Dust motes turned to gold in the slant of afternoon light through the plate glass window, each one drifting with the lazy indifference of things long undisturbed. Maeve Whitfield stood just inside the threshold of the bookshop on Harborside Lane, one hand still resting on the brass door handle, and let her eyes adjust to the dim. The bell above the door had not rung. It hung crooked on its spring, the clapper wrapped in a twist of faded electrical tape.
She breathed in. Paper, old glue, the ghost of pipe tobacco, and beneath it all a faint staleness, the particular quiet of a room where no one had drawn a full breath in some time.
"Well." Garrett came in behind her, ducking slightly under the low transom, his boots loud on the warped oak floor. "Didn't expect it to still look like this."
"Like what?"
"Like Aunt June never left."
The words landed somewhere in her sternum. Maeve did not turn around. She looked at the counter instead, the old mahogany one with the green banker's lamp and the curling receipts in a wire basket, and at the pair of reading glasses resting there, folded neatly, as though their owner had only that moment set them down to go fetch something from the back.
She crossed the room. Her flats were soundless against a rug so threadbare the pattern had become an impression rather than a design. Up close, the glasses were tortoiseshell, the left temple slightly bent from years of being pulled off and on. A fine scratch traced one lens. The chain that should have hung from the earpiece was gone.
"Those are hers," Garrett said from behind her. He had stopped three paces back, his hands sunk into the pockets of his canvas jacket. "She'd chain them to her neck when she was reading at the counter. Drove her customers half crazy."
Maeve picked the glasses up. They weighed almost nothing. The metal was warm, or she imagined it was. She set them down again, exactly where they had been, and turned to face her brother.
His face in the green lamplight was all sharp angles and harder history. He looked, she thought, like their father had at the end. Thinner in the cheeks. A weight behind the eyes.
"You said she'd been dead three weeks," Maeve said.
"That's what Margaret told me."
"Margaret Thorne?"
"Calls herself Maggie now." Garrett shrugged. "Said June was found in her apartment above the shop. Quietly. The way you'd hope for, I suppose."
Maeve looked past him to the rows of shelves, the rolling ladder still canted at an angle against the tallest stack. Beyond the ladder, a doorway half hidden by a bead curtain led into what had to be the stockroom, and beyond that, a narrow staircase climbing to the upstairs apartment where her aunt had apparently lived and, from the sound of it, died.
"No one cleaned it up," Maeve said. "The shop."
"Estate's in probate. Margaret's the executor, or she says she is. Town's been waiting on you."
"On me?"
"You're the one with the nursing license. You're the one she asked for."
Maeve let that sit. She walked along the front counter, trailing her fingertips across the worn wood. Behind the register, a row of small drawers held paper clips, rubber bands, receipts in triplicate. A coffee mug, long dry, bore the legend WORLDS OKAYEST LIBRARIAN in faded transfer lettering. A pen lay uncapped beside it, the ink dried to a crust in the nib.
"She asked for me," Maeve repeated, quieter.
"Asked, insisted, made Margaret write it down in front of a witness. That sort of thing." Garrett moved at last, circling wide around her to peer at a shelf of maritime histories near the window. "She left you the shop."
Maeve's hand stilled on the counter. "She left me the shop."
"That's what the will says. Margaret faxed me a copy."
"People still use fax?"
"The courthouse does. Don't change the subject." Garrett turned, and there was a flash of something in his face, too quick to name. "She left you the shop. She left me the sawmill. Clean. Neat. Like she'd thought it all out."
Maeve studied him. The resentment sat on him like a coat he wore without noticing, the collar always slightly turned up against a wind only he could feel. She had seen it at their mother's funeral.
The shop door closed behind Garrett with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence Maeve had not finished writing. She stood among her aunt's things, breathing in dust and old paper and the faint ghost of something floral, lavender perhaps, dried and long since faded to memory. Her fingers rested on the WORLDS OKAYEST LIBRARIAN mug. She turned it once, read the legend again, and set it down.
She did not follow him. Not yet. She wanted the quiet.
The shop held the quiet the way a bowl holds water, completely, without effort. Maeve walked the length of it slowly, letting her hand drift along shelves she remembered from childhood visits. Children's books with cracked spines. A rotating rack of paperbacks gone soft at the corners. A corkboard behind the counter pinned with decades of notices, club flyers, a child's drawing of a whale labeled in crayon as WALE. She did not touch the drawing. She did not need to. The whale's eye was a single blue thumbprint, and she knew who had made it.
