Violet reached up and brushed the tears from her sister’s cheek. “But Trudy, seeing you like this? You’re finally free. You’re using your voice and your whole heart. You’re finally living the way you were meant to live. I’d do it all again, the same way, if it meant I got to see you like this.”

Trudy nodded. “I do feel free, finally. But Violet . . .” She leaned her head toward Violet and held her gaze. “You’re free now too.”

Their arms around each other was the kind of comfort that could only come when two people knew each other all the way down to the core. Trudy and Violet had faced life together, they’d even faced death together, and that kind of connection was impossible to destroy.

From down the beach they heard someone call, “You’re the art lady, aren’t you?” A woman in a turquoise bathing suit and flip-flops was making her way toward them, her arms pumping, her hair piled on top of her head. “The one who makes all those sculptures from found things? I read that article about you in the newspaper.”

“That’s me,” Trudy replied.

The woman’s eyes grew wide. “I thought you didn’t talk.”

Trudy grinned. “I do now.”

“Well, good.” The woman fanned her face with her hand. “I want to come to one of your classes. I’ve been collecting shells on this beach for years, and I’ve never known what to do with them. Think you could help me?”

The sun broke out again, soaking everything in its white-hot brilliance, and Violet took a step back as Trudy and her student-to-be dove into a conversation about shells and twine and imagination and patience.

It had taken Trudy some time to get used to the speed at which spoken conversations took place—she was so used to the slow back-and-forth of writing her words, then waiting for the other person to read them—but she now seemed eager to try out her newly remembered skill on anyone who would listen.

Violet chuckled a few minutes later when the woman glanced at her watch, then down the beach behind her, as if searching for an escape route from Trudy, who’d been talking without even seeming to take a breath.

That woman has a whole world of words to unload, Violet thought. And she intended to provide time and space for her sister to say every single one of them.

A moment later, the woman was gone and the two sisters were walking again, their gaze on the sand in search of just the right treasures for Trudy’s bucket.

“Would you look at that,” Trudy murmured as she approached a small, pale skeleton.

Violet’s breath caught as she spied the slivers of rib bones, the wispy tail bones, the gaping hole where the eye had been. She opened her mouth to caution Trudy, to warn her, but before she could speak, a brown pelican swooped in from behind them and landed with quiet grace on the sand right next to the bones. The bird pivoted so its small, round eye gazed right at the two women, then it leaned its smooth, feathered head down and scooped the bones into its pouch.