The cantilever wouldn't sit right on the page.
Elara Whitlock had drawn the line four times in the last hour, each attempt a hair steeper than the last, and still the glass penthouse looked as though it might slide off the edge of the tracing paper and onto the studio floor. She set the pencil down, flexed her fingers, and caught the dim reflection of her own face in the sheet. Behind that reflection, Manhattan sprawled in the direction of dusk: low clouds the color of old pearls, the river pulling a long sheet of bronze beneath the George Washington Bridge, and the office towers across Eighth Avenue catching the last of the daylight in their dark, identical shoulders.
The studio was empty. Everyone else had gone to catch the 6:15 train or to meet whoever met them at bars on the Lower East Side, and Elara was glad of it. There was a particular kind of silence that only happened after eight, when the building's HVAC settled into its nighttime register and the fluorescent panels above the drafting tables stopped their faint, almost-audible complaint and committed to whatever color they had decided to be. Tonight they had chosen the kind of blue-white that made every surface look like an aquarium.
She picked up the pencil again. The cantilever. The horizontal line that had to suggest, with nothing but a single ruled edge, that the entire upper story of the proposed penthouse was floating. That it was glass and air. That it weighed nothing.
Below it, she had drawn the supporting structure: a concrete spine running up through the floors below, a knot of mechanical rooms, the elevator bank. Below that, the imagined city. Below that, nothing.
The locket at her throat shifted when she leaned forward. She touched it without thinking, the way she sometimes did, her fingernail finding the tiny seam where the two halves of the heart met. It was warm. It was always warm. Her grandmother had pressed it into her palm the last time Elara had visited Maine, the summer before last, and had said, in that flat Yankee way of hers, Wear it when you remember me, and don't you dare lose it.
That was the only kind of order Vera Whitlock gave.
Elara turned the locket over between her thumb and forefinger. Inside, behind the small brass clasp, was a photograph too faded to read in this light, and a strand of hair so fine it might have been spider silk. She had never asked whose. There were some questions you kept in your pocket for the right moment, and the right moment had not yet shown up.
She set the locket down against her collarbone again, where it fell into the small dent of skin above her sternum, and turned back to the cantilever.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound of hard-soled shoes on the polished concrete, moving fast, and then the studio door swinging inward and Daphne Han leaning one shoulder into the frame with the specific posture of a person who had been rehearsing this entrance for two blocks.
"You are, in order, alive, alone, and still here."
"That's a lot of assumptions for a Tuesday," Elara said, without looking up.
"It's Wednesday."
Elara glanced at the wall clock. 8:52. Daphne was right. It was Wednesday, and she had been here since seven the previous morning, and the only meal she had eaten was a peanut butter packet from the vending machine on the thirty-ninth floor at four o'clock.
"I'm finishing the cantilever."
"You're staring at the cantilever. There's a difference." Daphne came all the way into the room and dropped into the drafting chair across the table from her. She set down a paper cup, the kind with the green recycling logo, and a wax-paper bag, and the studio began to smell, faintly and then less faintly, of broth and scallion and something Elara could not immediately identify.
"Eat," Daphne said.
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten. I know because I've been watching the vending machine cameras through sheer force of personality. Eat."
Elara pulled the bag toward her across the table. Inside was a small porcelain bowl of something that steamed when she opened the wax paper. She did not remember ordering it.
"From the place on Forty-First," Daphne said. "The one with the woman who yells at you if you don't finish the soup."
"She's yelling at you by proxy?"
"She's yelling at you through me. I've internalized it. Consider it team building." Daphne folded her arms and watched her. "How long has this draft been sitting here?"
"Since last Friday."
"And you've been here every night since?"
"Most nights."
Daphne tilted her head. The angle she used when she was about to say something sharp and had decided to soften it first. She had a hundred such angles; Elara had catalogued them over the years, the way she had once catalogued tidal charts in a different life. "El."
"I know."
"You don't, though."
Elara took a spoonful of the soup. It was, against her will, good. Hot. Salt and ginger and the kind of long-simmered thing that tasted like it had opinions.
"You're going to take vacation," Daphne said, "or I'm going to put your name in for a conference in Honolulu."
"You wouldn't."
"I would. I'd forge your signature. I'd wear a mustache. You'd be at a marine biology conference wondering how you got there."