After a while, she stepped out the front door and turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, the small bell above the frame giving one bright peal as she did. The street waited.
The harbor at low tide smelled of brine and diesel and the sweet rot of seaweed left to blister on the rocks. Maeve walked toward it without quite deciding to. Her boots found the old boards of the wharf, and the wood spoke back in the language of creaks and groans it had spoken all her life. A gull wheeled overhead, screaming at nothing. Fishing boats leaned against their tires in the slack water, hulls scabbed with rust, names painted in careful script across their sterns. The LADY MARGARET. THE CORMORANT. RETURNING TIDE. She read each name like a roll call.
The town had not changed and had changed completely. That was the trick of coming back to a place you had loved as a child. The bones were the same. The skin was different. A shopfront she remembered as a bakery had become a wine importer with a green awning. The old hardware store had been painted a cheerful mustard and now sold, of all things, artisanal dog treats. A real estate office had opened where the barbershop used to be, its window displaying photographs of beach houses that cost more than her annual salary.
Maeve walked. The wharf narrowed as it reached for the deeper water, and she followed it out, past the fishmonger's stalls shuttered for the afternoon, past a stack of lobster traps piled like a child's abandoned blocks, past a rusted winch that had not turned in twenty years. The wind picked up. She pulled it in, her collar up, her hands in her pockets.
And then she saw the chandlery.
It should not have been possible. The Thorne family's shop had been a single storefront wedged between a marine surveyor's office and a place that baited hooks and untangled fishing line for tourists. She remembered it as cramped and dim, smelling of rope and varnish, Elias's mother behind the counter with her reading glasses pushed up into her steel-colored hair. Margaret Thorne. A woman who had once known how to make Maeve laugh without trying.
The chandlery was not that shop anymore. It spread along the wharf like a ship run aground on purpose, a long, low building of weathered cedar and salt-rinsed glass that must have taken years and a great deal of money to build. Two stories. A cupola on the roof crowned with a brass weathervane in the shape of a marlin. The sign over the door read simply THORNE in letters tall enough to be read from across the harbor, and beneath the name, in smaller script: MARITIME OUTFITTERS. EST. 1962.
Maeve stopped walking. She stood quite still on the wharf and stared.
Through the wide front windows she could see the interior, bright and orderly. Mannequins dressed in oilskins and fleece. Rows of boots on wooden shelves. A long glass case of navigation instruments, brass and chrome catching the afternoon light. Beyond the retail floor, through an open arch, she glimpsed a workshop, someone bent over a boat hull that had been lifted onto sawhorses, sanding in long, slow strokes. A woman with short gray hair and a screwdriver in her belt, a man she did not recognize with a pencil behind his ear.
She pushed through the door. The bell was different here, a low, mellow chime, not the bright clang of her aunt's shop. The air smelled of cedar and canvas and something she could not quite place, something clean and resinous, like the inside of a new guitar.
"Be right with you," a voice called from the workshop. Male. Low. The vowels had the slow, rounded shape of the hills behind the town.
Maeve wandered. She could not help it. The chandlery had been arranged by someone who understood both sailors and tourists, the merchandise presented with a craftsman's hand and a merchant's eye. A display of hand-bound logbooks sat beside a rack of prepaid nautical charts. Wool blankets in navy and undyed cream were folded in a bin beside a stack of enamelware mugs. A wall held nothing but coils of rope in graduated sizes, each labeled in neat copperplate with its diameter and recommended use. She let her hand hover over a coil of three-strand manila, almost touching, not quite.
A shadow fell across the rope.
"You can pick it up. It doesn't bite."
Maeve turned.
Elias Thorne had come out of the workshop wiping his hands on a rag, and he stopped when he saw her. The rag hung forgotten in his grip. He had grown into his bones. That was the thought that surfaced first, the one she would have written down if she were still keeping notes, which she was not. The boy she remembered, all sharp angles and unfinished sentences, had become a man with a stillness to him that the boy had never had. His hair was darker than his mother's had been, almost black, and longer than she would have expected, pushed back from his forehead as though he had only just run his hand through it. His face was tanned the particular tan of someone who worked outdoors and did not think to put on sunscreen. He wore a canvas apron over a wool henley, sleeves pushed to the elbows, forearms smeared with sawdust and the fine golden dust of teak.
