The Courtyard Café looked like I remembered it. The small yellow building was surrounded by a wide porch and leafy bushes of blue hydrangea. For some reason, this surprised me. I had changed since my last visit here—shouldn’t the place have changed, too?

I followed Mills onto the porch. He had insisted we have lunch together so we could talk some more. I was still trying to figure out how he knew where Marcus was buried, but Mills wasn’t saying anything yet.

Once inside the Café, I was pleased to discover that it was quiet, with only a few tables occupied. A perky waitress with a thick southern accent showed us to a small table. It was next to a window, which I liked. I removed my cap and ran a hand through my still-wet hair, scattering rain droplets on the menu.

“Get anything you’d like,” Mills said. “My treat.”

I already knew what I wanted. There was only one thing I craved when I visited Charleston: shrimp and grits. Mills ordered the same.

While we waited for our food, I watched the people on the street. Black umbrellas seemed to sail down the street as anxious tourists rushed to their destinations. People tried to snap pictures without getting their cameras wet, which was awkwardly funny.

“Do you remember your first visit here?” Mills asked.

I turned my gaze away from the window. “Yes.”

It was the previous summer. My family was working on a new DVD, and my sister and I were helping. But our experience at the Courtyard Café was an unsettling one. Nothing had been the same since.

“Does it feel different?”

It didn’t. There was no echo of the chilling cold I had once experienced, no remnants at all of my encounters in this place. It was a strange relief.

Our food arrived. Mills and I ate in silence, and I liked to think it was because we were both enjoying the food so much. But I knew he was getting ready to tell me what he knew—and why he knew it. After all, Mills had never met Marcus—or Dr. Zelden, for that matter—so how was he connected to either of them?

“I attended the memorial service,” Mills said. I looked up, surprised. “For Marcus,” he clarified. “I was there, at Zelden’s estate.”

His statement was so unexpected that I could do nothing but stare at him, my brow wrinkled in confusion.

“After everything that happened, Zelden began calling your house. Sometimes three, four times a day,” Mills went on. “He was really worried.”

“Only about himself,” I muttered. He sure wasn’t in any rush to answer my calls.

“Trisha answered most of the calls, but sometimes I did, too.” He shrugged. “And you’re right. He was concerned about what we would tell the police and if we were going to include anything about him on the next DVD.

“But he was also dealing with Marcus’s death and his own injuries.” Mills poked his fork into his half-empty dish of grits. I had thoroughly devoured mine.

“When he told me there would be a memorial service, I offered to go so I could represent your family.”

“I had no idea.”

“Good.” Mills nodded. “You were all going through so much. I wanted to handle something, you know?”

He talked briefly about the service itself. Zelden was there, of course, along with his new assistant. A few friends from the area had shown up. Marcus’s older brother was also there, but not his father. There were some prayers and a few readings from the Bible. It lasted less than an hour.

I leaned forward. “So where is he buried?”

Mills smiled sadly. “He’s not.”

“I don’t—”

“Charlotte, he was cremated. His ashes were scattered.”

Why hadn’t I considered that possibility? All this time I had been looking for a gravestone. What could I do now that there was no final resting place? How could I get the shadow creature to leave me in peace if I couldn’t pay my respects?

“You told me you could take me to Marcus,” I reminded him.

“I know where some of his ashes were scattered.” Mills said that while his brother had taken an urn home to be buried in Michigan, Zelden had kept some of the ashes. The small group attending the memorial service had traveled to the Charleston Harbor, near the aquarium, to scatter those ashes on the water.

“If you’re ready, we can go right now,” Mills offered. “It’s not a long walk.”

But I wasn’t ready. I wanted to arrive prepared, with a bouquet of flowers and a few nice words to say. I wanted to do this right, so the shadow creature would have no excuse to keep tormenting me.

“Tomorrow,” I decided. “Can we do it tomorrow?”

“Absolutely.” As he opened his wallet to pay our bill, I caught a glimpse of the shiny silver fragment of balloon he kept there. Maybe that was my sign that I was doing the right thing, the necessary thing. I hoped so.

“I miss you.”

I smiled into the phone. “I miss you, too, Noah.”

It was just before dinner. I had stepped out of a hot shower and into a fluffy robe when my cell phone rang. I rubbed a towel to my wet hair as Noah talked about his day. I loved the little details: the pop quiz in history, the chicken tenders served at lunch. I loved his voice. He could recite the phone book and I would like it.

“What about you?” he asked. “How’s Charleston?”

“Wet.” A quick glance toward the window showed me that the storm showed no signs of letting up. The sky had deepened from a pale gray to a deep granite. Black clouds moved fast across the sky, as if they were being chased by something even darker.

“Tell me more about school.” I wanted to simply listen, without having to talk too much in return. Everything I needed to say to Noah felt like it had to be done in person.

“Prom mania has gotten worse,” Noah said. “It’s like a disease around here. The freshmen girls are basically wearing bathing suits trying to get a junior to ask them to go.”

I laughed. “I hope they’re not coming after you.”

“I think they know that the only girl I want to see in a bathing suit is you.”

“Yeah, well, I doubt I’ll get a chance to wear mine. This rain isn’t supposed to let up until Saturday night.”

“Prom night.” He said it quietly, almost like he hadn’t meant to say it aloud at all.

“You didn’t want to go, did you?” I felt a twinge of guilt. Was Prom more important to him than it was to me?

“No, not at all.” He gave a short laugh. “I really didn’t want to rent a tux.”

“Okay.” But something in his voice struck me as being off.

