“It was George who got to me first, actually. As soon as I showed up for work yesterday morning.” She laughs a little. “And that’s not surprising. God. He was so obsessed with Nicole back then. He made a fool out of himself that summer. Pestering her. Following her all over the place. But Nicki never gave him a second look.” I think about the way George stares at me, and my skin crawls. Because I know now, that he’s been comparing me to her. “But then Willa told me, too, of course. It’s all anybody around here has been talking about the last few days.” Glory sets the little watering can on the floor behind her desk. She sinks into her office chair and reaches for a staple remover. “But I think deep down, I already knew it.”

She looks at me and smiles.

“You seemed familiar to me, too,” I tell her. “Like maybe I remembered you.”

“I was nineteen that summer,” Glory says. She’s playing with the staple remover while she talks. Squeezing it open and closed, like a set of jaws. “I’d just broken up with my high school boyfriend. Dropped out of college. My life was a mess. God.” She shakes her head. “I was just a disaster. And it was my first week working at Whisper Cove. Nicki was an old friend of Willa’s, of course, and I met her the very first day she arrived here.”

Nicki.

I’ve never heard anyone else call my mother that. Dad always calls her Nicole. Even Willa does.

“Were you close?” I ask.

Glory puts down the staple remover and takes half of my stack of papers. More invoices for the upcoming professional shows, she tells me. We sort them into her filing cabinet as she talks. But I have trouble remembering how to alphabetize.

“Nicki was thirty years old that summer. So eleven years older than I was. And it was less than eight weeks from that first day we met until . . .” She stops and picks a bit of fluff off her dress. “But you know how there are certain people you just click with right off? Like you know instantly this is someone you connect with? On a deeper level? It was like that with Nicki. For me.” Glory’s finished filing her half of the stack, and she reaches for mine.

There are so many things I want to ask, but I don’t know where to start. It’s a little paralyzing, having all this knowledge about my mother after years of begging Dad for scraps. It feels like waking up starving in the jungle, and then being led to an all-you-can eat buffet on the other side of the island.