You had to be careful with Jake. He had never gotten over Jude’s death. Sawyer and Law had learned that trying to get Jake to do anything he didn’t want to do—come out to social events, think about dating—only caused him to retreat. If you pushed too hard, Jake disappeared for a while. Didn’t show up at the bar the next Friday night.

Sawyer lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I was only thinking if you declared yourself in business, you could actually—call me crazy—charge people money for all the work you do around town.”

Jake paused with his hand on Sawyer’s front door. “I gotta go.”

Okay, then. Sawyer turned his phone back over and restarted his video.

After seeing her parents off, Eve went in search of Maya, who was the closest thing she had to a friend in Moonflower Bay.

She’d been planning to do this alone, but suddenly she wanted company.

Maya lived above Jenna’s General Store, she’d said. Sure enough, next to the store entrance was an unmarked door with a buzzer.

“Yep?” came a tinny voice from the intercom.

“Maya? It’s Eve.”

“Eve! What’s up?”

“Do you want to walk down to the lake with me?”

Soon they were strolling down Main Street toward the water. Eve had been in Jenna’s store a fair bit since she’d been back—in addition to souvenirs and fudge, Jenna had an espresso machine—but she hadn’t really been beyond the store.

Which was why she was totally unprepared for another memory to surge up and clobber her. She physically stumbled as she spotted the fountain. But there it was, the same as ever. And there it was inside her head, too. Something that had once delighted her. “I forgot about this thing. Does it still work?”

“Sure does,” Maya said.

It was a drinking fountain shaped like a giant fish—a piranha of some sort. To drink, you had to stick your head inside the fish’s toothy head. She remembered tittering with nervous laughter as she and Sawyer would visit when they were little. Even though she knew it was fake, it always felt weird to subsume your whole head inside the fiberglass creature. “It seemed a lot bigger and scarier when I was a kid.”

And she remembered that while Lucille would tell her to buck up when she was scared, Sawyer’s mom would always comfort her.

Sawyer’s mom was fuzzy in Eve’s memories, partly because she’d died when they were young, but partly because, although she knew he missed her terribly, Sawyer had never really talked about her.

Being here was like playing Whac-a-Mole with her memories. The fountain, Sawyer’s mom, the Twistee Freeze, the lighthouse.