check the seawall weep holes tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she says, in the voice she uses for all my house reports — this deliberate trust, like she decided a long time ago that one of us was going to understand how buildings worked and it wasn’t going to be her. She turns back to the pasta. “Your grandfather wants you. New noise.”
“There is no new noise.”
“I know. Go sit with him.”
I carry Bo through the living room, past Wren at the dining table. She doesn’t look up. She’s twelve and has cultivated a whole aesthetic of not caring, headphones in, laptop open, this studied intensity that basically says I am far too busy for whatever you’re doing. But her eyes flick up for one second as I pass — tracking Bo’s sleeping weight on my shoulder — and something in her face goes soft before she catches it and puts the mask back on.
She won’t admit she’s watching, but she always is.
Pop’s room is the old dining room — we converted it after the second fall, when his hips got bad enough that the stairs became a whole production. It still has the china cabinet, the chandelier, a hospital bed where the table was. It smells like menthol and the lavender sachets Mom puts in his pillowcases, and under that, faintly, like wool and old paperbacks.
He’s propped up in bed. The oxygen concentrator hums beside him — a ResMed, sieve bed rebuilt by me six months ago when the zeolite started channeling. It runs clean. There is no new noise. There has never been a new noise.
“There’s a clicking,” he says.
“There is no clicking, Pop.”
“Sit down and listen.”
I sit. Shift Bo onto my lap without waking him. My phone buzzes — Jess posting a TikTok to the chat, some guy failing spectacularly at a backflip into a pool — and I watch it with the sound off while Pop watches me. Not the phone. Me. The way I settled Bo without waking him, the arm tucked just right. He’s got this look he’s had since I was small. Warm bewilderment that I exist.
“You look like your father,” he says. He says this every time.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like a man in a dining room.” He leans back. “How’s the basement?”
“Wet.”
“Rain?”
“Ocean, maybe. Probably just groundwater.”
He goes quiet for a second. Pop grew up on this coast, fished it for thirty years. He knows the water the way I know wiring — not from charts, from decades of paying attention.
“The tide’s been off,” he says. Not a question.
“Probably just the storms messing with things. It’s been a weird spring.”
He nods, but he’s looking past me, toward the window where the sky is going pink. “I saw the moon last night. It was up before dark. Bigger than it should be.” He stops. Then, quieter: “It looked near, Nova.”
I don’t say anything, because I noticed it too. Three nights ago, taking the trash out, the moon was low and full and it took up more of the sky than a moon should. I stared at it for maybe ten seconds and then I went inside because the trash was done and also because standing in the driveway staring at the moon felt weird and I had a problem set due.
“Your father would have known what it meant,” Pop says, soft.
And there’s the third rail. Dad. Who didn’t die, didn’t crash, didn’t leave a body or a wreck — who went to work on a Tuesday in March and never came home. Car in the university lot. Office locked, computer wiped, phone disconnected a week later. The police said voluntary. Adults are allowed to leave.
He left a note. Handwritten, in his precise engineer’s script, tucked under Mom’s pillow, and I’ve never fully forgiven him for the cowardice of that: I have to go. I’ll explain when I can. Keep the radio on.
That last part. Keep the radio on. His shortwave set is in the study, behind a door nobody opens. Mom won’t go in. Wren pretends the room doesn’t exist. I walk past it every day and sometimes I put my hand on the knob and just — stand there. Like the door might have an answer the note didn’t.
“He would have known,” I say.
Pop’s hand finds mine. Thin fingers, cool, shaking with the tremor that started a year ago and never stopped. I wrap my hand around his and hold it still.
Mom appears in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel. “Dinner. Come on, before Bo’s completely out.”
Pop starts the production of getting up — the slow pivot, the walker, the careful steps that used to be automatic. Mom waits, doesn’t rush him, doesn’t offer her arm until he reaches for it. She’s good at that. At knowing what people need without making them ask.
Dinner is loud and good. Mom’s pasta is perfect, like always — she tastes it once and adds something and doesn’t tell us what and refuses to write it down on principle. Bo wakes up enough to eat but not enough to be reasonable about it. He puts a noodle on Steven’s head and announces that Steven is having dinner too.
“Steven doesn’t eat carbs,” Wren says, not looking up from her plate.
“Steven eats whatever he wants,” Bo says. “He’s a dinosaur.”
Pop tells the Buick story. The one about the ’78 Skylark with the stuck throwout bearing, the customer who tried to fix it with WD-40, the look on the guy’s face when Pop pulled the transmission in forty-five minutes. We’ve all heard it. We laugh anyway. Pop’s timing is still perfect, even when his hands aren’t.
Mom reaches over and wipes cheese off Bo’s chin with her thumb. He leans into it without thinking. She catches my eye across the table and gives me the small, private smile that means look at this. We made this.
