He had no idea. He was talking about the will, about the finality of death. There was that, yes, but there were also little land mines everywhere she turned in Moonflower Bay. Driving into town earlier today after a trip to Grand View to meet with a Realtor had taken her past the Twistee Freeze, a faded, 1950s-era ice cream stand shaped like a giant ice cream cone. Lucille used to take her there in the evenings. They would get cones and sit on the picnic tables nearby and watch the first stars come out.

Later, she and Sawyer would do the same. Neither of them ever had much money, so they’d get small, plain cones. Or if Clara was with them, Sawyer would forgo a cone entirely in favor of getting one for his sister. Eve always used to try to get him to share hers, but he never would. He would say he wasn’t hungry, but she knew it was a lie. He was always hungry.

But she also knew that sometimes, pride was more important than hunger.

“Lucille loved this place,” Jason said, drawing her from her memories.

“Yes. I did, too.” I do, too? She wasn’t sure. The past and the present were getting all muddled.

“Lucille thought carefully about what to do with it. She considered selling it about five years ago, when she was starting to face the notion that running it was getting to be too much for her.”

“We were always urging her to hire a manager.” Did that sound defensive? Eve still felt terrible that she hadn’t realized how poorly her aunt was doing toward the end.

So maybe she sounded defensive because she was defensive?

She should have been here more. She should have been here, period.

A flare of anger erupted in her chest. God damn Sawyer.

“As was I,” Jason said. “She did hire a cleaning service, but she held on to the day-to-day management until the end. She had quite the independent streak, didn’t she?”

“You can say that again. If you tried to get her to do something she didn’t want to do, she would put up shields and just not hear you.”

It hit Eve that she could have been talking about herself. Why had she not thought about the Twistee Freeze all these years? Because she’d blocked it out, along with the lighthouse and everything else about this town.

But, she reasoned, shields were not inherently bad things. Shields protected you. They made it so you could keep putting one foot in front of the other and get on with your life.

“In the end, she decided she wanted you to have the place,” Jason said.

“Yes. I’m flattered by her generosity.” She really was. The money from the sale of this place was going to make a huge difference in her life.