“The night of the boatyard window breaking, Kat told me that Lucky was learning metallurgy, so I kind of figured …” She shrugs, face pulling to one side. “Drew’s parents live down the street from the Karrases. They’ve done a lot of the ironwork around Beauty. His father made Salty Sally out front,” she says, gesturing toward the bookshop door. Then she crosses her arms and sighs. “Beauty’s a small town. Everyone’s trees are growing over each other’s fences.”

Maybe knocking a few fences down.

“So … Lucky got lucky, huh?” she says.

“Mom.”

“Sorry,” she says, turning her head to give me a soft smile. “Do you need to … talk about anything? He for sure used a condom, right?”

“Yes, and no, I don’t need to talk about anything. I’m perfectly fine.”

“I mean, I know you were angry when you said it on the tugboat, but I guess I kinda did hope you’d wait until you were married, or whatever the right way to do things is.”

“Is there a right way?”

She throws up her hands. “You’re asking me? How would I know? I’ll tell you what, though—there’s definitely a wrong way. That, I know. The wrong way is when you immediately think, ‘Oh crap. I’ve made a huge mistake.’ Did you think that afterward?”

I shake my head. “Nope. Not a bit.”

“That’s good.” After a long moment she admits, “To be honest, I’m glad it was him. He’s a good kid. I like him.”

“Pfft. You do not.”

“He’s funny and smart. And he’s hardworking, which I like. Plus, he was also good to you, even when you were kids. Guess I misjudged him when we first came back to Beauty.”

“Rough exterior, soft on the inside,” I tell her. “I like him, Mom. A lot.”

She nods slowly. “Maybe I was being overprotective of you because I don’t want you making the same mistakes I’ve made. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

I stare at my mother, silhouetted in the window, golden headlights from the road shifting shadows across her, and it’s as if I’m seeing her for the first time. As if I’ve spent the last few years only looking at her through a camera lens that was smudged with grease and dirt, and now I’ve wiped it clean and can finally see her clearly.

A mama bird with a broken wing, trying to find a safe nest.

Swiping right, trying to find something she lost, or maybe to forget.

A car pulls up to the curb outside the bookshop. I turned off the light on the shop to get the spotlight off the stupid nude poster of Mom, so between that and the display of Revolutionary War sailing books, it’s hard to make out what’s going on … but it looks like a taxi.