I hesitate, but then I pull the sweater over my head. The morning air still carries a chill, but I feel instantly warmer. I pick up the notebook and thumb through it. A photo falls out and flutters into my lap. Me. At five years old. In the farmhouse library. I recognize the wood paneling and the leather sofas immediately, and I remember telling Lex and Val that I thought I used to play in there. Evidently, I’d been right.

I’m looking at the camera and laughing. My image is blurry. Like maybe I’m moving too fast to be captured on film. And behind me, just peeking out from behind the long drapes, I see a shock of dark hair. A flash of gray eye.

“That’s you and Cole,” Glory tells me, but I already knew it. “You two were inseparable that summer.” She smiles. “And I guess that made sense, being so close in age. But it was funny how the two of you just took to each other. Like you were made for one another.”

I study that one gray eye peeking out from behind the library drapes.

The lost playmate I never knew I had.

“Of course, that was before all the trouble started with him,” Glory says. She’s staring at the photograph in my hand. “The two of you were so innocent that summer.” I hear her sigh, long and deep. “We all were.”

“What do you mean?” I ask her, and I give in to the urge to run my fingers over the two little ghosts in the photo. A boy and a girl who don’t exist anymore. “About the trouble with Cole?”

“You wouldn’t know it to look at him,” Glory tells me, and she drops her voice to a whisper. “But he’s had a tough time.” She glances over her shoulder, like she’s worried he might be standing right behind us. “Willa sent him away last year. For a couple of months. She was worried about him. Brody was, too. We all were.” She stops all of a sudden. Realizes she’s said too much. “He’s so much better now, though.”

I wonder if that’s true. I’m thinking about that bone-deep weariness on his face. The dark circles around his eyes. Those stories about the sea. The way he believes them.

“Thank you,” I tell her. “For all of this.” And I mean the information just as much as the sweater and the notebook. “I’ve never really had anything of my mom’s.”

“I know you must have questions,” Glory says slowly. She’s polishing her glasses with the hem of her blouse. “About what happened to your mom that night.”

“What do you mean?”

My mother wasn’t used to ocean swimming, that’s what Dad said. A Texas girl who didn’t know the dangers of being so far from home. That’s all there was to it.