Elara almost laughed. Almost. The sound got caught somewhere in the back of her throat and came out as a small cough, which Daphne, mercifully, pretended not to notice.
"I'm serious," Daphne said.
"I know you are."
"And?"
"And I'll think about it."
Daphne made a small noise in the back of her nose, the one she used when she was being patient on purpose. "El. It is the twenty-first of August. You have not taken a single day off since I started here. That was nineteen months ago. Nineteen months."
"I took a day in April."
"You had food poisoning. That doesn't count."
"It was a day."
"A horizontal day." Daphne leaned forward, elbows on the drafting table, and looked at her with the kind of focus she usually reserved for chefs who tried to pass off farmed fish as wild. "I'm not asking for me. I'm asking because you sound like a person who has not slept in a week and your cantilever is going to fall off the building."
Elara looked down. The cantilever was, in fact, beginning to look as though it might do exactly that.
"I'll call her this weekend," Elara said.
Daphne blinked. "Call who?"
"Vera." Elara touched the locket again. "My grandmother. I'll call her this weekend. I haven't talked to her in a while. She'll want to know how the project is going."
Daphne studied her for a long moment. The clock ticked. A plane traced a slow red line across the dark window toward Newark. "El."
"What?"
"That's not what I asked."
"I know what you asked."
"Then answer what I asked."
Elara took another spoonful of the soup to buy time. The broth was cooling now, the heat moving out of it the way heat moves out of everything eventually, and she watched the steam thin and disappear against the blue-white ceiling.
"I can't go home right now, Daph."
"Why not?"
"Because if I go home, I'll have to look at her. And if I look at her, she'll know."
"She'll know what?"
Elara did not say anything for a moment. The fluorescent panels ticked once above them, a soft complaint from the ballast, and somewhere far below a taxi honked twice and was answered by another taxi.
"That I'm not finished," Elara said. "That I'm still figuring it out. That I haven't done any of the things I told her I was going to do."
"You told her you'd finish a glass building in Manhattan. You're finishing a glass building in Manhattan."
"I told her I'd come home for the season."
Daphne was quiet for a moment. Then, very gently: "And?"
"And the season is in three weeks."
The studio held still around them.
Daphne set her spoon down. The porcelain made a small, deliberate sound against the saucer, the kind of sound that says the meal is over and the next thing is going to be the harder thing.
"Then go," Daphne said.
"Daph."
"Go this weekend. Skip the Sunday call. Get on a train. Be there Friday night."
"You don't understand."
"Then help me understand."
Elara looked at her friend. Daphne was leaning forward now, her elbows on the table, her chopsticks still balanced across her bowl, and her eyes were doing the thing they always did when she was being serious, which was to go very still and very dark and to wait for the answer as if she had all the time left in the world and was willing to spend it here.
"I'm scared," Elara said.
Daphne did not look away. She did not soften her face. She simply waited.
"I'm scared she'll look at me and know that I left," Elara said. "I'm scared she'll know exactly why. I'm scared she'll forgive me anyway, and I'm scared she won't, and I'm scared that what I really want is for her to ask me to stay."
The fluorescent panels ticked once more above them. The red line of the plane had crossed the Hudson by now and disappeared into the haze over New Jersey, and the window was just a window again, and the city beyond it was just the city, and somewhere on the eleventh floor of a building that had not existed when Elara was nineteen, her grandmother was asleep in her inn by the Atlantic, and Elara was here.
"Then ask her," Daphne said.
"What?"
"Ask her to ask you to stay."
Elara almost laughed. The sound came out of her like a small, broken thing, a branch cracking under a boot, and she pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth for a moment, the brass locket warm between her fingers, and then her phone rang.
The ringtone was the one she kept for numbers she did not recognize, a soft three-note sequence that sounded like a music box being wound down, and she almost did not answer. She almost let it go to voicemail, the way she let most things go to voicemail in those weeks, the way she let messages pile up from her brother and from people at the lab and from the editor of the small journal that had accepted her paper on halophyte resilience in late spring. She almost let it ring.
But Daphne's eyes flicked to the screen, and Daphne's lips moved, and Elara saw her read the name before she did, and she saw the color leave Daphne's face in a way that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
"Answer it," Daphne said.
Elara answered it.
"Miss Whitlock." The voice on the other end was gravelly and unhurried, a Maine voice, the kind of voice that had spent seventy years saying the same words about the weather and the boats and the price of lobster, and Elara's hand closed around the phone so hard the case creaked. "It's Edwin Pruitt. From down to Salt Bay. You remember me, I hope."
