Tilly told me about the summer she got sick, with a fever so hot she dreamed without sleeping. Lucy gave her a little silver bell and cooled her skin at the tide pools, trickled a sponge full of seawater all over her hot forehead. I imagined my mother collecting specimens the next day, filling a jar with old fever water without knowing, she couldn’t have known, how her younger sister’s sweat had steamed against the stone-cold Atlantic, found sleep for good.

My mother hadn’t known the moments she’d missed between her sister and her mother, and this made me sad for her, for the girl my mother had been.

“I’m off to piss,” Tilly said. “I’ll be back.”

“Out here?”

“Well, the courthouse is sure as fuck closed,” she said. “So I guess that means the bushes.” She lurched a bit, back and forth, and held the bench for balance.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.”

Now the stars were clear and sharp. They weren’t swimming at all. I was coming back from drunk. The cold was helping. If I squinted, I could see a lobster raising two of its claws toward the moon. It was fighting itself.

Tilly’s body hit the ground hard. “Ow,” she said. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“My ass hitting dirt.”

“Yep,” I said. “I heard.”

We were quiet. I tore up clumps of grass and wiped the dirt between my fingers. She drank the last of the gin. “Well, fuck me,” she said. “That’s no good.” She poured a trickle of liquor into the soil. “I’m trying out here,” she said. “It might not look that way, but I am. I’ve been trying for years.”

“It’ll be a good change when you move,” I said. “A new start.”

“A new start!” she said, suddenly loud. “I’ve fucked up more of those than you could count. I’m always doing them alone.”

That was when I first thought it. I couldn’t even see it clearly until I suggested it to her—out loud, a little drunk—like a dim constellation, far away, resolving itself against the glaze of my drunk eyes.

“What would you say,” I said, “if I said we should move out together?”

It was a long time before she spoke. Then: “I’d say we don’t know each other at all.”

“What would you say next?”

“I’d say it could be a disaster. I’d say it’s not my apartment. I won’t have any fucking idea what to do with myself once I—”

“Neither will I,” I said. “I’ll pay rent until I find a place of my own.”

“I’m gonna be starting all over again. It’s gonna be a shit show.”

“Maybe I could help.”

She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Can we get one thing straight?”

There was a blade in her voice that I recognized from my mother: Stella, you come here, grabbing my arm just before she yelled at me for something terrible I’d done: soap in the fish bowl, crumbs in the bed, getting pregnant by a married man.