Glory runs a hand over her hair. It’s frizzing up in the damp. She tugs her sweater around her shoulders. “Then the ambulance came and Willa rode with you to the hospital. We wanted someone to be there in case you woke up. So you wouldn’t be alone. Your dad couldn’t get here until that evening. And then a bunch of us—me, George, Brody, a lot of the other people who were here that summer—we came back down to the beach and stayed here, just standing around and looking out at the sound all day. We knew, if you were in the water, Nicki must be out there, too. Somewhere. We were hoping for a miracle, I guess. And then dark came and I couldn’t leave. The others all went home eventually, but I spent that whole night sitting right here. Waiting. Because I couldn’t give up. Not on Nicki.” She chokes a little. “I thought, if you were alive, maybe there was a chance she—” She stops again. Takes a deep breath. “The tide didn’t bring her body in until the next morning. She must’ve gotten hung up somewhere. On the rocks, maybe. Or a fishing line.”

“I’ve never known any of this,” I tell her.

Glory hesitates for a second before she pulls something out of her bag and hands it to me. A pink sweater. Soft and worn. It’s wrapped around a spiral notebook. The cover is a faded green. “I found these at my place when I finally went home that next day. The two of you had been there just a few nights earlier. I’d made spaghetti for the three of us, and we’d watched old Disney movies. Then everything happened, and I walked in the front door, and there Nicki’s things were on my couch. Like she’d just wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water.” Glory is staring at the pink sweater. “Nicki was always leaving things lying around.” She almost laughs. But then she stops. Takes a deep breath. “And I just scooped them into a box and put them in the closet. I couldn’t throw them out, but I never touched them again.” She hesitates. “I thought you might want them.”

The sweater is soft. I hold it close and try to breathe in my mother. I want it to smell like her, but I have no idea what she smelled like. I get the faintest whiff of lavender, though—like the ghost of a scent—or the scent of a ghost—and it makes the hair on my neck stand up.