"Mr. Pruitt." The name came out of her before she had decided to say it, and the name carried with it the smell of the general store, of coffee on a percolator, of sawdust and old rope and the particular dusty heat of a place that had been selling the same things in the same arrangement since her grandfather was a boy. "Yes. Of course."
"I'm sorry to call you so late, sugar. I am. I sat with this number for an hour before I dialed, I'll tell you that honest. I had a ham sandwich and I thought about it and I thought about it and then I dialed because I figured a body ought not to wait when a body's called home."
The words did not come into focus for her at first. They slid off her, the way water slides off a duck's back, the way all the worst words slide off you before they find the seam, and she said, "Called home?"
"It's your grandmother, pet." Mr. Pruitt's voice softened in the way that old Maine voices soften, the way they go gravelly and sweet at once, the way a man who has buried a wife and a brother and most of his friends learns to make a sentence sound like a hand on your shoulder. "Vera. She passed in her sleep last night. Up at the inn. Millie found her this morning with the bedclothes still tucked around her, and a book open on her chest, and her glasses folded neat on the nightstand. The way she'd want it, the way she'd want it exactly. I want you to know that."
Elara did not say anything.
The studio held still around her. Daphne's hand came across the table and closed around her wrist, but Elara did not feel it yet. She was somewhere else. She was in a backseat, and she was nineteen, and the car was moving.
She did not know she was crying until Daphne wiped her cheek with a paper napkin.
"Sugar?" Mr. Pruitt said. "You still there?"
"I'm here," she said. Her voice did not sound like her voice. It sounded like a voice that had been left out in the cold. "I'm here, Mr. Pruitt. I'm here."
"All right," he said. "All right now. Take your time. I just figured you ought to hear it from somebody who knew her, before you heard it from somebody who didn't. I called Jules first. He's on his way up. He'll be there by morning, I expect."
"Jules knows," Elara said.
"Jules knows," Mr. Pruitt agreed. There was a pause, and in the pause she heard him sip something, the small clink of a spoon against a mug, the coffee-drinking of a man who could not get through a phone call without it. "I didn't want to call you at this hour. I really didn't. But I figured a body ought to know. And your grandmother, she talked about you every time I saw her, sugar. Every single time. She talked about the glass you were building and the salt and the project, and I want you to know that, I want you to know that right now. She talked about you like you were the best thing she'd ever done, and I want you to know that before the world starts telling you anything else."
The line held. Somewhere in Maine, a man in a kitchen in Salt Bay sat at a table with the salt from his own clothes still on his cuffs, and he waited for her to speak.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you, Mr. Pruitt."
"You call me Edwin, sugar. I've known you since you were this high." There was the smallest chuckle in his voice, the chuckle of a man who could not help being gentle even when he was delivering the worst news of a person's life. "You come home when you can. The inn will wait. The town will wait. We all will."
He hung up. The line went to that soft gray static of a dead call, and Elara sat with the phone pressed against her ear for three full breaths before she lowered it.
Daphne was still holding her wrist. Daphne's face was the color of skim milk.
"Vera," Elara said.
"I heard," Daphne said.
"She died in her sleep."
"I heard, El."
"She was reading. There was a book on her chest."
"Okay."
"She had her glasses folded on the nightstand."
"Okay."
Elara put the phone down on the table. She put it down carefully, the way you put down something that has just become too heavy to hold, and she folded her hands over it, and she looked at the window, and the window showed her nothing but the blue-white ceiling reflected back at her, and the ceiling was just a ceiling, and her grandmother was gone.
The first sob came up out of her like something being pulled out of the ocean by a hook, slow and heavy and reluctant, and she bent over the table with her forehead nearly touching her folded hands, and Daphne was around the table and into the chair beside her in a single motion, and Daphne's arm was around her shoulders, and Daphne's hand was on the back of her head, and Daphne did not say anything for a long time.
The studio held still. The clock ticked. The red line of another plane began to trace itself across the dark window, and somewhere far below a taxi honked twice and was answered by another taxi, and the city went on being a city, and the soup cooled, and the night came on.
Elara cried until she did not have any more crying in her, and then she sat up, and she wiped her face with the paper napkin, and she said, "I have to go home."
