“Soon,” I tell her.

She looks up at me. “I want to wait for her to come back,” she says.

“Right,” I say. “I know. But you can’t. You have to go home with Grandma and Grandpa. Daddy will help find Mommy, and then we’ll come home to get you. All right?”

It’s a stupid plan, but Aubrey seems to take it as a good idea.

“Honey,” Helen says to Aubrey, “everything is going to be all right. Promise.”

I don’t know how she can make that promise, but I’m grateful for it just then. I can almost forgive her for what she said outside the bathroom door. She was just echoing Frank’s words. The kinder thing to do would be to not pass on such poison. As I watch Helen take my daughter’s hand, I wonder if sometimes I mistake quietness for kindness. Silence for caring. When it gets right down to it, no one ever really knows what other people are thinking. I want to like Helen Flynn, but there might not be anything there to actually like.

“Car seat’s in Sophie’s car,” I say.

I watch Frank wave his arms as he undoubtedly makes a point to the detectives that I’m a piece of garbage and that Sophie would have been better off with someone else.

“Anyone else,” he’d say.

The two detectives and my father-in-law are silent as we approach. There’s nothing quite like being tossed under the bus on the worst day of your life. Leave it to Frank Flynn.

My father-in-law makes a show of exiting the parking area by our cabin by revving the Buick as if it were some hot rod. The detectives head back to the station after promising to keep me posted on developments, and I am alone. Aubrey’s gone. Sophie’s gone. I am unsure of what to do. So I sit on the bulkhead above the beach, and I play the events of the afternoon over and over in my head. I think of the crab pots, Sophie, the call for help, the police, the strangers around me. Each mental image of what happened hangs like a noose around my neck. Heavy. Sad.

The crunching sound of oyster shells under Teresa Dibley’s feet knocks me out of my thoughts. Her face is etched by years of heartache and summer sunshine.

“Grandson found them in the bottom of the boat when you were gone,” she says, holding out my glasses.

“Thank God,” I say, putting them on and suddenly seeing everything more clearly. The faces. The heavy scene coalescing around me. All of it.

“Clark’s a good kid,” she adds, indicating the boy, back on the rope swing. He’s gangly, all lanky limbs and a head of hair that’ll go nearly white as the Pacific Northwest summer begins its annual sprint.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” she asks.

Her eyes are kind. The first real kindness anyone has exhibited since Sophie went missing.