I didn’t have a chance to ask him anything more. Annalise came home, dripping wet and cradling a soggy bag of groceries. “Sorry I’m late. It’s awful out there.”

“Noah? I have to go. Talk with you tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure. Say hi to Annalise for me.”

I said goodbye, dressed quickly and joined my sister in her little kitchen. “Special dinner for us tonight,” she said as she unloaded the grocery bag. “You like rainbow trout?”

“I think so.” Truthfully, I couldn’t tell most fish apart. As long as it was served with sauce and lacked tiny bones, it was fine with me. I grabbed a pot for the rice while Annalise arranged ingredients on the counter.

“What did you do today?”

I measured three cups of water and turned on the stove. “Besides trying to avoid drowning? I went to the library and had lunch with Mills.”

She smiled. “That’s nice. He’s stopping by later with dessert.”

The water was boiling, so I dumped in the box of rice pilaf and placed a lid on the pot. Annalise hummed as she sautéed butter and chopped some parsley.

“This is a special dinner,” I said. “When did you become so fancy?”

She shook her head. “Using fresh herbs does not make me fancy. Tell me more about your day while you cut this into wedges.” She handed me a ripe lemon.

“We had lunch at the Courtyard Café.”

“You did?”

I cut the lemon in half and pried some of the seeds out with my knife. “Yeah. It was nice, actually.”

“I know. I’ve been back there, too.”

This surprised me. It was less than a year ago that Annalise had declared she would never, ever return to the place where she had once felt overcome with sadness. In fact, her experience at the Café resulted in a serious threat to leave my family’s paranormal investigations behind forever. At the time, I didn’t understand her fierce fear. But now, I knew exactly what it was like to want to turn away from our family’s work. With Mom absent, I had no desire to return to the occupation that had made up so much of my life. That part of me was also absent.

Satisfied with my lemon wedges, I leaned against the counter to watch Annalise finish preparing dinner. “Why did you go back?” I asked.

She flipped the fish filets with a spatula. “I wanted to know that it was over. I wanted to walk through those doors and not feel anything.”

“And?”

“And it was fine. A nonevent. I walked in, ate a meal and left without ever once feeling anything strange. Case closed.” She turned to me. “Grab some plates. Dinner’s almost done.”

As I set the table, I mulled over Annalise’s words and my brief visit to the Café. I hadn’t felt anything, either. And if the occurrences we had experienced there could fade completely, so could my encounters with the shadow. Still, I wondered what the shadow was, exactly.

My family believed that people could leave behind an imprint of intense feelings after they died. Fear or terror was sometimes strong enough to echo for years, and so was simple repetition. We had investigated places where a rocking chair would move nearly every day at the same time, or a window would open and shut almost on a schedule. It fit with our theories that someone experiencing profound regret or guilt could also leave a trace of that emotion behind. Was the entity that was haunting the night simply the residual energy of my own remorse? Or was it more connected to Marcus’s energy?

The shadow creature’s presence in my life was tied to Marcus. It had to be. But if my search for answers led nowhere, what would I do? Was I destined to be followed by the eerie, unpredictable being for the rest of my life? Maybe pursuing Marcus was a bad idea. What if it was better to leave his ghost alone?

Annalise brought dinner to the table. “Smells great,” I said.

“I feel bad that our plans have been derailed.” She scooped rice onto her plate. “I had our entire weekend mapped out, but between this weather and my class paper, it’s fallen apart.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I didn’t mind having the apartment to myself. It was kind of nice to be alone. I missed Noah and Avery, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had hours of quiet time, away from my house and the memories it held.

Mills arrived as we were finishing dinner. He carried a bouquet of white lilies in one hand and a key lime pie in the other. Annalise beamed as she took the flowers from him and kissed his cheek.

Mills took off his wet jacket and began slicing the pie. Annalise went to find a vase for her flowers. “I haven’t said anything to Annalise about our plans for tomorrow,” he said to me. “But I don’t like keeping secrets, so I’m going to tell her after you’re back home.”

“Okay.” I appreciated his discretion. I didn’t want my sister to worry.

Annalise returned with the vase. “I have to meet my study group at noon tomorrow. Do you have plans?”

“I’m off tomorrow.” Mills slid slices of the dark yellow pie onto plates. “I thought Charlotte and I could go to the aquarium.”

Annalise kissed his cheek again. “Have I told you lately that I think you’re the world’s most amazing boyfriend?”

Mills blushed and adjusted his glasses. “Um, no.”

“Well, you are.”

I looked away as Annalise nuzzled his neck. Their intimacy made me long for Noah. After dessert, I left Annalise and Mills in the living room so they could have their privacy.

I flipped open my phone. Still no call from Zelden. Not that it mattered now, but it would have been nice if he could have acknowledged me. I hated being brushed off. I looked out the rain-streaked window in Annalise’s bedroom. Night had fallen while we had been having dinner, and a soft amber glow from the lamp posts outside filled the room. I stood up and went to the window so I could gaze out onto the empty street.

The glass was foggy with condensation. I wiped my hand against it, smearing the cold water in an arc. The fuzzy orange light of the lamppost illuminated the wet street but nothing more. I focused on the slender black steel, an elegant reminder of Charleston’s history.

And then I saw the shadow.

Like a swift animal, the black shape sailed past the light. I should have been expecting a visit, should have known it would still be there. Again, it looked up at me and pointed toward the harbor.

“I know,” I whispered.

My ragged breath fogged the window, and when I wiped at the glass, the shadow was gone, vanished into the curtain of night. I hoped it would be the final time I would ever see the thing.