"I know," Daphne said.
"I have to go home now."
"I know, El. I know."
She did not know how long she sat there. It might have been ten minutes. It might have been an hour. At some point Daphne made her drink a glass of water, and at some point Daphne put a blanket over her shoulders, and at some point the clock struck two, and the clock struck three, and the city outside the window thinned and thinned until it was just the same two taxis and the same plane and the same dark.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the backseat came back to her.
It was a Toyota. It was a green Toyota Camry with a crack across the windshield on the driver's side, and it belonged to her father's friend Donnie, who had driven her down to Salt Bay from college for the weekend of her grandmother's seventieth birthday, and who was now driving her back to the bus station in Portland because she had a Monday class and could not stay. The trunk was full of things her grandmother had pressed on her, a jar of beach plum jam and a tin of shortbread and a wool sweater the color of the sea, and the backseat smelled like the wool sweater and like the pine air freshener Donnie hung from the rearview mirror and like the salt that was, even then, in everything she owned.
Elara was crying. She did not want to be crying. She had told herself in the bathroom of the inn that morning, with her face under the cold tap and her grandmother's towel against her cheek, that she was not going to cry, that she was nineteen and that nineteen-year-olds did not cry in the backseats of cars on the way to bus stations, that she had a future and that the future was a clean glass building in another state and that her grandmother would understand. She had told herself this very firmly. She had told herself this with the particular sternness of a girl who has not yet learned that the sternness never works.
She was crying anyway.
The car passed the salt marsh on the left, the long pale flats where the marsh grass stood up out of the mud like the hair on the back of an arm, and the tide was out, and the mud smelled even through the closed windows, and she pressed her forehead against the glass and watched the marsh go by and did not say anything.
Donnie did not say anything either. Donnie was a kind man. Donnie had been a kind man his whole life, the kind of man who drove four hours to bring a girl to her grandmother's birthday and then drove four hours to take her back without complaint, and he had the radio turned low to a Red Sox game he was not really listening to, and he left her alone with the marsh and the salt and the crying.
The inn fell away behind them, and the general store fell away, and the harbor fell away, and the town thinned to a few houses and then to the long road that ran north along the coast toward Portland, and Elara watched the salt marsh give way to the dark spruce woods, and the woods went by in a long green smear, and the crying slowed and stopped and then started again.
She thought about the morning. She thought about the kitchen at the inn, and her grandmother at the stove with the wooden spoon in her hand, and the kettle just starting to whisper. She thought about the way her grandmother had looked at her over the rim of her glasses when Elara had said she had to leave that afternoon, the way the look had not been surprise and not been hurt but had been something quieter and worse, something like the look of a woman who has always known her granddaughter would leave and has made her peace with it and would never, ever admit it.
She thought about the boy.
Kit Marchetti had been standing at the end of the inn's walk when she came out with her bag. He had been standing there with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and he had not come up the walk, and she had not gone down the walk, and they had stood there at the distance the walk gave them and had looked at each other.
He had not said anything for a long time. He had just looked at her.
Then he had said, "Write me."
"I will," she had said.
"Promise."
"I promise."
He had taken his hands out of his pockets. He had crossed the distance between them in three strides, and he had kissed her once on the mouth, hard and quick, the kind of kiss that says everything a nineteen-year-old boy cannot say, and then he had stepped back, and his hands had gone back into his pockets, and he had nodded once, and she had got into the car.
Now, in the backseat, she put her hand up against her mouth and pressed her fingers against her lips, where his mouth had been, and the salt smell from the marsh came in through the vents, and she cried for the boy and for the grandmother and for the girl she had been at nineteen, who had believed that leaving was the braver thing and who had been, all along, only afraid.
The car went north. The road unspooled. The salt smell thinned and was gone, and the woods thickened, and Donnie drove, and the clock on the dashboard turned from four to five, and Elara sat in the backseat with her hand over her mouth and the wool sweater against her cheek and the locket warm against her sternum, and she did not look back.
She never looked back.
Until now.
The road unwound north through thickening pine, and the salt smell was long gone, replaced by the dry green scent of spruce and the faint petroleum tang of the highway. Elara sat in the backseat with her hand still pressed against her mouth, and she did not know how long she had been like that before her fingers came down.
