Salt film crept across the windshield in pale crescents as Wren Calloway drove the final mile into Ashworth. The wipers dragged across the glass with a dry, rhythmic protest, and she did not turn them on. Beyond the smudged pane, the Atlantic lay flat and silver, catching the last copper light of evening, and she watched it the way one watches a face one has not seen in years: wary, half hoping not to be recognized.
She had forgotten how the town announced itself. First the salt, thick and cold in her nose, riding in through the cracked seal on the passenger window. Then the gulls, thin cries trailing over the road. Then the first clapboard houses, hunched along the shoulder like old women waiting for a bus that never came. Ashworth had not changed, or perhaps it had changed in the way stones change, so slowly that the alteration is invisible until you try to lift one and find it fused to the others.
The speedometer needle quivered at thirty-two. The posted limit had been twenty-five since she was twelve. She eased her foot off the gas and let the sedan roll down Pilgrim's Lane toward the harbor.
Her phone sat on the passenger seat, face up, a single missed call from a number she had not saved but recognized by its rhythm of digits: Maren, calling from a Brooklyn payphone or, more likely, from the landline of whatever borrowed apartment she was crashing in that month. Wren had let it ring. The funeral was tomorrow. Maren would arrive in the morning, or she would not, and Wren did not have the energy to guess which. Maren Tate had a talent for materializing at the precise moment she was needed and an equal talent for vanishing when she was not. Wren had long suspected this was not carelessness but calculation. Maren would deny it. Maren would be right to deny it, and wrong about why.
The road curved. A wooden sign, hand-painted and peeling, announced ASHWORTH, POP. 1,842, and below it, in smaller letters, EST. 1798. Someone had crossed out the population and written 1,720 in black marker. Wren remembered when it had read 1,903. She did not remember who had been subtracted first.
She had not been here in seven years. She had not been here since the week her father's boat had been found drifting two miles east of Widow's Rock with the engine idling and no sign of him aboard. She had not been here since the search, which became a vigil, which became a memorial, which became a quiet, regional agreement to stop asking questions. She had not been here since the night Declan Ashford had come to her mother's kitchen door, rain in his hair and something in his eyes she could not name, and her mother had told him to leave. She had not been here since the next morning, when Declan's own mother had told the sheriff that her son had been seen arguing with her father on the dock the afternoon he disappeared, and the town had taken that single fact and built a small, neat house of suspicion around it, and then closed the door.
Seven years. The bookshop, she knew, had continued without her. The ledgers were still kept. The invoices still went out. A woman named Petra Something-or-other had been hired to manage the floor, according to the few sparse letters Aunt Margaret had sent, written in the old woman's careful, slanted hand, never mentioning Wren's father, never mentioning Declan, never mentioning anything that mattered.
Aunt Margaret had died on a Tuesday. Wren had received the news by certified letter, because that was the kind of town this was, and the kind of woman her aunt had been. The letter had been brief. It had been signed in green ink. It had said, simply, that Margaret Adelaide Calloway had passed in her sleep at the cottage on Pilgrim's Lane, and that funeral arrangements would be handled by Judith Ashford, and that Wren was welcome to attend.
Welcome. As if she had been a guest somewhere she still belonged.
The sedan crossed the wooden bridge over the tidal creek. Beneath it, the water was the color of old pewter, slow and heavy, pulling east toward the open sea. A heron stood on a piling, watching her pass with the indifferent patience of a creature that had seen every kind of human trouble pass over that bridge and none of it had concerned him. Wren watched the heron in return. She felt, suddenly, the unreasonable urge to apologize to it.
The town center unfolded ahead. The usual landmarks assembled themselves in the failing light: the granite war memorial, wreathed now in a collar of late asters; the Methodist church with its dimming steeple; the IGA with the orange bug-zapper glowing in the window; the library, closed; the post office, also closed; the harbor itself, where the masts of the lobster boats stood like a small bare forest against the sky. The water between them was still. The smell of diesel and brine and frying something, probably from the Chowder House, came drifting through her open window.
She turned left onto Harbor Street. The bookshop was three blocks north, on the corner of Harbor and Pilgrim's Lane, and the cottage, Aunt Margaret's cottage, was one block past it, set back from the road behind a wall of Rosa rugosa and a white picket fence that had not been painted in a decade. Wren's hands tightened on the wheel.
She had told herself she would go to the cottage first. She had told herself she would stand on the porch and put her hand on the rail and feel what she needed to feel and then go inside and set down her bag. She had told herself many things on the drive north from Boston, and she had believed none of them.
Instead she parked across from the bookshop, in the small gravel lot behind the harbormaster's office, and sat.
