Despite my protests, I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, the station empty of thought trains and the whales barely on the periphery. I wake hours later to Valerie at my bedside, a bowl of pasta in her hands.

“Hungry?”

I’m famished. My head is pounding from sleeping too long and from the exhaustion of the stormy afternoon. The sliver of sky I can see around the curtains is gray streaked through with pink. The storm has passed and the sun is setting.

“Starving.” I scrunch up into a sitting position against the pillows and shovel the noodles into my mouth, only noticing three bites in that it is filled with mushrooms. I hate mushrooms. But I eat them anyway.

Valerie stands by the bed, her look expectant.

“I’ve closed the shop early,” she says. “Because of the storm.”

“That’s too bad,” I say, not sure why she’s telling me.

She tilts her head. “I don’t think so. How’s your ankle?”

I turn it in a slow circle beneath the quilt. “It’s fine.”

“Hmm,” she murmurs. If I weren’t so busy shoving food in my mouth, I’d wonder why she’s acting strangely.

The bowl is almost empty, and I wonder briefly if my future ought to include competitive eating. I’m scraping the sauce off the side of the bowl with my fork when Valerie says, “You should walk on it a bit so it doesn’t stiffen up overnight.”

“You’re probably right,” I say, swinging my legs from the bed, my ankle protesting with the dullest of cries. “I need to use the restroom anyway.”

“You’ll be wanting these.”

The empty bowl in my hand is suddenly replaced with an ankle brace atop a folded blue dress.

“What’s this for?” I ask suspiciously.

“Oh, I had the brace. It was one of Alex’s from an old sports injury.”

She’s definitely up to something. “Valerie, not the brace. What do I need a dress for if the store is closed? Or if it’s open, for that matter?”

“You ought to shower, get all that lake off your skin and hair. It will make you feel better. And give my old dress a spin. It hasn’t seen anything other than the back corner of my closet for years.”

I wonder if this is what having a mother is like when you’re old enough to care about clothes.

I don’t want my morose thoughts dragging me back to losing Jenna, to my mother, so I say, “Fine. But it’s silly, because I’ll just be taking it right back off to go to sleep.”

“Everything is silly, dear. Life is too brief to be anything else.”