Her phone was in her jacket pocket. She knew what it said. She had known since Mr. Pruitt had handed it to her across the counter of his store, the screen lit with the missed call and the number she had not dialed in eleven years, and she had put it in her pocket without looking at it and she had walked out into the wind and the gull noise and she had gotten into Donnie's car.
Now she took it out.
The screen was bright in the dim of the backseat. The number was still there. Her thumb hovered.
In the front seat, Donnie glanced in the rearview mirror. He had not asked a single question since they had left the marsh. He had simply driven, the way he used to drive her father to the hospital those last months, the way he had driven her grandmother's body to the crematorium in Portland when Elara was nineteen and could not stop shaking. Donnie knew when to talk and when not to. He was the only man in three counties who did.
"I'm going to make a call," Elara said, to no one in particular, to the window, to the darkening trees. Her voice sounded strange to her, rough at the edges, the way it got when she had been crying without knowing she was crying.
She pressed the number.
It rang four times. Five. Six. She thought it would go to voicemail, and she thought she would leave a message, and she thought she would hang up after the beep and sit there in the backseat with the relief of having tried, which was the coward's relief, which was her mother's relief, which was not hers anymore.
On the seventh ring, the line clicked.
A breath. Then a voice, low and slightly monotone, slow and heavy with the particular weariness of a person who has been waiting for the phone to ring and has been hoping it would not.
"Elara."
"Jules."
A pause. The particular pause of a mother hearing the voice of a daughter she has not spoken to in eleven years, and choosing not to say what that pause contains.
"I got the call," Elara said. "From Mr. Pruitt. About Vera."
"I know," Jules said. "I made the call."
Elara closed her eyes. Of course Jules had made the call. Of course Jules had been the one to find her, or to be called by the hospice, or to sit with her in the last hours, and to call Mr. Pruitt, and to have Elara's number pulled out of some drawer in some house Elara had not been inside in over a decade. Of course. The machinery of family, running on the fuel of Jules's stubborn, exhausted competence, running without Elara, as it always had.
"How is she," Elara said, though she knew. She could hear it in the way Jules had said I know . The way the vowels had flattened. The way there was no rise at the end of the sentence.
"She's gone, Elara. She went this morning. Quietly. In her sleep. The nurse said she hadn't woken, and then she had, and then she hadn't again."
Elara opened her eyes. The trees went past, a dark blur. She watched them, because if she watched anything else, she would lose the sentence she had been building.
"The funeral," she said.
"There's no funeral to speak of," Jules said. "She left instructions. Cremation. No service. A small scattering at the marsh, when the weather permits, and you and I are to do it together, and that is the entire sum of it."
"That can't be the entire sum of it."
"It is what she wrote. It is what she asked for. She was very clear, Elara. She was very clear about a great many things in the end."
Jules's voice did not waver. It never had. That was the thing about Jules, that her voice never wavered, that she could say your grandmother is dead in the same tone she used to say the tide is out or the kettle is whistling , and you could not tell whether she was feeling something or had simply decided long ago that feeling it would not help.
"I want to come," Elara said.
A pause. A longer pause this time.
"To Portland," Elara said. "I want to come to Portland. For the scattering. For whatever there is. I want to come."
Another pause. Then Jules sighed, the sigh of a woman who has been running the salt farm and the family and the bookkeeping and the phone calls to doctors and to cousins and to Mr. Pruitt for so many years that the sigh has become part of her exhalation, automatic, the body breathing out before the lungs are even empty.
"Elara," she said. "There is nothing for you to come for. I can handle the arrangements. I have handled every arrangement for the last eleven years. The scattering can wait for a Saturday when the wind is right. I can do it alone. I have done everything alone."
"I know you have."
"Then why."
Elara looked down at her hand. The locket had slipped out of her shirt, and it lay against the wool of Vera's sweater, catching the passing headlights in its little tarnished face. She pressed her thumb into the dent of it, the place where Vera's thumb had pressed, year after year, the worn smooth place that fit a thumb the way a stone fits a hand.
"Because she's my grandmother," Elara said. "Because I left. Because I left and I didn't come back and she kept the locket for me and I want to scatter it with hers and I want to see the marsh one more time and I want to see you, Jules. I want to see you."
The line was quiet. Elara could hear the television in Jules's kitchen, some news broadcast turned low, and the particular creak of the floorboard outside the pantry that Vera had always meant to fix and never had, and the absence of Vera's breathing in the next room, which was the loudest sound of all.