"Maeve." He said her name as though he were testing it. "Maeve Whitfield."
"Hello, Elias."
He did not move forward. Neither did she. The space between them held the particular weight of two people who had last seen each other at the worst possible moment and had not spoken of it since.
"You came back," he said.
"My aunt died."
"I heard." He folded the rag once, twice, and hung it from a hook on his apron. A small, deliberate motion, the kind of thing a man did when he wanted his hands to be doing something. "I'm sorry. June was. She was something."
"She was." Maeve looked around the chandlery, the bright floor, the careful displays. "Elias, this is."
She gestured. The word she wanted would not come.
He watched her look. There was no pride in his face. There was something steadier than pride, something that had been earned rather than performed.
"Mom ran the shop for thirty years out of a storefront so small you had to turn sideways to reach the register. When she got sick, I came home to help her close it down." He shrugged, a small motion that did not quite dislodge the sawdust from his shoulder. "Closing it down turned into something else."
"You built this."
"Most of it. With help." He tipped his head toward the workshop, where the gray-haired woman had emerged and was leaning against the arch, watching them with the frank curiosity of someone who had earned the right to be curious. "Lou here is my boatbuilder. That's Pete on the floor. There are six of us full-time, twelve in the summer."
Maeve did the arithmetic in her head. Twelve employees in a chandlery in a town this size. That was not a chandlery. That was an industry.
"And the boats," she said. She had seen them through the back window as she walked the length of the building, three of them tied up at a new floating dock, gleaming with fresh varnish. A fourth sat on the marine railway, hull down, a man beneath it with a paint scraper. "You run a charter fleet."
"Three boats now. Two more in the spring." He said it the way he might have said the weather, a fact of the world rather than a boast. "We do day sails out to the islands, sunset cruises, a few longer trips up the coast. It's not what Mom would have done. But it's what the harbor needed."
"It's remarkable."
"It's a living." He looked at her then, and there was a flicker of something in his eyes, humor or memory or both. "You always did understate things, Maeve Whitfield."
She almost smiled. Almost. "I learned from your mother."
He did smile at that, briefly, the corners of his mouth lifting in a way that did not quite reach his eyes. The mention of Margaret Thorne moved through the bright shop like a draft under a door.
"How is she?" Maeve asked. "Your mother."
"Bad days and worse days." Elias leaned against the display of logbooks, arms folded across his apron. "Some days she knows me. Some days she thinks I'm my father. Some days she thinks I'm nobody at all, and those are the easiest, because she isn't afraid of strangers."
The fluorescent light above them buzzed once, softly, and went back to its steady hum. Somewhere in the workshop a radio was playing an old Tom Waits song, the brass and gravel of it drifting out into the shop like smoke.
"I'm sorry," Maeve said, and meant it the way she meant it when she said it to families in hospice rooms, which was to say, completely, without performance.
He nodded. "I heard about yours. Your mother." He paused. "Garrett called me at the hospital. The night she died. I went and sat with him in the waiting room until you came out."
Maeve had not known that. Garrett had not mentioned it, which was not surprising. Garrett did not mention things that complicated his version of events.
"Thank you," she said.
"You don't have to thank me."
"I do, though."
He looked at her for a long moment. The sawdust on his forearms caught the light. Behind him, the brass weathervane on the cupola shifted with a small, musical creak as the wind changed.
"You're here about the shop," he said. It was not a question.
"I'm here about the shop."
"June's place."
"June's place."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he straightened from the display and walked to the front window, looking out at the harbor. The late afternoon light was turning the water the color of old gold. The fishing boats in the slack tide rocked gently, their lines creaking against the cleats.
"There's a storage room in the back," he said. "Above the old fuel depot. It hasn't been touched in fifteen years. It's full of June's things, the ones the family didn't take when she left. I can get the door open. There's a key in my desk."
Maeve walked to the window beside him. She did not stand too close. She could smell sawdust and cedar and, beneath it, the salt of his skin, which was not a thought she had expected to have and which she dismissed with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had learned not to have such thoughts.