The bookshop's windows were dark. The sign above the door, CALLoway's, hand-lettered in gold leaf by a man who had since died, was still legible. A cardboard CLOSED sign hung in the door at a slight angle, as if propped there in haste and never straightened. Through the glass, the shop was a deep brown quiet, full of shapes she could not quite resolve in the dusk. Bookshelves. The old green reading lamp. The rug, which had been her grandmother's and which her aunt had refused to replace on principle.
Wren turned off the engine. The ticking of its cooling was loud in the cabin. The salt air came in again through the cracked seal, and with it the first true smell of the Atlantic, not the diluted roadside version but the heavy, iodine-dark smell of low tide and old rope and the particular mineral breath of that specific cove. She closed her eyes.
She had been twenty-two when she left. She was twenty-nine now. Her hair, which had once been the same dark auburn as her mother's, had been cropped short the year before in a fit of something she still declined to name. She had published two novels, both about women returning to coastal towns they had fled, both praised by reviewers who used the word haunted. She had hated the word both times. She had not corrected them.
Her phone buzzed on the seat. A text this time, from Maren.
Arriving 7am. Coffee before church. Don't argue. M.
Wren read it twice. Then she picked up the phone, typed K, and set it back down. Her reflection stared up at her from the dark screen: pale, thinner than she remembered, the jaw set in a way that had become habitual and that she did not yet recognize as fear.
Footsteps on gravel. She looked up.
A man was crossing the lot toward the harbor office. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a canvas jacket the color of old khaki and a wool cap pulled low. He had a dog with him, a rangy brindle thing on a rope lead. The dog saw her first. Its head came up, ears forward, and it gave a single short bark.
The man stopped. He turned.
For a moment neither of them moved.
It was Declan Ashford. She knew him at once, the way one knows the sound of a particular door in a house one grew up in, by something beneath the face. He was older. Seven years older, or rather seven years added. The jaw was harder, the mouth set in a line that looked less chosen than worn in. The eyes, though. The eyes were the same, pale and shadowed and watchful in a way that had always made her feel, even as a girl, that he was looking at something just behind her shoulder. He had been twenty-six when he left. He was thirty-three now. The cap hid most of his hair, but what she could see at the temples was going early gray.
He did not smile. He did not wave. He looked at her car, then at the Maine plate, then at her face through the windshield, and she watched him put it together the way one watches a lock open. She saw the recognition arrive, and the thing that came after it, which was not surprise but something colder. Calculation, perhaps. Or caution. She had spent enough years around writers to know that the thing that arrives on a face one half a second after recognition is almost never what one would call welcome.
He walked over. Slow, the dog pacing at his heel. He stopped about four feet from her window, and he did not come closer, and she understood that the distance was deliberate, that he had learned something about distances in the years since she had seen him, and that the lesson had cost him.
He tapped the glass once with a knuckle.
She rolled the window down. The salt air flooded in. The dog, sensing her hesitation, sat.
"Wren." His voice was rougher than she remembered. There was a trace of the old Clare in it still, the soft rise on the vowels, but it was buried now under something flatter, something New England had laid down on top of it like a coat of paint. He had not been raised here. He had arrived at eleven, with his mother and his sister Lily, in the year her father had first bought the bookshop, or close to it. She had been five. They had grown up like weather, passing through each other's seasons. "Didn't know you were back."
She looked up at him. Up close, the lines around his mouth were deeper than they should have been on a man of thirty-three. They looked less like age than like sentences begun and abandoned.
"Just got in," she said. Her own voice sounded strange to her, too even, too careful. "I was going to go up to the cottage."
He nodded once. A small, closed nod, the kind that meant he was not going to ask if she wanted company, and she was not going to offer. "Judith's been over there all day. Your aunt and my mother were close." A pause. The dog shifted beside him. "I'm sorry about Margaret."
"Thanks."
Another silence. The harbor ticked and creaked behind him. Somewhere down the dock a halyard rang against an aluminum mast, a small bright sound like a struck bell.
"You going in?" he asked. He nodded toward the bookshop.
She looked at the dark windows. At the CLOSED sign. At her own reflection, faint and insubstantial, layered over the shelves within.
"I don't know," she said.
He looked at her then in a way she had not been looked at in a long time. Not the way strangers looked at her at readings, searching her face for the woman behind the book. Not the way her editor looked at her, scanning for damage. He looked at her the way one looks at a thing one has broken and is trying to decide whether it will still hold weight.
"Be careful going in," he said. "The back stairs are rotten. Second and third from the top."
