I wandered out to the dock and sat on the end with my feet hanging over and watched the movements of the water. A school of fish swam by, embroidering the surface. The sun turned orange and slipped lower. The objects around me took on a bright-edged insistence, the old splintered boards of the dock each separate and unique, the white sails in the bay popping out from the background.

I heard the screen door and turned to see Lucas coming toward me.

“Cole wants ice cream,” he said.

“We haven’t had dinner yet.”

Cole strode out the back door. “I like ice cream after a game,” he called to me. Lucas hurried after him.

“We haven’t had dinner,” I said again, but they were going, and I jumped up and followed them.

We sat on a bench down by the ferry landing and looked out at the lights of Martha’s Vineyard. The late ferry would be coming in at nine. I knew that boat as if it were my own body, I’d been watching its comings and goings for so many years.

“I’m going to look,” Lucas said.

“Good luck,” I told him.

Cole and I licked ice-cream cones and watched Lucas crouch by the water and poke the sand with a stick, searching for phosphorescence.

“We couldn’t get a better night if we ordered it from a catalog,” Cole said. He leaned back and surveyed the water. I noted again the way he looked at everything with an expression of ownership—as if it were already his.

“I don’t really order my nights from catalogs,” he said. “That’s a good way to get the wrong size. No, the way I do it, I go to the store, I try a bunch on, see what fits, what feels right, then put it on the credit card.”

“Mine are hand-me-downs,” I said.

“Really? Who had them first?”

“My mom. Lucas. Baby B. I don’t know. I don’t even know why I said that.”

Cole licked the drips around the bottom of his scoop of ice cream, put the rest of the cone in his mouth. “I could eat another one,” he said. “I’m basically always hungry.”

I looked at him through the dusky light and felt a familiar feeling rise up. A desire for something out of reach, something in the past, or the future, something lost to time, or not meant for me.

“You know,” I said, “all this will probably make things harder for Lucas when you leave.”

“I’m not planning to leave anytime soon.”

“Just to be clear, I don’t believe you’re the reincarnation of my dead brother.”

“You say believe like it’s a filthy thing. Don’t you believe in anything?”