I stepped into the water, letting the freezing waves lap over my bare feet.

Then I stepped out again. I shook the sand off my feet and put on my shoes. I tried to stretch my quads, then my hamstrings, both of which felt tight after my run.

Trying to avoid looking at the thousands of dead animal bones all around me, I bounced on the balls of my feet, mentally running through all the things I was supposed to be doing.

Take a shower, eat breakfast, get dressed, and book it over to school. I had planned my morning out carefully, and I was nervous thinking that it was all going to hell because of this. I had scheduled a meeting with Mr. Moss—my AP calculus teacher—and he’d be waiting for me in his classroom. I wanted to talk to him about any extra credit I could do to bring up my grade, which I was pretty worried about.

After—hopefully—talking him into that, I was going to have to sprint over to the newspaper room so I could check the proof prints of our final edition of the paper. I was the copy editor of our student newspaper, and I took the job very seriously. Some might say too seriously, but I never listened to that. I really wanted to be editor next year, and I wouldn’t get the position if I screwed up on the copy edits.

I needed to be editor next year. And I needed the extra credit in calculus. I needed all of it. How else would I win the Provincetown Pride scholarship for Amherst—my dream school—if I didn’t go the extra mile?

A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I forced myself to take a deep breath. I was spiraling, and I needed to stop before it got worse. I could wind myself up tighter than a spring, and if I didn’t stop myself, I could snap. So I took another deep breath and reminded myself to unclench my jaw and shake out my hands, which were balled into fists.

That helped.

So did the sight at the edge of the sand—my parents emerging from around the sand dunes and walking toward me.

“Finally,” I murmured to myself, and started toward them. As they came into focus through the hazy morning air, I saw that they had come prepared. My mom had one duffel bag over her shoulder and another in her hand. I knew the bags by sight—they were filled with ocean water test strips, vials and jars for sample collection, slides and a microscope for examination, and even a couple of humane traps in case they needed to take any creatures with them to study more closely. My dad was carrying a third bag and had a camera with a long-scope lens slung around his neck. Both my parents were marine biologists, and they had come to the beach prepared to work.

My parents were both professors of marine biology at Northeastern, but they did a lot of their own independent research, mostly funded by an assortment of grants and awards. And they always spent the summers immersed in their research projects. They liked teaching, but it was being in the field that they loved most.

Which made sense, because that was what had brought them together in the first place.

My dad, Oscar Silva, had been on a research trip to the Galapagos to study the aquatic ecosystems of the islands. My mom, Lara Lessings, was there working to identify the animal species living around the underwater, deep-sea volcanoes that surrounded the archipelago. They fell in love on that trip, and a few months later, when they were both monitoring hatching turtles in Costa Rica, he proposed.

They loved telling that story—I’d personally heard it about a thousand times—but neither of them appeared to be in a storytelling mood as they approached me on the beach.

My dad got to me first and looked around, totally gobsmacked by the sight of the bones.

“What the heck is going on?” he muttered, almost speaking to himself.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t figure it out.”

My mom joined us. She dropped the duffel bags and looked around. “Well—like I said—this is…unusual.”

I snorted at her understatement. “You can say that again.”

She bent and picked something up from the base of one of the bone piles. It was a bone that appeared to have been carved and sharpened into a shape.

My mom turned it over in her hand. “What on earth could this be?”

I stared at it in wonder. “Is that a key?”