The Sound Between Words

Everybody in Winnehasset talks. Ariana Bettencourt is the only one who can read what they’re really saying.Ariana is twelve, profoundly Deaf, and the only Deaf student at Winnehasset Middle since the district pulled her out of her school for the Deaf. She catches about four words in ten when she reads lips. The rest she builds from faces, hands, and the weather in a room. She’s very good at it. She has also learned that when she raises her hand, adults smile and move on. So she stopped raising it.Then, one Thursday at Netty’s Diner, she watches the most trusted man in town lean across a corner booth and say five words to a stranger in a camel coat: 'The lamp goes missing first.'Three days later, the Gale Lamp of 1846 disappears from the Cranch Sail Loft. It is the lantern that saved the entire fishing fleet in a legendary storm. Founders’ Day is days away, and a museum appraiser is coming to examine it. The whole town is in an uproar. When Ariana tells the police chief what she saw, he answers her interpreter instead of her. 'Lip-reading isn’t evidence, sweetheart.'But someone overheard. Owen Tavares is tall, sunburned, and silent, the boy teachers finish sentences for. He stutters. He has also spent three years teaching himself sign language from library videos. On the loft steps, with shaking hands, he signs three words: I believe you.Now the countdown to Founders’ Day is on. Ariana has the eyes and Owen has the ears. They follow the clues through a diner mirror, an old floor that reports every footstep, a pharmacy shelf where something doesn’t belong, and a locked lighthouse across the harbor. There they find a buried journal written entirely in drawn hand signs, and Ariana is the only person alive who can read it. It tells a story the town got wrong for 175 years, about a Deaf girl who kept the light.To be believed, Ariana will have to stand in front of the whole town. Owen will have to find his voice, stutter and all. And they will have to learn that being understood is something you build together.