“I’m just thinking about the future,” I said.

“Well, there’s your mistake,” he said. “Be in the moment.”

I looked around me. I loved the island. Loved it the way you love home. Which meant that sometimes I hated it, love and hate being two sides of the same coin. I looked at Eddie, felt a little volcano of anger. Be in the moment. Easy for him to say; his future was one he’d already chosen, with Kim. Sometimes my past, present, and future felt more like stories being told to me than a life I had any power over. “I’m sick of the moment,” I said.

“What you need is a distraction,” Eddie said.

And that’s when the stranger stepped off the boat.

I noticed him immediately because he didn’t fit into any of my categories. He was carrying a New York Times and a black duffel bag. He was handsome, and he seemed like an island himself, not in any way part of the commotion around him. He looked like someone coming home, but I knew everyone who grew up here. He wasn’t a tourist either, not on vacation. He didn’t really fit anywhere.

He stood at the bottom of the plank and heaved his bag over his shoulder, looking up and down Clara Day Street. He wore a white shirt and dark jeans, had dark eyes and dark hair, too. His shirt was untucked, and his black hair was windblown, but he still gave the impression of neatness, formality, and precision. He looked around him with a complicated expression—I couldn’t read him, but it seemed at once hungry and content, a contradiction.

He noticed me. I straightened. I was messy, unbeautiful. My hair was tangled, the color of sand. Lucas got the golden hair and amber eyes. I had sand-hair and mud-eyes. What was soft and sensual in Lucas’s face was just ill-defined in mine. But still, there was something about me that some men liked: sunburn, scratched skin, those little signs of danger and disorder. There was something pitiable about me, I knew, island girl, trapped here at the mercy of storms and boats. Some people spent all their lives looking for a girl like that. They wanted to be the one to give her the brave new world.

The stranger lifted his hand, waved. I waved. Then he turned and walked away. I watched him disappear down Clara Day Street. I realized I’d been holding my breath.

“Who the fuck is that?” Eddie asked.

“No idea,” I said.