"I'd like that," she said.
"Tomorrow morning. Before we open. Seven o'clock."
"All right."
He turned from the window. "Maeve."
"Yes."
"The will. The shop. The things she left you." He chose his words the way he chose his joints, carefully, with the fit in mind. "Be careful with it. June kept everything. Everything anyone ever gave her, told her, wrote to her about. She kept it in that storage room, and she kept it in her head, and some of it she kept in places I don't think even she knew about."
"Are you warning me?"
"I'm telling you what I know." He folded his arms again. The apron strings hung loose at his waist. "I've been in that room twice. Both times I came out with questions I hadn't had when I went in."
Maeve looked at him. The boy she remembered had been all hesitation and unfinished sentences. The man in front of her was not that boy. He had built a chandlery from grief and lumber and stubbornness. He had kept his mother home. He had sat in a hospital waiting room for a man who had probably never once thanked him for anything.
"Tomorrow at seven," she said.
"Tomorrow at seven."
She turned to go. The bell gave its low, mellow chime as she pushed the door. Outside, the wind had picked up again, and the gulls were wheeling low over the water, their shadows racing across the surface of the harbor like darker thoughts.
She did not look back. She had learned, in her work, not to look back at the living any more than she had to. It was a habit that served her well at the bedsides of the dying and less well, she was beginning to understand, everywhere else.
The wharf stretched before her, the way it always had, the way it always would. She walked its length, past the chandlery, past the shuttered fishmongers, past the stack of lobster traps, and did not stop until she reached the parking lot where she had left her car.
She sat in the driver's seat for a long time, keys in her hand, and did not start the engine. The harbor moved in the windshield, bright and restless. Somewhere in town, a church bell rang the hour, five slow notes that sounded like a question no one was asking anymore.
She started the car. She did not go back to the inn. She drove to the only bar in town that stayed open past nine, and she sat in a booth in the back and ordered a glass of wine she did not particularly want, and she waited to see if Simone Vance would walk through the door at the usual time, because Simone always walked through the door at the usual time, and because Maeve had questions that could not be asked of a chandlery or a weathervane or the slow, careful eyes of a man who had grown up and built something she had not expected to find.
Simone arrived at quarter past nine, because Simone was never precisely on time but was never precisely late either. She had a way of arriving exactly when she meant to, which was usually whenever she had finished whatever she had been doing, regardless of what she had said she would do.
She spotted Maeve immediately, the way Simone spotted everything, with a quick sweep of the room that missed nothing and pretended to miss less. She crossed the bar in four steps, her boots loud on the floorboards, and slid into the booth across from Maeve without asking permission.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thank you," Maeve said.
Simone flagged the server, ordered a glass of the same wine Maeve was not drinking, and folded her hands on the table. Her nails were short, unpainted, and there was a smudge of graphite on her right index finger that suggested she had been drawing something, or writing, or taking notes on whatever case she was currently failing to advertise.
"So," Simone said. "You're back."
"I'm back."
"For how long?"
Maeve did not have an answer for that. She took a sip of the wine she did not particularly want and set the glass down carefully, as though it might break, or as though she might.
"Long enough," she said.
Simone studied her. It was the kind of study Maeve had learned to endure years ago, back when they were fifteen and Simone had decided, with the certainty of the very young, that Maeve Whitfield was going to be her best friend whether Maeve liked it or not. The study had not changed. Only the things being studied.
"You've seen him," Simone said. It was not a question.
Maeve said nothing.
"He came into the shop yesterday," Simone continued. "Stood at the counter for ten minutes arranging and rearranging the change in his pocket. I thought he was going to leave without paying."
"Simone."
"What? I'm telling you what I saw. You asked me to tell you what I saw."
"I didn't ask you anything yet."
"You're about to."
The server brought Simone's wine. Simone picked it up, took a sip, made a face that suggested she agreed with Maeve's earlier assessment of the wine, and set it down again.
"Take me somewhere quieter," Maeve said.
They left the bar by the side door and walked the two blocks to Simone's café, which was technically Simone's mother's café but had been Simone's in every way that mattered for at least a decade. The sign in the window read Closed, but Simone had her own key, and she let them in through the back, flipping on the lights over the pastry case and the espresso machine but leaving the main room dim.
