This old cabin resort she and her husband George had bought after their honeymoon was slowly going downhill. Money was tight, and there was always a cabin in need of repair. Most distressingly, for the first time since buying the place, there hadn’t been a single guest over the winter. They’d always had reservations in the winter. Being so close to the Florida border, snowbirds used to flock here from the north, woolen caps still on their heads, road salt still stuck to their tires. But the regular guests had aged along with everything else. Many of them were gone now. Some couldn’t drive anymore. Some had simply grown fond of their comfortable chairs by warm windows and didn’t want to leave home.

This was the right decision. It had to be.

A small beautiful woman in her sixties came to stand beside Eby in the doorway of the main house—a two-story clapboard structure with a roof that leaked, hallways that led nowhere, and stairways that narrowed into tight squeezes as you reached the top, like in a child’s playhouse. The old house and the rental cabins had come with the lake, and one of the main reasons Eby and George had bought the place was because there had been so much to do. It had been a fitting metaphor at the time—repairing, rebuilding, reinventing.

Eby could feel Lisette’s anger like a burst of heat. The force of it made the fine silver hair around Eby’s face move, as if by wind. Eby sighed. Lisette had to have known this was going to happen sooner or later, but Eby could tell she was going to be difficult about it anyway.

Lisette opened the small notebook she had on a length of butcher’s twine around her neck. She wrote something, then showed it to Eby: You should have consulted me about this! How long have you been planning to sell? Why did you not confide in me?

“You can’t be that surprised, Lisette. Not after the winter we had. And I’ve been thinking of traveling again. You know that,” Eby said. She had been dreaming of Europe lately, of Paris and its dark streets. In her dreams, she had lost George but was following a large orange one-eyed cat to him. He was waiting around the next corner for her. Always just around the next corner. “How about we go back to Paris? Wouldn’t that be nice?” Eby asked, trying to make her decision sound like an adventure. “Your mother is almost ninety. You should see her again. Mend that fence.”

Lisette was, and always had been, as combustible as an unlit match. Eby usually knew how to work around her tirades, to soothe her before she had time to get riled up. But mentioning Lisette’s mother, Eby realized belatedly, had been a bad idea.