I arrived in Newport just before dark, under a clearing sky, and turned off the highway into the old section of town. It was a cute town—there were cobbled streets and wrought-iron lampposts— but thankfully not too cute. The grip of tourism hadn’t quite latched on this far south, which was part of the reason we’d always liked it so much.

As I turned off the main street, I caught sight of a young girl’s face in the window of a shingled beach bungalow. She was a moony girl, with sandy blonde hair pulled into tight pigtails and ruby lips against her pale skin, and the way she stared made me think she was waiting for something, possibly even for me. Maybe she had something to tell me, I thought. She was offering herself as some kind of sign. Passing along, though, seeing the flicker of the TV in the room, I decided she was just incredibly bored.

The hotel was a dilapidated box with broken windows and ragged shake siding, partly hiding the cabin at the end of an overgrown alleyway. The key was in the fake rock, as usual, and inside the door the smell of aged wood and ocean brine was reassuring. I dropped my bag on the floor, turned up the heat, put the whiskey on the shelf, and then promptly turned around and walked back out. Our routine had always been to hit the beach directly upon arrival. I figured I should stick to our patterns if I wanted Judy’s spirit to pay a visit.

It was only four o’clock, but already the winter sun was heading down. The wind was blustery and the sky was all over the place— dark in one quadrant and pale blue in another, with splashes of magenta, orange, and streaks of hot pink in the lower regions. The billowing cumulus clouds gliding over the ocean were like slow-moving buildings of water and air.

I skirted the edge of the tide, avoiding heaps of bullwhip kelp and seagull carcasses and blobs of broken jellyfish, and tried to imagine Judy walking alongside me. I thought of her rounded shoulders, her full lips, the lilac smell of her hair. I picked at memories of New Year’s in Brooklyn, our month in Morocco, our last phone conversation about whether or not we needed fresh half-and-half.

I waited for something to happen, but nothing did. Her voice didn’t whisper from the rocks or the sea. The sky didn’t open. I felt no tingles down my spine. I couldn’t say I was surprised, really. Judy was a practical person, and ghostly visitations didn’t seem like her style. Our love had never been the flamboyant kind.