She shut off the water. Thinking about Kate still made her jaw ache, and she forced herself to unclench her teeth. Kate had moved on, leaving Morgan here, living in a house with three other people instead of the apartment she had shared with her fiancée. She stepped blindly out of the tub and elicited a yelp from the dog lying on the bath mat.

“Sorry, bud.”

Back in her room, she set her pager and her phone on her nightstand, then shoved her head through the worn hem of her favorite Cornell T-shirt (the one that featured a donkey’s head on the front and its rear on the back, courtesy of the livestock club at school). Barely conscious, she measured out Kraken’s dinner, ruffled the hair around his ears, and slipped into an exhausted sleep.

• • •

Emilia unlocked the door to her father’s house with shaking fingers. After Morgan had left, she’d borrowed her skiff and rowed back out to her boat to retrieve her bag and tow her leaky dinghy to the dock. Nell looked up at her reproachfully and made a beeline for her dinner bowl as soon as Emilia hefted the old wooden door open. Entering her father’s house still felt strange. Set back on an acre of land that abutted a small corner of the estuary, the log cabin-style home smelled like old tobacco and musty leather furniture. Taxidermy animals adorned the living room walls, and one corner of the sunroom was dedicated to his fly fishing supplies. She’d have to decide what to do with it all at some point, but not while she wore a stranger’s clothes.

Not a stranger. Morgan Donovan.

“Eat, you monster,” she said as she fed Nell in the dim kitchen. Painting the dark wood white would be the first thing she did, she decided. Her father had liked the constant twilight of his home, but she did not enjoy living in a cave. Her therapist would no doubt agree. White curtains would help, too.

She changed into an old sweatshirt and sweatpants, dumped her wet clothes and Morgan’s into the washing machine, and curled up in the recliner that overlooked the window to the yard. It was more of a meadow than a yard really, overgrown with tall grass and old dry stalks painted silver by the moonlight.

“Well, Dad,” she said to the room, “I fell off the boat.”

He would have laughed at that. Prior to the divorce he’d laughed a lot. Even after, during the years when she had spent the summers with him, he had been full of laughter. She hadn’t spent much time with him during the intervening decade and a half. Vet school and work made it hard to get away, but she imagined his laugh would have remained the same—so long as he hadn’t been drinking. Not that I can judge right now.

A deer crossed the meadow, followed by a fawn. Nell finished her dinner and settled herself on the vacant couch to watch the deer with interest. The peepers chirped in the gathering night, joined by the calls of animals Emilia didn’t recognize. It was louder here in its own way than the city, though she didn’t miss the omnipresent serenade of distant sirens.