“You remember! Yes, you came up every July. Before—” She chokes on emotion, and I am shamed into silence. Before my mom cut us off. Refused to speak to her mother, effectively ending my relationship with her, too. One day I had a grandmother. The next I had a sore subject I quickly learned to never bring up with my mom. All she would say was my granny had done something she could not forgive, that we’d be fine on our own.

And we were, until the cancer.

A peculiar sight outside my window gives us something better to talk about. “What the hell happened there?” I point to the partial remains of a McMansion at the end of the road we’re now on. Half of it is simply…gone. The edge of the building hangs over a cliff. The pavement around it is cracked and buckled.

“The sea came for it and half the block last year. Cliff face underneath simply slipped away,” Maura replies matter-of-factly. “God’s way of scolding foolish mortals for building dream houses so close to the sea. Or that’s what some in town say. The homeowners surely feel otherwise. There are more along the way here. No time for the complete tour, though.”

A right turn takes us back toward downtown. We cruise past modest bungalows and apartment complexes, while Maura points out historic homes, churches, a corner store, the diner, “that Mexican place” that opened in 1986. That she remembers the precise year and makes a point to call it out tells me a lot about the homogeneity of this place. The faces I see outside the car do little to convince me otherwise.

We pull into the Seaview High parking lot, where Maura’s late-model Mercedes finds good company in the front row. Presumably all these luxury cars belong to the kids who live in those doomed beachside mansions. ESTABLISHED 1938 proclaims the stone sign at the parking lot entrance, but the main school building must have been remodeled in the sixties, by the looks of the soaring stone archway at the entrance, and again in the nineties, judging from the new windows. Beyond the main building, I spot several squat classroom blocks through a grassy quad crisscrossed with covered walkways. And, much like the contrast between historic and salt-faded downtown Seaview and the mansions on the coast, there’s a state-of-the-art addition on the far end of the parking lot that screams money. This entire town is a twisted juxtaposition between worn-down and ostentatiously new.