Sally is already pulling the enormous, brocaded living room drapes shut when I come through, as if we were heading out for six months instead of a few days’ break. Emma runs into the living room, and Sally startles, hands in the air, bracing for the three-foot-tall tackle.

I picture our housekeeper as a linebacker and stifle a smirk. She’d probably be good at it.

“John Ashford’s around the side, milady,” Sally says, ignoring Emma’s attempts to scale her leg. “He thought you might like the use of his pickup truck to get down to the harbor.”

She always says pickup truck like it’s a foreign delicacy.

I smile. “Awesome, that’ll be helpful.”

I didn’t flinch when I heard milady this time. Sally hardly says it anymore. It slips out when she’s busy. It has the ring of a joke, like calling Charlie “Esquire” or Emma “Dr. Treadway” when she’s playing checkup with her dolls.

How am I a milady? How is anyone in this day and age?

“Have you seen Charlie?” I ask.

Sally frowns, thinking. “Isn’t he at the landing with Lord Treadway?”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure I saw them go off together.” She wipes her hands on her trousers. “Do you want me to have a look around?”

“No, no. It’s fine, you’re busy enough as it is.” I smile another goodbye, but my heart’s still pounding like there’s something wrong.

It’s fine, he’s fine, he’s with his dad, calm the hell down, Nina.

Outside, John Ashford’s green pickup is idling on the drive, the driver himself nowhere to be seen.

“John Ashford,” not just “John.” Sally uses his full name because on an island with a population of less than two hundred, there are somehow seven Johns to differentiate between. Five of them have been off fighting for the past four years, but John Ashford remains John Ashford, and ancient John Jones is still John Jones. You’d think new parents would get it together among themselves to vary the names they give their babies, but that’s not the way of things here, and if I’ve learned anything in the past seven years on Lute, it’s that “the way of things” likes to stay put. Even in wartime. Everywhere around us, life’s been upended, but here, it’s only seemed to shift.

I wonder if things are still the same in Florida. Strip malls extending their reach like concrete kudzu, theme parks whirling, playgrounds flash-drying in the summer sun. I feel a little pain behind one eye at the thought of my childhood home, flat and glaring, and then blink it away as I reach for my daughter.

I hold Emma back from the growl of the running engine, and then John Ashford’s head pops up past the hood.