“Do you know for sure he hit you with something?” Tuck asked.

“Are you sure of what you saw? Someone who looked just like me swimming in the water?”

“I had been drinking,” Tuck admitted. “Did I tell you that part? But I’ve never seen anything that wasn’t there, drunk or not drunk. It was you.”

We looked out where the red houseboat used to be. I didn’t know where it was now, but I did know that the bay looked completely different without it, like a different view out a different window. A different bay off some other island.

Maybe there were ghosts: spirit swimmers, widows looking out to sea, the ghosts of whores, tiny faces at the window. I didn’t know if Baby B was a ghost following me around the island. Maybe he did exist. But everything I had to fear existed in the human realm. It was the same stuff everyone here feared: lost love, loneliness, death. Slipping off the rocks into the cold water.

That afternoon, Lucas found me in the kitchen. He’d been crying. There was dirt smeared across his cheeks, and his eyes were red.

“He’s gone,” Lucas said. “He’s not coming back.”

“Did they find him?”

“They’re not going to find him.”

I looked at Lucas’s face. “Is he dead?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Lucas said. “But he can’t be with us anymore. And he said I couldn’t come with him either.”

Would Cole continue this way, transforming himself into someone else’s brother, someone else’s husband or son? He would arrive on some other island, handsome and powerful, and I felt sorry for the girl on that island who he decided to love.

“He said he has to disappear,” Lucas said. It seemed he was past crying, his sorrow heavy and immovable, the sorrow of rocks, of stones, of things that take years and years to erode.

I pitied Lucas, but there was nothing I could do. His grief, like mine, was a private thing. For the first time in so long, I didn’t feel the need to grieve—I wanted to have cake and champagne. Walk on the cold beach. I wanted to go to the grocery store and fill a cart with food, enough for a month. I wanted to eat and then sleep, I wanted to shout, to laugh.

Cole was gone. Cole had disappeared. For now.

“Did I ever tell you about the ghost?” I said.

“No.”

“I started seeing it in my dreams. This was after my mother died. Then I thought it was following me around, in my daily life. I kept catching glimpses of it, but then it would vanish.”

“Wait, what are we doing?”

“I’m telling you a story.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”