The drive to Nectar Creek Farm took about an hour, but we took a few stops along the way. This part of Maine wasn’t lush and green, but I loved letting my head rest against the window and watching the stark, craggy coastline whiz by. The highway we took was rock-bound, water on one side of us, soaring granite cliff on the other. Every so often there’d be a pullout, and whenever we found one with available parking, Levi would scoot in.

Forty miles away from home, we took our third stop and Levi reached for the back seat, snagging his sketchbook. “Last one, I promise,” he said as we got out of the car.

“I don’t mind,” I told him, watching as the awe on his face morphed into studious concentration as he flicked his dulling pencil point in long, sharp strokes across the paper.

I wasn’t immune to Maine’s beauty. Happy to let him have all the time he wanted, I wandered away, leaving him to lean against the wooden railing, sketching furiously. My feet tumbled over pebbles and sandy beach and grassy dunes until I came to the water. It was calm, unbroken by seagulls or children splashing. It pulled me in, seducing me with its endlessness. I stood there for what could have only been a few minutes, but it felt like much longer.

A young couple with a toddler stood at the water’s edge, both parents pointing to the waves. In the distance, a foghorn bellowed.

“I get it now.”

I started, my shoulders jerking forward when I heard Levi’s unexpected voice next to me. “Get what?”

“Why you don’t want Oar’s Rest to become commercialized. No chain hotels or five-star restaurants. No real estate tycoons buying up land and spitting out parking garages and shopping centers.” Levi stared across the water.

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “Yeah.” Eyeing him sideways, I asked, “Did you get your sketch?”

He exhaled roughly. “Yes. But I can’t replicate the water and the sand.” He stared at the sea and its vastness. “When I look out there … it’s so haunting. I don’t know how to explain it.”

He didn’t have to. I understood.

Levi looked up at the sky, his unneeded sunglasses tucked into the V of his neckline. “Even though the world is so gray right now, which you’d think would make sketching easy…” He laughed. “It somehow seems harder.”

“You’ll get it.”