A stab of panic hits my chest. I can’t leave the mermaid and the rooftop. Not yet. But I also can’t tell Simon that. “Okay if I use the bathroom first?” I ask.

“Of course.” He gestures to his phone. “Emma texted. She was thinking we could all bike to our favorite doughnut shop tonight? I promised the girls we’d go after dinner.”

“Sounds great.” I can’t help my smile, and when Simon sees it, he smiles back. “Thanks for coming with me, Mason. See you downstairs?”

“Yeah.” He leaves the room, and I rush the painting again, trying to process this hopeful feeling bubbling up in my chest.

Cautious hope. But hope. And this feels bigger and more awkward and spikier than any of the other feelings I’ve lugged around up until now. I have been looking for my mom for years and made zero progress. I’ve asked every adult in my life for help and gotten nowhere.

And now I have this mermaid, pointing me to a space that looks built for me.

No, I have no idea what this means. But what if this is a sign that things are about to change? What if this painting and rooftop are somehow leading me somewhere? It’s like I’ve been summiting, the air thin, each breath a struggle, and all of a sudden there’s a clear hit of oxygen.

A clear hit of hope.

I can’t get ahead of myself.

But what if?

– 9 – Willow

I’m feeling so worried and tender and genuinely concerned about my mom, it makes me want to smack her.

What is wrong with her?

Yes, she’s lost someone important to her, but in my experience of loss, this isn’t the way people act. They don’t run. And lie. They don’t pretend none of it happened.

The aunts take off in one direction, my mom in the other, and it takes me nearly to Essex Street to catch up with her. As we converge with the crowd of pedestrians, I am an absolute cauldron of emotions. I can barely see what is in front of me, because the image of the house feels burned into my retinas. The soft sweeping of the willow branches, those shiny windows, all of those flowers. “Mom! We need to talk.”

We’re walking against foot traffic, and we have to keep dodging groups. We skirt around a sandwich board set outside a shop. UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE GIVEN AN ESPRESSO AND A BOOK OF CURSES.

“Lower your voice, Willow.” She doesn’t stop, doesn’t even look back. And this infuriates me because she doesn’t get to shut me out on something this big. Not this time.

I don’t lower my voice. “Why do you tell everyone that you grew up in Martha’s Vineyard?”