The whole place was full of people I recognized, the people I’d gone to school with, the people who took care of the island, serving its food, and cleaning its rooms, and patching its roads, and sweeping its sidewalks. They sat at big tables with barrels for seats and ordered pitchers of beer and laughed together.

“I haven’t seen you in here in a while,” Eliot, the bartender, said to me. He nodded at my empty glass. “But I guess you needed a night out.”

“Lucas is meeting me here,” I said.

“Lucas, your brother?” Eliot looked incredulous.

When the door of the bar next opened—I heard the jingle of bells like the tinkling of shells in the waves—Lucas and Cole walked in, the door swinging shut behind them. Everyone looked up, surprised. Lucas didn’t often go out in public, not since we were in school, and even then it was pretty touch and go. He’d even been homeschooled for a while. When we had the funeral for my mom, he’d hid in the woods the whole time.

“There’s Lydia,” I heard Lucas say.

He cupped one hand around his eye, a kind of half blinder, and made his way across the room. He sat on one side of me, and Cole on the other. Lucas stared at the floor.

“What would you like?” Eliot asked Lucas from behind the bar, and Lucas looked up, startled by the question.

“I’m just going to bring you a really good beer,” Eliot said.

“You were right,” Cole said to Lucas. “This is a great bar.”

Eliot brought their beers and Lucas and Cole took long sips.

“It is a great bar,” Lucas said. He looked at me and smiled, and I felt inexpressibly happy. I felt the kind of happiness that goes along with fragile things, little shells, dried flowers, beautiful in part because they’re fragile. I felt the weight of that complicated feeling, as if I were holding gorgeous, crushable things in my hand.

Beside me, Lucas lifted the beer to his mouth, an unselfconscious action, like any other man, like someone else’s brother. I took a long sip from my drink and felt it burn my mouth, my throat.

I pointed out Steph and Stephan, and told Cole about how they’d been in love as long as we could remember, since third grade, second grade. Cole introduced himself to Eliot. Lucas drank a second beer and laughed when Cole pretended he could read the scratches in the wooden floor like hieroglyphics. The rest of the bar lost interest in Lucas pretty soon and went back to their own stories over their own tumblers.