"I was going to offer you coffee," Simone said, moving behind the counter. "But you're already a little wine-sad, so maybe just coffee."
"Just coffee."
Simone made it the way Maeve had always taken it, black, in one of the heavy ceramic mugs that had been in this café longer than either of them had been alive. She set it on the counter and leaned against the register, arms folded.
"All right," she said. "Tell me."
Maeve held the mug in both hands. The warmth of it was better than the wine had been. The ceramic was cool where her palms did not touch it and hot where they did, and she could feel her own pulse through the handle.
"I saw him today," she said.
"Elias."
"Elias."
"And?"
"And nothing. He was at the chandlery. He helped a customer. He said good morning. He said it would be good weather for the boats."
Simone waited.
"That's it," Maeve said.
"That's it," Simone repeated, in a tone that made it very clear she did not believe it.
Maeve drank her coffee. It was stronger than she remembered, or she was more tired than she knew.
"You still talk to him," she said.
"Who? Elias?"
"Who else would I mean?"
Simone considered this as though it were a real question.
"No," she said, finally. "Not really. Margaret comes in once a week, every Wednesday, for the lemon squares. She never talks about him. I never ask. That's our arrangement."
"And him?"
"He comes in sometimes. Buys bread. Says hello. Leaves."
"He never married," Maeve said.
It came out before she could stop it. She had not meant to say it aloud. She had not even been certain she was right until she heard herself say it, the way a patient sometimes diagnosed themselves with the first word out of their mouth, the truth surfacing before the person could catch it.
Simone raised an eyebrow.
"Heard that, did you?"
"I didn't hear anything. I just. The shop. There's only his name on the sign."
"There was a time," Simone said, slowly, "when you would have known that without having to look at a sign."
Maeve did not respond to this. She set the mug down. She folded her hands. She unfolded them.
"Tell me," she said.
"Tell you what?"
"Whatever you're not telling me."
Simone was quiet for a moment. In the dim of the café, with only the pastry case lit, her face was half in shadow and half in the warm gold of the case lights, and she looked older than she had at fifteen, and younger than Maeve felt.
"He was engaged," Simone said. "Three years ago. Almost four."
Maeve's hands went still.
"Her name was Nora. She taught at the elementary school. She was nice, Maeve. I mean genuinely nice, not small-town nice. She laughed loud. She brought him books. She didn't care about the Thorne money or the Whitfield name or any of the stupid things people in this town have cared about for a hundred years."
"What happened?"
Simone picked up a cloth from the counter and began folding it, the way people fold things when they need their hands to be doing something while their mouth is doing something else.
"She found out," Simone said.
"Found out what?"
"That this town still talks about you two."
Maeve said nothing.
"Not gossip talks," Simone clarified. "Not really. It's more like. The way a dog returns to its vomit. People can't help themselves. Every time Elias walked into a room with that woman, somebody had something to say about the summer everything burned. About the Whitfield girl. About the Thorne boy. About whatever it was that happened between them that nobody saw and everybody decided they knew."
"I never told him," Maeve said. "Whatever they decided they knew. I never told him."
"I know."
"Nora asked him."
"I know."
"And?"
"And he didn't answer her the way she needed him to. Not because he didn't love her. He did, Maeve. I saw him with her. He did. But when she asked him what had happened that summer, he couldn't. He wouldn't. He just looked at her like she had asked him to translate a language he had spent twenty years trying to forget. And she was a smart woman. She knew what that meant."
Maeve's coffee had gone cold. She did not notice.
"She ended it," Simone said. "Two weeks before the wedding. She came into the café on a Tuesday and ordered a slice of lemon cake and ate the whole thing and cried into her napkin for about ten minutes. Then she paid, and she left, and three months later she took a job in Portland and I haven't seen her since."
"Does he know she's the one who ended it?"
"Everybody knows. Nobody talks about it. That's how we do things here."
Simone refolded the cloth. She set it on the counter. She looked at Maeve with the look she had been giving her for twenty years, the look that said I am telling you this because you need to hear it and because I love you and because if you don't do something with it I will lose my mind.
"He still has the ring," Simone said. "Margaret told me that. She didn't mean to. It just came out one Wednesday, between the lemon square and the decaf. She said he keeps it in the back of a drawer in his workbench, in a wooden box he made himself. She said she didn't know why he kept it. She said maybe he didn't either."
