I stood without an answer when a flash of lightning lit the store like a thousand suns. We startled, laughing.

“I knew there was a storm coming,” Hutch said.

“I really wanted to go to all the stores on the waterfront,” I said. “I guess … another time.”

“It’s a sign,” he said, grinning.

“A sign?”

“Take me to the guesthouse. Show me your work.”

I stared at him until the rain began to splash against the windows like a fire hose pointed at the building. “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

Uselessly shielding ourselves from the rain with our hands held above our heads, Hutch and I ran into the guesthouse, laughing and soaked. I grabbed towels and threw one at Hutch. “I’m gonna change,” I said, and shut the bedroom door.

I came out in jeans and a linen shirt, my hair wet and dripping onto my shoulders. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything that would fit you,” I said, sitting next to him at the dining table.

“I’m fine.” He ran the towel through his hair and then draped it over a chair. “Ellie, this is beautiful.” He pointed to the timeline. “Your sketches, your rendition of how things connect together. The house, the school, the man. Your black timeline is almost like a highway connecting one place to the other, taking what seems like random events and tying them together with some sort of meaning.”

“Thanks, Hutch.”

He placed his finger over the yellow star. “And this?”

“My birth … .”

He looked up at me. “September fourteenth.”

“You remember.”

“I remember everything of you.” He turned away from me as he continued to scan the timeline.

I reached across the table and grabbed the set of colored pencils and charcoals. “You want to help?”

“How?”

“Tell me what you see; tell me what you think happened here and here—” I pointed to the empty space between the bus burning and my birth. “You read her journal and you know the 1961 history better than I do. Talk to me while I draw.”

He settled back into the chair as I took the charcoal in my hand. “After the bus burning, she returned to Bayside and her job as a lifeguard at the country club.”

I drew a rectangle, making small squares of tile around the pool, a lifeguard stand. Hutch stood and walked to the kitchen. “You have anything to drink around here?”

“Wine in the fridge, glasses in the cabinet on the left.” I didn’t look up from my sketch, now filling in the pool with blue water. The sounds of an opening refrigerator, clinking glasses, rain running with the sound of a whispered waterfall outside the window. Then music: Hutch had found my iPod in the speakers and turned it on. Melody Gardot sang “Love Me Like a River Does.” And Hutch came to sit next to me.

“You know her work?” he asked.