“And I’m angry that Finley would even make it a clue.” Taylor slides her fingertips beneath the bottom rim of her sunglasses to wipe her eyes. “She’s dead so she gets to stay seventeen forever, but we have to keep getting older and someday we’ll run out of memories of her. We can’t stay young, so I don’t want to go to some stupid tourist trap and pretend like it’s possible.”

“Do you think it was intentional?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor says. “Maybe she was just being cute, but I feel kind of manipulated. Like she came up with this whole list because she didn’t even trust us to grieve without her help.”

“But here’s the thing . . . I read the same clue and it never occurred to me that our memories of Finley are finite,” Willa says. “It’s possible you’re giving her the credit for the work you’re doing.”

Taylor’s mouth opens and closes as if she was going to speak and changed her mind. Then, “I didn’t think of that.”

“Finley was a pretty insightful person, but she couldn’t actually see the future. Maybe we shouldn’t give her list that much power.”

“I still don’t want to go to the Fountain of Youth.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of gone cold for me too,” Willa says. “Do you want to skip St. Augustine and keep going?”

She holds her breath as she waits for the answer. Willa would never force Taylor to visit a place that makes her uncomfortable, but Willa has been excited about St. Augustine since they first started talking about the trip.

“No, it’s cool,” Taylor says. “I’d like to see the rest of the city. Just not the fountain.”

They pick up a mooring ball in the harbor, and in the morning they take the dinghy ashore so they can explore St. Augustine. Willa and Taylor join the other tourists, wandering along St. George Street, a narrow pedestrian walkway that was once the main street of the old city. They poke around in gift shops, snap pictures of themselves in front of the oldest wooden schoolhouse in the United States, and eat empanadas on the grass beside the old city gates.

As they walk down one of the side streets that border the old part of the city, Willa notices a small purple clapboard house with yellow trim and flower boxes brimming with red flowers. It looks like it should be an antique shop or a teahouse, but a painted sign hanging over the porch steps, rimmed with a string of white lights, says SWEET MISERY TATTOOS. An older white woman with a thick bundle of dreadlocks comes out onto the front porch and waves at the girls as she waters the flowers. As they pass, Willa feels a pull in her belly, an inexplicable call to walk up the porch steps.