He had no reason to know that. She had not been in the bookshop in seven years. He had, presumably, not been in it at all in seven years, or if he had, he had had no reason to climb the back stairs. And yet he knew. She tucked the fact away, the way one tucks a paper clip into a drawer, without knowing yet what it fastened.
"I'll keep that in mind," she said.
He nodded again. Lifted his hand, not quite a wave, more a small acknowledgment, the kind one gives to someone one may or may not see again. Then he turned and walked back across the lot, the dog falling into step beside him, and the two of them disappeared around the corner of the harbormaster's office and were gone.
Wren sat for a long moment with the window still down.
The breeze off the water had picked up. It carried with it the first true cold of the season, the kind that lived in the bones of houses along this coast and never quite left them. A newspaper page tumbled across the gravel in front of her, white in the dusk, and stuck against the curb. Somewhere a screen door banged, once, twice, and was caught.
She looked at the bookshop again. She looked at the cottage, one block up, where a single light burned in the kitchen window. Judith Ashford, then, was still there. Setting things in order, perhaps. Or simply sitting with the dead, which was what people in this town did, because the alternative was to sit with the living, and the living were harder.
Her phone buzzed again. She ignored it.
She turned the key. The engine caught on the second try, rough at first, then settling into its old, patient idle. She put the car in gear and pulled out of the lot and turned up Pilgrim's Lane toward the cottage.
The light in the kitchen window did not move. Whoever was inside was waiting, and had perhaps been waiting for some time.
Wren parked at the gate. Killed the engine. Sat.
The white picket fence leaned a little to the left, the way it always had, since the storm of 2007 had taken out the post at the corner and her aunt had refused to have it replaced because her father, in some earlier decade, had set that post himself and she would not have it said that she had undone his work. The rugosa was wild and tangled, hips already forming on the lower branches, the smell of them sweet and faintly rotten, the smell of late summer tipping over into fall.
She got out. Closed the door. Stood.
From inside the cottage, the sound of a kettle being lifted off a burner. The faint whistle of steam. Then, very quietly, a woman's voice, singing something in a language Wren did not recognize, something low and unaccompanied, the kind of song one sings when one believes oneself to be alone in a house where someone has died.
Wren walked up the path. The porch boards gave under her feet in the places they always had. She put her hand on the rail, the same rail she had put her hand on at six, at twelve, at twenty-two, and felt the wood give a little, warm from the day, and the grain of it rough against her palm.
She did not knock. She lifted the latch. She went in.
The singing stopped.
For a long moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the kettle's fading whistle and the tick of the clock above the stove, the same clock that had hung above the same stove since before Wren was born. Then a chair scraped against linoleum, and a familiar voice, dry as kindling, said, "Well. You took your time."
Margaret Calloway stood at the counter with her back to the door, pouring hot water into a brown ceramic teapot that had a chip on the spout. She did not turn around. She did not need to. The shape of Wren in the doorway was as recognizable to her as her own hands.
"Aunt Maggie."
"I heard your car an hour ago. Then I heard you sit in it. Then I heard you get out. Then I heard you stand on the path for what I can only assume was a personal record in standing." Margaret set the teapot down with a small, precise clatter. "I had begun to think you had forgotten which latch to lift."
Wren closed the door behind her. The latch fell with a soft click. The kitchen smelled of lavender and lemon oil and something else underneath, something older, the particular smell of a house that has been lived in by the same hands for fifty years. The table was set for one. A single cup. A single plate with a slice of lemon pound cake under a glass dome. The chair pulled out at an angle, as if waiting.
"I wasn't sure you'd want me to come here," Wren said.
"I didn't say I wanted you to come here. I said I heard you come here. Those are different statements, and I am not so far gone that I can't tell them apart." Margaret turned then, finally, and Wren saw that her aunt had not been crying, which was somehow worse than if she had been. Margaret's face was composed in that particular way she had of composing it, the way that made her look carved from the same wood as the furniture. Her eyes, though. Her eyes were not composed.
"You look like your father," Margaret said. "Standing there. The exact way he stood."
Wren's throat tightened. She crossed the kitchen and set her hand on the back of the empty chair, and Margaret looked at the hand, and neither of them spoke for a long moment.
"Sit," Margaret said at last. "The cake will dry out."
They did not eat together. Margaret poured the tea, set a cup in front of Wren without asking if she wanted one, and then took her own cup to the rocking chair by the window, the one with the green cushion that had been reupholstered twice in Wren's lifetime. The rocker began its slow metronome. Outside, the last of the evening light was pulling itself out of the rugosa canes, and somewhere down the lane a dog barked once and did not bark again.
"I saw you at the hall," Wren said.
"I imagine a great many people saw you at the hall."
"Declan saw me."