Maeve stood up. She did not know she was going to stand up until she was already standing, the way patients sometimes got out of bed in the night without knowing why, their bodies knowing before their minds caught up.
"Sit down," Simone said.
"I can't."
"You can. You just don't want to."
Maeve sat down.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.
"Because you came back," Simone said. "And because you came to find me. And because you are sitting in my mother's café at ten o'clock at night drinking bad coffee and asking me questions you already know the answers to."
"I don't know the answers."
"Yes you do. You have known the answers since you were eighteen years old and you packed your bag and got on a bus and never wrote and never called and never once in twenty years explained to anyone in this town why you left."
Maeve put her face in her hands.
Her mother's house was still standing. The key was still under the third flagstone. The bed in her old room was still made with the quilt her grandmother had pieced together from the dresses of women nobody remembered. The lighthouse still turned at the mouth of the harbor. The gulls still wheeled. The town still talked, and Elias still did not answer, and somewhere in a workshop by the water there was a wooden box in the back of a drawer, and inside the box was a ring, and Maeve had come home to find out why her mother had left her half of everything, and why Garrett had not spoken to her in three years, and what had really happened the summer everything burned.
And she had come home to see Elias, though she had not admitted it yet, not even to herself, not even to Simone, who had always known.
"I have to go," Maeve said.
"Go where?"
"I don't know. Somewhere."
"Maeve."
"I know."
"If you go to him tonight, you will say the wrong thing. You always say the wrong thing when you are tired."
"I know that too."
"Then come upstairs. The couch pulls out. You can sleep on it and you can go to him in the morning when you have slept and when you have had a shower and when you have decided what it is you actually want to say."
Maeve looked at her.
"You still have the pull-out couch," she said.
"Where else would it be?"
"In the same place it's been since we were seventeen."
"Downstairs has not changed since Truman was president and I see no reason to fix what isn't broken."
Maeve almost smiled.
"All right," she said.
Simone took the mug from her and rinsed it in the sink behind the counter, the way she had rinsed a hundred mugs a hundred times, the motions automatic, the porcelain clinking against the stainless in the quiet of the closed café.
"Simone," Maeve said.
"Mm."
"Thank you."
Simone did not turn around.
"You can thank me in the morning," she said. "When I
I tell you that you look like hell," Simone said.
"I know."
"And when I tell you that you have not eaten anything since that sandwich on the drive up."
"I know."
"And when I tell you that whatever you are about to do tonight is going to be something you regret by sunrise."
"I know."
Simone held her gaze for a long moment. Then she reached beneath the counter and pulled out a folded blanket, the kind that came in bulk from the restaurant supply store, gray cotton with a thin blue stripe along the edge. She set it on the counter and slid it toward Maeve with one finger.
"Take it," she said.
"I have a blanket."
"You have a jacket and a purse and a phone with twelve percent battery. Take it."
Maeve took it. The cotton was soft from a hundred washes, familiar in a way that made her chest tighten. She had slept under this blanket, or one exactly like it, on this couch, in this room, more nights than she could count. Summer nights after the reservoir. Winter nights when her father was on a bender and her mother was working doubles and Maeve did not want to be alone. Nights when Garrett had said something cruel and she had walked the two miles to Simone's house in the dark because the porch light had always been left on for her.
"Upstairs," Simone said. "Pull the couch out. I'll be up in a minute."
Maeve climbed the narrow staircase at the back of the building, the steps wooden and worn smooth in the center where a thousand feet had worn the varnish away. At the top, a door opened onto a small apartment above the café: a bedroom, a bath, a kitchen that was really just a hot plate and a microwave and a sink. Simone had lived here for eleven years. The walls were painted the color of old paper. The furniture was thrift store and salvage. A guitar she did not play leaned in one corner, missing a string.
Maeve pulled out the couch. The mechanism groaned softly, familiar, a sound she had heard a hundred times. She laid the blanket across the mattress and sat down on the edge of it and looked at the window.
Outside, the town lay under a low sky, the kind of gray that did not promise rain or clear weather but simply persisted, the color of waiting. She could see the roofline of the old bank building across the street, and beyond it the steeple of the church her mother had attended every Sunday until the cancer made it impossible, and beyond that, somewhere in the dark, the lumber mill that Garrett had inherited and had not been able to save.
