I poured coffee. Lucas flipped pancakes. He was wearing the Kiss the Cook apron, and from the back he looked exactly like Dad. I hadn’t noticed the resemblance in a long time.

Cole took his coffee out to the dock and stood in the cool air, looking at the sunrise over the water. He was wearing a navy sweater with a cable-knit pattern, and when he came back in, the sweater seemed full of the smell of outdoors. It reminded me of something, some elusive thread from way back. I felt dizzy, breathing in the smell of the woolen sweater, the scent held in its fibers—sun, salt, earth—and the smell of coffee and bacon, which were so familiar and wrapped up in home and family.

Cole’s hair was longer than when he’d arrived, and it looked rich and healthy. Had he gained weight? Just a couple pounds, enough to fill out his face. He looked healthy and vibrant, as if now instead of simply emanating heat, he also emanated light.

Later I caught the reflection of my face in the old coffeepot. It was distorted by the curve of the pot, but distorted or not, I saw my huge eyes, my pale skin. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, and that was probably why I looked the way I looked, but it occurred to me that Cole had been siphoning my well-being, stealing a vitality for himself that used to be mine.

After breakfast, Lucas unwrapped his present, carefully, without tearing the paper.

“Look at it,” he said. It was a camel hair overcoat. He held it up. “Like Dad’s,” he said.

“It’s like the one he wore when we were really little. I thought you would like it, even if you don’t get a chance to wear it much.”

“I love it,” Lucas said. He tried it on, and it transformed him even more than the Kiss the Cook Apron. It wasn’t even that he resembled Dad so much, I realized, as that he resembled a dad. We were grown up, or something like it. We were twenty-nine that birthday.

Lucas and Cole gave me a jewelry box, and inside was a silver bracelet.

“There’s more,” Lucas said, and held out his hand. Clasped there was a charm: a silver jellyfish. “You put that on the bracelet,” he said.

“I get how it works. Jewelry isn’t that foreign to me. I’ve seen it on TV.”

“Very funny,” Lucas said. Then Cole handed me a charm, a silver pyramid.

“Triangle,” he said, reaching out to fasten the charm on the bracelet. His fingers on my wrist. Both of us thinking of the night on the beach when he’d drawn the triangle in the sand.