The rocker stopped. Margaret lifted her cup, took a careful sip, and set it down on the side table with the careful precision of a woman who has decided not to let her hands betray her.
"That young man," Margaret said, "has been spoiling for a fight since the day he came back into this town, and I will not have you being the thing he breaks himself against. Not in my hall. Not in my presence."
"He accused me of coming back to make a podcast."
"Well." Margaret's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "You are a writer. The distinction may be lost on him."
"It's lost on everyone, apparently."
"It is lost on no one who knows you." The rocker resumed, slow and measured. "You are not here to make a podcast. You are here because you could not stay away. That is a different thing, and a worse one, and we will not discuss it further tonight."
Wren opened her mouth to protest, and Margaret said, "Drink your tea."
She drank her tea.
It was late when Margaret finally rose, kissed Wren once on the forehead in the way she had when Wren was small, and went upstairs to the room at the end of the hall. The floorboards complained under her feet the way they always had, a complaint Wren had once thought was the house itself speaking and had later realized was the wood settling, year after year, into its own particular griefs.
Wren sat alone in the kitchen for a long while. The clock ticked. The lemon oil smell and the lavender smell faded to nothing but the house. Eventually she rose and carried her cup to the sink and washed it and set it on the rack to dry, and the small domesticity of the action made her chest ache in a way she had not been prepared for.
The cottage had three rooms downstairs. The kitchen. The front parlor with the blue curtains and the settee that smelled of cedar. And the small room off the back hall that had been her father's study, and then had been nothing, and then had been storage, and now, Margaret had told her when she handed over the key, was hers.
Wren walked down the hall. She did not turn on the overhead light. She turned on the lamp that sat on the small table just inside the door, and its yellow circle fell on a narrow bed made up with a quilt she recognized from childhood, a bookcase, a wooden chair, a small chest of drawers with a mirror above it. On the bed, Margaret had laid a stack of folded towels and a bar of soap still in its paper, and the thoughtfulness of it, the unasked-for smallness of it, made Wren's eyes sting.
She set her bag down. She sat on the edge of the bed. The quilt was the one with the cabbage roses, the one her grandmother had made, the one that had been on her father's bed the last time she had been in this room, the night before he disappeared.
Seven years.
She put her hand flat on the quilt and felt the stitching under her palm and did not think about it.
She stood. She looked around. She had not yet looked around properly, and she had the uneasy feeling that the room was waiting for her to look around properly.
The bookcase held a row of paperbacks with cracked spines, a few hardcovers with no dust jackets, a wooden box of pencils, and a small ceramic bird that had been hers since she was nine. The chest of drawers was empty. The mirror had a crack running through one corner that she had never noticed before, or had noticed and forgotten, the way one forgets the scars on familiar furniture. The walls were papered in a pattern of small blue flowers, faded now, and in the corner above the bed, the paper had come away from the plaster in a long, slow curl.
She stared at the curl. She did not know why she was staring at it. She went closer.
The curl of wallpaper was not, she realized after a moment, a curl of wallpaper. It was the edge of a panel. A small panel, set into the wall at an angle, perhaps eighteen inches long and twelve wide, painted over with so many layers of the same blue flower paper that it was almost invisible unless one happened to be staring at exactly that spot from exactly that angle, at the end of a long day, in a certain light.
She put her hand against the edge of the panel. It gave. A quarter inch. Half an inch.
She went to the kitchen and found a butter knife in the drawer beside the stove. The drawer was the same drawer. The knife was not the same knife. She brought it back to the bedroom and worked the edge of the panel gently, and after a moment it came free with a soft wooden exhale, and behind it was a shallow cavity, and in the cavity was a book.
A journal. Leather, the color of dark tea, the surface gone soft and slightly puckered with age. No title on the cover. No name. Just the leather, and a thin ribbon marker in a color that had once been red and was now the color of old brick.
She carried it to the bed. She sat. She opened it.
The first page was not the first page. The first page had been torn out. What remained was a half-title, and beneath the half-title, in cramped handwriting she did not at first recognize, a single line:
Forgive me the order in which I have set things down. There was no other order that would bear the weight of telling.
Her father's handwriting.
Her father's handwriting, which she had not seen in seven years, which she had not expected to see again in this lifetime, was on the page in front of her, and her hands began to shake.
She steadied them. She turned the page.
The handwriting was small and tight and slanted slightly to the left, and it pressed hard into the paper, the way her father's hand had always pressed, the way it had left grooves in the checks he wrote at the bookshop, the way it had dug into the margins of the manuscripts she had watched him mark up when she was a girl and thought he was the most patient man in the world. She had been wrong about that. Patience, she had come to understand, was something else entirely.
