“Look!” Stevie lay on his back then flipped over onto his stomach, put his whole head underwater, then flipped over again onto his back. A week ago he was too scared to be the only one in the pool. Now he was doing tricks.

“Mrs. Pike,” I began, my voice still strange. But behind her something caught my eye. Across the lawn and up at the very top of the mansion, nestled between the peaks of the two turrets, was a small widow’s walk. Hugh was leaning against its railing, looking out to sea. He was still in his bathing suit, a square white bandage on his bare shoulder.

“Did you have something to say, Cara?”

“No. Just— Would you mind passing me the fins?”

She had to bend down to reach them.

“A wolf shark needs her fins,” I said and slid them on.

At the edge of the pool I let out a howl and jumped. I could hear Stevie cheer me on just before I went under. I wasn’t sure if wolf sharks actually existed. At four and a half, Stevie knew far more about the natural world than I did. But I hoped they existed. I hoped there was such a thing.

FIVE TUESDAYS IN WINTER

Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections—if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?—while they complained that nothing was arranged by title. He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance.

His daughter loved the customers. She sat behind the counter at the cash drawer every Saturday, writing up receipts in an illegible imitation of his own microscopic hand and chatting like an innkeeper. She was too tall and too sophisticated for a Maine preteen. She made him uneasy. She had recently learned the word “reticent” and used it on him constantly.

“Isn’t he the most reticent person you’ve ever met?” she asked Kate, his only other employee.

“Maybe not the very most,” Kate said, not looking up from her pricing.

“But he’s—”

“That’s enough, Paula,” he said, then, feeling an unexpected pulse of blood to his cheeks, fled to the stockroom in back.

Mitchell had good ears, and just before he shut the door behind him, he heard Kate’s gentle reprimand: “I think as a rule people don’t like being spoken of in the third person.”