Voices pulled me out of my dreams. A kind of pure white light reflected up from the bay, filling the room. The voices belonged to the ripples of light on the wall, then to the waves out in the bay. Then I was fully awake, and the voices were just voices.

I slid out of bed and pulled on pajama pants. Crept down the stairs.

Not voices—music. I paused to make sure it wasn’t the record player, the old Nina Simone album—because that would mean things with Lucas were worse than I thought. But it was Leonard Cohen, which meant things were okay. Lucas was making scrambled eggs. His hair was tousled, sticking up, as if he’d slept on it wet. This time of year, late summer, his skin was brilliant and brown, and his shoulders and cheeks glowed with sunburn.

“You were out late,” I said.

He slid a plate of eggs in front of me without a word.

“Were you at the lighthouse?”

He sat across from me, fixed me with his earnest stare, his complicated amber eyes. Lucas was a child of the earth. He was all rocks and bricks and dirt, sun-warmed things, molten things, dust and leaves and pollen. One of his eyes had a dark brown stripe through it, the other a single fleck of gold.

“Well?” I said. “Were you?”

“Don’t you ever miss him, Lyd?”

“Who?” I said, but I knew.

“I just want things to be the way used to be,” Lucas said.

“He’s been dead all our lives, Lu.”

“The way things were supposed to be, then.”

That was a dangerous line of thinking. How did anyone know how things were supposed to be? Our destinies weren’t like clothes laid out for a party, they weren’t some one-size-fits-all costume to slip into. But I understood why Lucas was thinking about Baby B and how things should have been. That was the turn thoughts took when loneliness grew too big and unruly. Island Loneliness was more terrible than regular loneliness. Loneliness could be just sad, sweet solitude. Island Loneliness was solitude with wind and crashing waves, and it wasn’t at all sweet. Island Loneliness meant looking toward the blue edge of the world and longing for something that existed only on the other side.

“I’m late,” I said. “I have to go.” But I turned back from the doorway. “Let’s do something fun together tonight. You and me. I don’t know what. Make a big dinner or something.”

“I could get clams?” he said.

“Yes, let’s have a feast. Just you and me.”