I smile back.
After dinner I do the dishes while Mom puts Bo down. I can hear her through the wall — the low singing, the negotiation about whether Steven can sleep on the pillow (he can, he always can), the particular creak of the hallway floorboard when she tiptoes out. She’s been doing this for four years and she’s still terrible at the tiptoe. Bo doesn’t wake up because Bo could sleep through a demolition, but she tiptoes anyway, every time, and I love her for it.
Wren drifts through the kitchen on her way to her room. She’s got her headphones back in, phone in hand, but she pauses near the counter where NPR is still going.
“Hey,” she says. “Did you see that thing about the tides?”
“What thing?”
She holds up her phone. It’s a clip — some professor in a rumpled blazer at a podium, filmed badly, gesturing at graphs. The caption: UMass oceanographer claims tide models are “fundamentally miscalibrated” — thread. Below that, thousands of replies, almost all of them dunking on the guy. Clickbait. Doomsday panic. Clout-chasing.
“He got put on leave,” Wren says. “Two days after he posted it.”
“Where’d you find this?”
“It was everywhere. Then it kept getting taken down.” She scrolls. “There’s another one — a NOAA guy, said the same thing, then went quiet. Someone in the comments said he got reassigned.”
She’s giving me The Look. The one that means she’s noticed something the adults haven’t, and she’s waiting to see if I’m going to catch up. She’s been doing it since she was eight and it’s a little terrifying every single time.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“Why does everyone who says the tides are wrong get fired?” She tucks her phone back. “That’s not normal.”
“Probably just university politics,” I say. “Professors get in fights about stuff like this all the time. My Coastal professor literally has a blood feud with a guy at MIT over sediment transport models.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s kind of the same thing.”
“It’s not, though.” She looks at me. “Why does it smell like the ocean in here?”
“Because the ocean’s in the basement.”
She stares at me. Looks toward Pop’s room. Looks back.
“Okay.” Quiet. Then, testing the words: “The moon looked really big last night.”
“Yeah, Pop said the same thing. It’s probably just —”
“It looked wrong big, Nova.”
For a second the headphones and curated indifference fall away. She looks twelve.
Then she puts one earbud back in and disappears down the hall. “Night.”
“Night, Wren.”
I finish the dishes. The group chat buzzes three times while I’m drying — Jess is live-updating from Mika’s, something about someone showing up uninvited — but I keep thinking about Wren’s face when she said wrong big.
On my way to my room, I pass the study door. Closed, like always. I put my hand on the knob. Behind this door: Dad’s shortwave, his drafting table, his tide charts pinned to the wall, his shelf of notebooks in the same handwriting as the note. And whatever frequency he was tuned to the last time he sat in that chair.
Keep the radio on.
I pull my hand back. Opening the door would mean admitting he isn’t coming back to do it himself. Not tonight.
In bed I tell myself I’m going to put the phone down in five minutes and then it’s forty-five minutes later and I’ve watched nine TikToks about bread, three about the moon looking weird (the comments are wild — half “we’re all gonna die” and half “it’s literally just perigee bro”), and a makeup tutorial I have no intention of following. The group chat has moved on from Whit’s sleeves to a ranking of every guy in our Dynamics section by “would you trust him to carry your coffin,” which is unhinged even for us, and Mika’s winning because she’s arguing for Tyler Park based solely on grip strength.
I scroll Dani’s Instagram story from the party — they’re all in someone’s kitchen, Dani making a face, the Thermo guy doing something with a Brita filter that everyone seems to find hilarious. Mika posted a blurry video of Jess trying to do a cartwheel in the living room. Normal. Fun. The night I’d be having if I wasn’t on Bo duty, and I don’t even mind, really, because Bo duty means I got to watch him discover Steven and announce that Steven doesn’t have a bedtime, and honestly that’s better than whatever the Brita filter thing is.
My phone buzzes.
COASTAL FLOOD ADVISORY — TONIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW MORNING. ELEVATED WATER LEVELS EXPECTED DUE TO ASTRONOMICAL HIGH TIDES AND ONSHORE FLOW. LOW-LYING AREAS MAY EXPERIENCE MINOR TO MODERATE FLOODING.
I glance at it and almost swipe it away. We get these a few times a year. Minor to moderate means stay off the roads near the harbor and don’t park on Water Street. It’s never been a real thing.
Through the wall: Pop’s concentrator breathing. Bo shifting in his sleep, probably rolling onto Steven. Wren’s white-noise machine, the one she pretends she doesn’t need.
The moon is in my window. Full, bright, close.
It does look big. Wren’s right about that. But moons look big sometimes. That’s just what moons do.
I put the phone down, and I don’t sleep for a long time, and I don’t know why.