She thought of the mill. She thought of her father walking the floors of it when she was small, his hands smelling of pine resin and machine oil, his voice humming something she could not remember now but could almost hum herself. She thought of the day he had sold it to Garrett for a dollar and a bottle of bourbon, the deed signed on the kitchen table while her mother wept in the next room. She thought of Garrett's face that day, the triumph in it, the way he had looked at her as if to say, you see, I have won.
She thought of Elias.
The thought came unbidden, as it always did, rising from somewhere beneath her ribs, somewhere she did not want to visit. She had not spoken to him in three years. She had not written. She had not answered the one letter he had sent, which still sat in a drawer in her apartment in Baltimore, unopened, though she had read the return address on the envelope a hundred times.
She had come home knowing she would see him. She had come home knowing she could not avoid it, not in a town this small, not with the estate to settle, not with whatever it was her mother had left her in the box on the dresser. She had come home, and she would see him, and she would have to look at his face and remember the summer everything burned and the boy she had been then and the boy he had been and what they had said to each other, and what they had not said, in the days after.
Maeve lay down on the pull-out couch. The springs creaked beneath her. The blanket smelled faintly of detergent and of Simone's apartment, of the years that had passed and the years that had not.
She closed her eyes.
She did not sleep for a long time.
When she did sleep, she dreamed of water. She was standing on the bank of the reservoir where she and Elias had gone swimming the summer they were seventeen, the summer the fire had happened, the summer everything had gone wrong. The water was very still and very dark and the trees along the far shore were burning, but slowly, the way a fire burns in a dream, the flames curling up the trunks without consuming them, the color of them orange and gold against the gray sky.
Elias was beside her. He was seventeen. He was looking at her. He said something she could not hear, and she leaned closer to hear it, and the sound of the water rose up between them.
She woke.
The room was gray with early light. The clock on the shelf read 5:47. She lay still for a moment, listening to the sounds of the café below: Simone moving, the coffee machine hissing, the soft thud of a door opening and closing.
She sat up. She folded the blanket. She went to the window and looked out at the town waking up, the first car on the street, the streetlight at the corner flickering off now that there was enough light to see by.
She thought about what she would do. She could go to the house first, the house on Hemlock Street where her mother had died, where the estate was, where the box was, where the ring was, where the answers were if there were any answers to be found. She could call Garrett and tell him she was here and let him make the first move. She could go to the mill and face him there, on his ground, where he felt strongest.
Or she could go to Elias.
She stood at the window for a long time.
Then she went downstairs.
Simone was at the counter, pouring coffee into two mugs. She looked up when Maeve came in, and she did not ask how Maeve had slept, because she could see the answer in her face.
"There's coffee," Simone said. "And there's toast, if you want it. And after that, you can tell me what you are actually going to do."
Maeve sat down at the counter. She wrapped her hands around the mug. The ceramic was warm against her palms. The coffee smelled of the dark roast Simone always bought, the same brand, the same roaster, unchanged in fifteen years.
"I am going to see him," Maeve said.
"Elias," Simone said.
"Yes."
"And then the house."
"Yes."
"And then Garrett."
"Yes."
Simone nodded. She picked up her own mug and took a sip and set it down again.
"All right," she said. "Then you should eat something. And you should take your phone. And you should drive, not walk, because if you walk you will think too much and change your mind before you get there."
"I never change my mind."
"You always change your mind."
Maeve almost smiled.
Simone set a piece of toast on the counter in front of her, buttered, the bread cut thick, the way Maeve had always liked it.
"Eat," Simone said. "Then go."
Maeve ate.
Outside, the day was beginning. The sky was still gray, but lighter now, the color of old pewter, and the first true light was touching the roofline of the buildings across the street. Somewhere in the town, a dog was barking. Somewhere, a truck was starting. Somewhere, Elias was waking up in his apartment above the carpentry shop, and Garrett was in the house on the mill road that had once belonged to their father, and their mother was in the ground on the hill above the reservoir where she had walked every morning for forty years.
Maeve set down the toast. She picked up her mug. She drank the rest of the coffee and set the mug on the counter and stood up.
"Thank you," she said.
"You can thank me when it's over," Simone said. "And it isn't over yet."