The next morning, Elana walked down to the tidal pool at low tide. She sat on the wet sand, closed her eyes, and for the first time in her life, she listened . Not to the waves—but to the silence beneath them. And from that silence, a single word rose like a bubble from the deep: saltbush .

Elana laughed. But that night, she sat in the cottage attic, surrounded by her great-grandmother’s journals. For the first time, she noticed something written in the margin of every page, in tiny, trembling script: “Listen to the cove. It tells you what to add.”

Elana ignored the praise as coincidence. Until the day a man in a black SUV showed up at the cove.