When she breaks into a smile, I relax a little. This is the Anne I want to see. Sunny side up starts with her face. “The attic was our clubhouse. Margo was the president, you kept the records, I did the food. Even then.”

“By the way, your shop looks adorable,” I say. I’m not trying to butter her up. Well, yes. I am. I know there’s a “but” behind that smile and want to put her at ease. “I love the logo.”

“I love the whole place.”

“A lot of work?”

“Nah. It’s just breakfast and lunch.”

Giving her time to elaborate, I pull up the bottom section of stairs. It creaks as it folds, but soon enough the base covers the hatch with only a short piece of rope hanging to lower it again.

Anne is too quiet. Normally, she would go on about Sunny Side Up, which is why I raised the issue. The shop is something she does well. But she is definitely uneasy.

Gently, I say, “I’m not here to cause trouble, Annie. That’s the last thing I want.”

Her eyes hold mine. They’re the same dark green as Joy’s when she’s scared. “What’s the first?”

I consider. How to prioritize? “Seeing Dad, I guess.” So how did that work for ya? a voice inside me asks, and I wince. “He didn’t look pleased.”

“He was unsettled, is all. He didn’t expect you to come. If I’d known ahead of time, I could have prepared him.”

“How bad is he?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Not bad at all. You’ll see. He eats, he sleeps, he walks, he talks. He does everything he normally did, except work.”

“And remember who Joy is.”

“But he does,” she enthuses with a new light in her eyes. “He kept looking back at her in the car and saying, ‘Mallory’s daughter, Mallory’s daughter,’ like he didn’t believe she was here—and he said it in a really excited way. He loves that you brought her.”

I hoped that. The alternative was that his repetition of who she is was an attempt to drum it in so that he didn’t forget again.

“His memory isn’t what it used to be,” Anne goes on. “He wants to see the three of us here, and Joy looks like Margo. It was wishful thinking, is all.”

He isn’t the only one suffering from that. I cross to the window. The beauty of being on the bluff is that every window has a striking view. This one is part ocean, part land. I want to focus on the ocean half, which is more open, certainly more soothing to me, but that’s the coward’s way. Land is where the people are. Sure, open ocean can be lethal, but so can people. Is my father a murderer, or is he not? The answer isn’t out there in the deep blue. It’s here on land.