“Because that’s also what she wanted. She wanted us to be together. All of us. She wanted that before she died, but I couldn’t. Not then. But now that I’ve met you I feel...compelled...to respect her wishes.”

“But—what do you want from us?”

A shadow passed the window. The new librarian, Elijah West, was setting up a tripod in the street and aiming a square, old-fashioned camera in the window of Mady’s. He moved as if he were spring-loaded, hopping from place to place. He fiddled with the camera, then hunched over and pulled a black cloth over his own head and the camera. In his right arm he held a small black box, which was attached to the camera by a cord. It was the clicker for the camera, and, headless, he held it extended from his body and then clicked. He would develop the picture, and there I’d be, at the table in the back with my cracked white mug lifted in both hands, and my elbows leaning on the table, and my hair in two braids, Cole and I drinking coffee together, surrounded by fishermen, as if we did this all the time, as if we liked each other tremendously, as if we loved each other. And Cole was barely even real! He was a ghost. He was here for my mother, not me.

“I just want to be with you,” he said. “I want us to be together.”

“I know that isn’t true,” I said.

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because no one wants to be with me,” I snapped. “My own mother didn’t want to be with me. Nobody does.”

I stood up so quickly my chair tipped backward and I had to catch it before it crashed to the ground.

Outside, the air was sweet with the smell of warm earth, browning leaves, the metallic tang of seaweed washed up on the sand. Cole tried to catch up with me but gave up when I kept walking. I tried to take deep breaths.

I felt ridiculous—acting like a baby. I thought about my mother, pulled up a series of memories I liked to go over when I had a chance. It went like this, in this order, as if the memories were one of those children’s stacking games that could only fit in one particular way: me swimming from the end of the dock to the shore, my mother, resplendent in a red bathing suit applauding above me. My mother laughing at something I’d said, a joke, her laughter like a prize I’d won, a reward. A viola concert in sixth grade. My acceptance letter from Brown. It occurred to me now that the memories were all times she’d been proud of me.