The worst part was that Cole was right. He hadn’t targeted us. I’d targeted him. I’d brought him home, introduced him to Lucas. If I’d been a different person, a better person, it never would have happened. If I hadn’t been trying to forget about Eddie, maybe I would never have noticed the stranger. If I’d long ago gotten married to some nice island boy, I wouldn’t be thinking about fucking strangers in the first place, right? If I hadn’t been so selfishly sure he was going to take Lucas off my hands and set me free, I wouldn’t have let him enter our lives.

But now? Was it too late? Did I want him to go? Did I trust him to be in our lives?

I stared at the list in my hands. The truth was I wanted him to stay. I wanted answers. I wanted to know what he knew about my family.

The wind came off the harbor and got into my bones, a chill that stayed with me, penetrating deeper and deeper as the day wore on. The tourists turned their collars up, and dug their hands into their pockets.

I wanted him to stay because he had something to show me, about the past, or maybe about myself.

Everyone was searching. I was not alone in this. All the islanders, all the tourists, scouring the beaches, scouring the streets, scouring the woods and the rocks and the lawns and the restaurants and the shops and the movie theater and the bathrooms at bars, looking for what they’d lost.

This island was only seven miles long. How could so many lost things be crowded into such a small space? I thought of my mother’s lost part of her soul in the dressing room, not taking up any space all those years. Lost things don’t always take up space outside of us. What exactly had I lost, I wondered, and when? An image of dark water came to me then, and something like a face beneath the surface looking up toward the light.

And then I thought, without meaning to, of my mother on the ferry that night when Baby B died. Who cared about the part of her soul in the dressing room? The real loss was that baby. I imagined her taking great greedy breaths of air, trying to breathe for him. No wonder she wanted to believe he was still alive somehow or reborn. Stop feeling bad about the dead, I told her, and I was also saying it to myself.

Chapter 14

14