I understood what it was like to have contradictory feelings, that duel between what you longed for, and what was good for you. When Emily had gone, I felt empty. For weeks, I felt myself flounder looking for something to fill me up. A past, no, a future. A blue hat on a busy street, a wooden door with small black numbers outlined in gold. The bell tower in Carson Cove, a garden with star-shaped flowers. A bridge over a stream, where two people fall asleep and dream the same dream.

Miracle number three is Tuck.

He went away to finish school, but then he came back. And when he told me he wanted to stay, some little voice that I hadn’t heard in a long time said good.

We made love in my new bedroom in my tiny apartment over the post office. The clean white sheets tangled up under us.

I woke up during that first night and looked at him in the dull light coming from the street. The waves, the hot golden sand, the cries of frogs and gulls: these were my sounds, my memories. This feeling—easy, plentiful, slow to blossom—this was the kind of love I wanted now.

Tuck has been with me for a long time now. “Five years?” I ask him.

“Almost five,” he says.

He loves the apartment as much as I do. He loves a lot of things: dogs and dinner and beer and walking until his body is exhausted. Loves the taste of just-picked vegetables. Loves yoga. My mom would have liked him. He joined search-and-rescue and goes out on the water late at night. He writes poems. He grows a patio garden. A widow’s walk garden. Tomato plants hang from hooks, beans climb up the old railing. Pots of basil and thyme and oregano spice the air.

Sometimes when we’re making dinner together, or cleaning house, or grocery shopping, sometimes when I’m reading in bed waiting for him to come home, sometimes I still think, This is what happy people do.

We think about Cole often; we wonder where he is and if he’s coming back. I think back to the night in the houseboat, and I remember drowning. The beauty, the stillness, the ache of wanting, with all the force of my being, one more breath. Sometimes now it feels to me that I was drowning all along—that the tumble into the water was only a culmination of a long, slow suffocation. Drowning in family, drowning in love, drowning in guilt and loyalty and loneliness. Drowning in a childhood I couldn’t grow out of.

Now I dream about Baby B. I dream of what I saw under the water, little lost soul, living in his underwater home there for years. Little soul waiting to make his grand appearance. Water baby. Water baby.