I thought, She is alive. Did he mean my mother after all? The letter had been written in September, in that last year of her life. Dearest C. Had she meant Colin or Cole? Or both? There was something strangely specific about the letter. What had she said? Someone else can feed your dog. As if she knew all about his dog, as if a dog were the thing keeping him from visiting her in those last months of her life. The intimacy between them was palpable in the letter, as if they’d talked dozens of times.

I looked around my room and felt a rush of tenderness, almost nostalgia, for my old things, as if a new life was nudging its way in. Already everything we did was affected by Cole. He had something to do with our breakfast, our lunch, our dinner, and he had something to do with our walks on the beach, and the way we took care of our house, and the magazine articles we read, and the conversations we had, and our thoughts and our dreams.

I felt a sudden stab of desire to go back to a time before he came. I imagined walking home on the beach in the late afternoon, the long shadows making a path in front of me, a path toward home, always knowing, all those years, what I would find at home. The predictability like the sound of the bay, always there.

I wondered and wondered what my mother had meant, and how they had met, and why she’d never told me about him. I thought about what Eddie had said about my dad being a Scout leader, how everyone had loved him. What else did I not know about my parents?

It continued to rain, the scent of electricity in the air. Normally I liked a gray day, but because of the letter from my mother, the gray seemed startling, ominous.

I held the letter. I read it over and over again. I put the letter in my pocket. Then I sat on the couch on the screened-in porch and watched the red houseboat rocking, until it was too dark to see it.

Soon after the nine o’clock boat came in, their voices floated toward me from the beach.

“Lydia?” Lucas said, peeking onto the dark porch.

“Hey,” I said. “I was waiting up for you.”

“Are you okay?” Lucas asked.

Cole appeared behind him.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just having a quiet minute out here.”

“Mind?” Cole said, walking past Lucas and standing above me.

I moved to one side of the couch. “Go ahead.”

“We saw your lion-boy,” Cole said, sinking down beside me. I was aware of his warmth, the smell of his skin, something more than heat and dust. I reached into my pocket and felt the edges of the letter.