She read.
June 12, 1994. I have been asked to do a thing I do not wish to do, and I have agreed to do it, because Judith asked me, and because the alternative was worse, and because I am, it turns out, not the man I believed myself to be when I was twenty. I will set down here what I can, and what I cannot set down I will seal away, and what I seal away I pray will stay sealed. If you are reading this, the seals have not held, and I am sorry. I am sorry in a way that has no language.
Wren turned the page. The next entry was dated three days later, and the handwriting was different, looser, angrier.
June 15. I spoke with T. today, who pretends not to understand what is being asked of him and so must understand it perfectly. There is a place on the ridge where the slate outcrops in a way that makes a kind of natural wall, and if one stands at the right angle one cannot be seen from the road. We met there. He brought no one. I brought no one. We talked for two hours and in the end we agreed to nothing except that we would not speak of this again, which is of course the same as agreeing to everything. I came home in the dark and Margaret had left the lamp on for me and I sat in the kitchen and did not move for an hour. She knew something was wrong. She always knows. She did not ask.
Wren turned another page. Another.
July 3. D. came to the shop today. He is sixteen and already as tall as I am and he has his mother's mouth and his father's way of standing very still when he is afraid. He bought a paperback he did not want and pretended to read it at the counter. I let him pretend. There is something he wants to tell me, or something he wants me to tell him, and I cannot decide which, and so we both waited, and then he left, and the bell rang, and I watched him walk down the street and turn the corner toward the river, and I thought: I have done a thing that will follow him for the rest of his life, and I have done it in the name of a thing that was supposed to set him free.
She stopped reading.
She sat with the journal open in her lap and her hands flat on the open pages and she stared at the small lamp on the table and the yellow circle it threw on the wall, and she felt the room around her settle and shift, the way rooms do when the weather changes or when something that has been hidden in them for a long time is at last brought into the light.
T. D. Judith. Margaret.
The initials lined up in her mind the way they had lined up in her father's, she supposed, all those years ago, when he had pressed the pen hard into the page and written them down and put the journal behind the wall and hoped that no one would ever find it, or hoped, perhaps, that someone would.
She thought of Declan in the church hall. The way he had stood at the back, near the door, with his coat still on, as if he had been planning his exit since the moment he arrived. The way he had not looked at her for the first twenty minutes of the reading. The way he had waited until the lawyer had finished and the room had begun to thin out and then had come straight toward her, across the parquet, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders set.
"You came back." That was what he had said. Not a question. An accusation.
"I came back for the reading," she had said.
"For the reading." A pause. The kind of pause that held something heavy behind it. "You couldn't even let him stay dead, could you."
She had not answered.
"You and your microphone." His voice had dropped, low and rough, the way it always dropped when he was trying to keep something from spilling out. "You and your true-crime. You came back to stand in this town and pick the bones of it clean for strangers to listen to in their cars."
"Declan."
"Don't." He had held up a hand. "Don't say my name like we are old friends. We are not old friends. We are two people who grew up in the same town and lost the same man in different ways and have not spoken in seven years because there is nothing left to say that either of us wants to hear."
She had looked at him then. She had looked at him properly, the way she had not let herself look at him since she had arrived, because looking at him meant remembering the boy he had been at sixteen, the boy who had come into the bookshop and bought paperbacks he did not want and pretended to read them, and she had not been ready.
He looked like his mother. He looked like the photographs of his father. He looked like neither of them.
"I am not here to make a podcast," she had said.
"Then why are you here."
"I don't know yet."
"Liar." He had said it softly, almost gently, which was worse than if he had shouted. "You have always known. You have known since you were twelve years old. You just do not like the knowing, and so you pretend it is something else, and you have built a whole life out of pretending it is something else, and now you have come back here to see if the pretending still holds."
He had turned then. He had walked toward the door. He had stopped, with his hand on the frame, and had not looked back.
"Stay out of my family's grief, Wren."
And then the door had closed behind him, and the room had exhaled, and she had stood in the middle of the parquet with her hands at her sides and had not moved for a long time.
Now she sat on the cabbage-rose quilt in her father's old room with her father's journal open in her lap, and the lamp threw its yellow circle on the wall, and the house breathed around her in the way old houses breathe at night, and she understood, with a clarity that felt almost physical, that she had come back for exactly the reason Declan had accused her of coming back, and also for every reason she had not yet admitted to herself, and that the two reasons were not the same, and were not, either, entirely different.
She put her hand flat on the open page. She felt her father's grooves under her palm.
She turned to the next entry.
Outside, the lane was quiet. The rugosa breathed. Somewhere down toward the river, a light went on in a window, and stayed on.