He shook his head. “Nah. For most people, I think that’s the point. The dream stays a dream.”

Considering that, I tipped my bottle toward him. “Then here’s to the dream.”

“And to the dreamer,” he said, returning my toast.

We fell into companionable silence, watching the gulls soar over the water and a long row of cars get backed up on Main Street. White crests of cerulean-blue waves crashed, the wind carrying muted squeals of delight from a young family on the beach.

The pier was missing planks in a few places, and orange safety cones cordoned off the area. Even from this distance, I could make out two men in yellow hard hats and blue overalls walking along the pier, one swinging a toolbox while his partner carried new slats of wood over his shoulder.

They wrenched the old and broken wood out and replaced it with the new boards, hammering them into place and testing the weight. The scrapped wood would go toward building the model boat on the beach that the whole town would help to construct, only to set it on fire at the end of summer. Another old founders’ tradition, this one would reclaim Oar’s Rest at the end of tourist season.

The minutes passed with the warm breeze on my cheek and the soft scratches of his pencil rasping against the canvas. All I could see of the preliminary sketch were boxy outlines of houses. He used feather-light strokes, the pencil faint against the white of the canvas, and made even fainter by the glare of the sun. His right arm moved all over the canvas while his left intermittently raised the water bottle to his lips.

I almost hated to break the serene moment, but a question had popped into my mind. “Out of all the places in the world, why Oar’s Rest?” I asked.

The pencil touched the tip of his nose. “Would you believe me if I said I just closed my eyes and shoved a pushpin into a map?”

“No.” I paused. “Is that what you did?”

He smiled. “Yeah. My dad had this huge map in the den where he put little pins on all the places he wanted to visit. He got so mad at me when I was little and pulled some out. I just got so … I hated that stupid map. And when my parents kept insisting college wasn’t the right place for me right now—for my career—I hated it even more. So I grabbed some of Dad’s red pushpins and the first one landed on Oar’s Rest. I loved the name. It sounded unreal, and when I looked the town up online and saw the artist residency program, something just clicked.”

“Did you tell your parents you were coming here?”