"Book a flight," Jules said, at last. "If you must. Book a flight. I will not stop you. I will not ask you to stay. There is no room in the house. There is the cot in the she'd. You remember the cot in the she'd."
"I remember the cot."
"It is not comfortable."
"I know."
"Book a flight," Jules said again, and then, before she hung up, she said, very quietly, very fast, the way she said things she did not intend to say, "I am glad you called, Elara. I am glad."
And then the line went dead.
Elara sat with the phone against her ear for a long time after, listening to the silence that was not silence, that was the hum of the disconnected line, that was the absence of Jules, that was the absence of Vera, that was the eleven years of not calling and the eleven years of not answering and the one sentence I am glad you called that Jules had said and that Elara would remember for the rest of her life.
She put the phone down. She opened the airline app. She typed Portland, Maine. She typed tonight. She typed one way, because she did not yet know if she was coming back, and she did not want to lie to herself about it.
There was a red-eye out of Boston at eleven forty. There was a seat in the back, near the lavatory, the kind of seat no one wants and that Elara always chose because it gave her a wall to lean against and a place to put her bag and no one to make small talk with. She booked it. She paid for it with the card that still had her father's name on it, because she had never changed it, because some part of her had liked the way the receipt at the gas station said WHITLOCK in the little printed letters.
The confirmation came through. The plane would leave in five hours.
She put the phone away. She leaned her head against the window. She watched the dark trees go past, and the occasional lit kitchen of a farmhouse, and the small lit windows of a church, and she did not speak, and Donnie did not speak, and the car went north.
At her parents' house, which was not her parents' house anymore, which was just her mother's house now, the door was open and the kitchen light was on and the salt smell came in from the marsh, faint but there, as it always was, as it would always be. Elara went inside. She did not turn on any lights. She went up the stairs in the dark, by feel, the way she had gone up them since she was a child, her hand on the banister, her feet knowing the creak of the fourth step and the slant of the hallway floor.
Her room had been kept. Not as a shrine, not as a museum, but as Jules kept things, functionally, the way one keeps a fire extinguisher, in case it is needed, with no sentiment about the contents. The bed was made with the old quilt. The dresser was dusted. The curtains were the same faded blue. There was a stack of mail on the desk that was addressed to her, forwarded from California, and that she would open tomorrow, or the day after, or not at all.
She took a small canvas bag from the closet. She folded a clean shirt into it. She folded trousers. She folded a toothbrush in a washcloth. She put the phone charger in the side pocket.
Then she went to the dresser and opened the small top drawer, the one that smelled of cedar and of Vera's old handkerchiefs, and she took out the locket. She held it in her palm for a moment, feeling its weight, the way a coin feels heavier than it is when it has been carried a long time. She put it into a small velvet pouch, and she put the pouch into the bag, against the side, where it would not be crushed.
Then she reached into the back of the drawer, behind the folded gloves, and she took out a napkin. It was white, once. It was the color of old paper now, and it was soft from being handled, and in the corner, in faded blue ink, were the initials V.W., Vera Whitlock, and beside them, in different ink, smaller, shakier, the initials J.W., Jules Whitlock, and beside them, in the smallest hand of all, the initials E.W., Elara Whitlock.
Vera had written them there one summer afternoon when Elara was six or seven, at a picnic on the marsh, on a napkin she had borrowed from the general store, because Vera had always believed that important things should be written down, even on napkins, even in pencil that would not last. She had written the initials of the three Whitlock women, and she had folded the napkin and put it in her pocket, and she had given it to Elara at the end of the summer, and Elara had never been able to throw it away.
Elara folded the napkin along its original creases. She put it into the velvet pouch, beside the locket. She drew the strings of the pouch closed.
She zipped the bag. She carried it downstairs. She set it by the front door, where she would not forget it, where she would see it when she came down in the morning and went out to Donnie's car and rode to Boston and boarded the red-eye and flew through the dark to Portland, Maine, to the marsh, to the scattering, to Jules, to whatever came after.
In the kitchen, the clock ticked. The salt smell came in through the cracked window. Elara stood at the sink in the dark and pressed her hands against the cool enamel and listened to the house, and the house listened back, and somewhere in it, in the room at the end of the hall, the room that smelled of lavender and of nothing now, Vera was not, and that was the truest thing in the world, and Elara stood there with her hands on the sink and let it be true.