“I went once,” Sebastian said.

“No shit,” Gordon said, impressed.

“It’s like this,” he said, turning kindly to me.

Back in his granddad’s day, he told me, they would come in after a few weeks out whaling and go to the place where the ghosts of whores would still fuck you for free. You paid for your bed and fell asleep and they would visit you in the night, ghostly, but gorgeous. They all died of syphilis pretty young, and their ghosts were young and pretty. You could feel them only faintly, but you saw them clearly, and they rode you until you came just thinking about what it would feel like if they still had their flesh.

“All true,” he said.

Eddie appeared from the kitchen. “Look what the cat dragged in,” he said, happily, throwing his arm around me and squeezing me to him. He smelled of the bar, the brine of beer and oil from the kitchen.

“You okay?” he said.

“Oh sure,” I said. I wanted to hug him, to hold him for a long time, hold on to everything he meant to me—childhood and love and the simplicity of wanting something you can’t have.

On the beach on the way home I saw a ghost moving toward me, larger and larger as it emerged from the fog.

No. Not a ghost. Cole.

We stood facing each other on the sand.

“You know what I like?” he said finally. “This.” He touched the birthmark on my cheek. “It looks like the wind blew it there.”

“Let’s go home,” I said, and we walked side by side.

In the doorway I paused, listening, because it was my habit now to pause and listen in doorways, even when the thing I was listening for was just there behind me.

“Where’s Lucas?” I asked.

“He won’t bother us,” Cole said softly.

I looked at him in alarm. “What do you mean? Where is he?”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I just meant he’s out. He has an appointment at the clinic to look at his hand. They want to do an X-ray. He might be a couple hours.”

“Someone should be with him.”

“He can go to a doctor’s appointment by himself,” Cole said.

I felt sluggish and hot. Haunted by the ghosts of whores. By Cole sleeping on the other side of the wall night after night. By Emily. And Anthony. Lydia and Lucas and Colin. And my mother, who seemed like a stranger to me when I thought of her now.