We were sitting at my kitchen table that night, yellow Julia Child roses on the table. Jules was showing me the photos of the motorcycles she had recently custom painted, and we were sampling two pieces of pie—marionberry from a farmer friend named LaRenti and lemon custard by a man who had recently moved here named TeeRee—that I was going to sell in the bookstore. Obviously, the pie eating was purely for professional reasons.

“I’m going to write back to her. Soon. But not yet. I have to think this through. Do I want to meet her? When?” I looked at my dad’s airplanes hanging from the ceiling. Why did you have to lie, Dad? “Do I want new parents and a sister in my life all the time? Part of the time? Will they like me? Will I like them?”

“Yep, wait it out and think about it,” she said, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “This marionberry pie is heaven. Have a bite.” She held out her fork. “Open up, sister-love.”

“Delicious.”

* * *

I saw Marco on his boat. I was sitting in the gazebo reading a book with Sundance. I knelt down like a spy and peeped out. He was with three other men. They were laughing and talking. I thought my heart would stop beating, collapse, and be sucked into the rest of my body.

He was so dang handsome, the wind brushing his hair back, his arms muscled, his smile wide.

I loved that man, I did.

But Marco loved his boat. That was a problem. A deathly problem.

My premonition of Marco’s death was stark and horrifying, I didn’t even like to think about it. Thinking about that premonition before I went to sleep had always given me nightmares.

Together with Sundance we were out on his boat at the tail end of dusk. The boat started taking on water in a freak storm, thunder and lightning, the works. We were not near the islands, not near home, I don’t know where we were, but night soon caved in, the inky blackness all around us, like a suffocating black blanket.

The boat started to sink, why was not clear to me. Marco had a life raft on board and he inflated it, pushed me into it, then tossed Sundance to me, which knocked me over. The boat suddenly lurched to the side and Marco fell over. He cracked his head on the rail as he went. I grabbed the oars of the lifeboat and went around the tilting boat to get him, screaming his name, my screams lost in a blast of thunder.