“Okay,” Tuck said. He looked around the room groggily. An almost full moon over the harbor was filling the room with pale light.

“Come up,” I said. And he stretched out on the bed beside me.

“What did the ghost look like?” he asked.

“A seal,” I said. “Sometimes. And sometimes like a skinny girl. Maybe that was what you saw when you jumped in the water.”

Then I said, “Oh!” and a realization flooded through me, icy as ocean water. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my face, because I must have been an idiot not to have realized it long ago. That little face I glimpsed through the window in the bathroom at Jack’s. The sense that someone was behind me. That flash in the waves. Those weren’t seals. Not a ghost. Not Baby B either.

It was me.

It was always just me.

Little Lydia, lost all these years, wandering the island, haunting the Claws, swimming back and forth alongside the ferry, where I must have lost her to begin with, that spring I came home, when my mother got sick.

“I thought it was Baby B,” I said. I felt something pressing against my throat and eyes, ballooning large and insistent. I was definitely going to cry. I lay beside Tuck and pressed my face into his neck. His neck smelled like ocean water. He put one hand in my hair.

“You’re always seeing ghosts,” he said. “How did you know it wasn’t just a regular person?”

“I know everyone on the island.”

“You didn’t know me.”

“I knew you weren’t a ghost.”

“Are you sure about that?”

He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt his body, strong and human and kind—a celebration. Then all my thoughts dissolved into a warm blur as he pulled me on top of him.

Chapter 35

35

The morning light was steady and bright and almost green.

“Oh my god,” Tuck said, waking up. His eyes were only half open, and he smelled warm and sweet. “Let’s do that again.” He found my body under the sheet and pulled me toward him. I felt myself relax against him.

I didn’t feel compelled to be with Tuck. I didn’t feel driven by external forces. Being with him felt comfortable, happy.

We went to Mady’s for breakfast. Diane greeted me kindly, and she poured my coffee with the intimacy I’d once noticed between her and the fishermen. And I started to think: this feeling I’d had with Tuck these past months, this working together to solve a mystery, maybe that was being a normal person. Only usually there was no big mystery, it was just working together to buy a cup of coffee, working together to change the oil in your car, working together to take care of your home or your children.