Cause/Effect of "Silver is for Secrets"

In the book Silver is for Secrets, Stacey and her friends are relaxing at a beach cottage during summer vacation after high school graduation. She starts having nightmares about a girl named Clara, who she's never met. In the nightmares, someone's out to get Clara. Clara appears to be oblivious to the current events and spends her time flirting with the guys at the beach. Stacey must find out what her premonitions mean, or someone could end up dead.

The climax of this book is near the end, when Stacey and her boyfriend, Jacob are in their room on a cruise ship. Stacey wakes up and finds that Jacob isn't there anymore, so she goes searching for him. She finds Clara instead, on the deck, bleeding and weak. Stacey starts to help her, but Clara fights her off and admits the truth: There really was no one out to get her, it was all a big lie for revenge. She pushes Jacob off the edge of the ship, where he drowns.

It all started in the first book of this series, Blue is for Nightmares, when Stacey has nightmares about her best friend, Drea, getting stalked. It turns out the stalker was a boy named Donovan, who had been in love with her since third grade. He gets sent to a juvenile detention center after being found out. Now, Clara surprises Stacey by saying that she had been a freshman at the same high school that Stacey went to, and had loved Donovan. This was her revenge, making all Stacey's friends uncomfortable and killing Jacob for sending Donovan away.

Let's go back to when Stacey and her friends are deciding whether to go on this cruise ship: Stacey wants to, so they can protect Clara from any danger. Amber and Drea just want to be there for Stacey. Jacob, on the other hand, is reluctant to go because of some nightmares he's been having: In them, he's drowning, his lungs filling up with water. That's exactly what happens. Even knowing this, he still gets on the ship with Stacey because, being her boyfriend, he has to be there for her.

This is why I believe the moment on the cruise ship is the turning point. After all her hard work for nothing, after Jacob's death and the shock of Clara's twisted, cruel lies, Stacey will never be the same. There is no going back for her, or any of her friends.