Prologue – Lost at Sea
He should have known better than to drink that much. But graduation only came once, and after four years clawing his way through lectures, sleepless nights, and the unforgiving rigor of marine sciences, his friends insisted he deserved it. The bar was noisy, lights flashing, laughter rising like waves around him. He raised a glass, let the burn of whiskey coat his throat, and tried to ignore the hollow tug of the ocean calling him back.
By midnight, he was drunk on both celebration and salt air. The old boat — his grandfather’s vessel, sturdy from decades of deep-sea fishing — waited for him in the harbor. Its name, painted in careful strokes across the hull, had always struck him as strange: Serena. Siren. Mermaid. A word whispered with reverence, as though the sea herself had christened it.
He untied the ropes with clumsy fingers and pushed off. The boat cut across black water, moonlight trailing silver along its wake. He wanted nothing more than to feel alive in the dark, alone with the waves that had raised him.
Then the squall came.
It rose like a monster from the horizon, rain slashing sideways, waves towering high enough to swallow the sky. He fought the wheel, the storm howling against him, the boat shuddering beneath his grip. For a moment, he swore it would break apart, but the old vessel was as stubborn as the man who built it. It held.
Look Inside: Lost At Sea
A crash of water flung him across the deck. His head slammed hard, the world spinning into darkness. He remembered only one last thing before blacking out — a figure in the waves. A woman, swimming toward him, hair streaming like liquid moonlight. Too beautiful, too impossible. Then nothing.
When he woke, he thought he was still dreaming.
Her body was pressed against his, warm despite the storm, lips moving against his skin. He gasped, disoriented, every nerve alive as if death had given him one final delirious fantasy. But she was real. Her hands explored him as though she’d known him all her life, and under the glow of the full moon, her body was human — perfect, aching, alive.
He whispered her name without knowing why, the name painted on his grandfather’s boat.
Serena.
And she smiled as if she had been waiting for him to remember.
When dawn came, she was gone. Only the sound of waves filled the silence. He staggered across the deck, half-convinced he’d lost his mind, until he found it — a bracelet of shells lying where her body had been. The same shells he remembered glinting in her hair, in her earrings, in the shimmer of her laughter.
It wasn’t a dream. Now the ocean stretched endless around him, empty but not silent. Somewhere beneath, she was still there. Waiting.
And he was lost — in the sea, in her, in the promise that she would return.
