When she finished feeding the animals, she pulled the starter on the snow machine and climbed aboard.

In town, she pulled up in front of the harbor dock entrance and parked. A water taxi was waiting for Leni. Mama had called for it on the ham radio. The sea was too rough to take the skiff out.

Leni slung her backpack over her shoulder and headed down the slick, icy dock ramp.

The water-taxi captain waved at her. Leni knew he wasn’t going to charge her for the ride. He was in love with Mama’s cranberry relish. Every year she made two dozen jars of it just for him. That was how the locals did it: trading.

Leni handed him a jar and climbed aboard. As she sat on the bench in the back, staring up at the town perched on stilts above the sea, she told herself not to have any hopes for today. She knew Matthew’s condition, had heard the words so often they’d worn a groove in her consciousness. Brain damage.

Even so, at night, after writing her daily letter to Matthew, she often fell asleep dreaming it was a Sleeping Beauty kind of thing, a dark spell that the kiss of true love could undo. She could marry him and hope that her love would waken him.

Forty minutes later, after a bumpy, splashing crossing of Kachemak Bay, the water taxi pulled up to the dock and Leni jumped out.

On this ice-cold winter day, fog coiled along the waterline of the Spit. There were only a few locals out in this weather and no tourists. Most of the businesses were closed for the season.

She left the road and began the uphill climb into Homer proper. She’d been told that if she came to the house with the pink boat in the yard and Fourth of July decorations still up, she’d gone too far on Wardell.

The care facility sat at the edge of town, on a wildly overgrown lot with a gravel parking lot.

She stopped. A huge bald eagle perched on a telephone pole watching her, its golden eyes bright in the gloom.

Forcing herself to move, she went into the building, spoke to the receptionist, and followed her directions down to the room at the end of the hall.

There, at the closed door, she paused, took a steady breath, and opened the door.

Mr. Walker stood by the bed. At Leni’s entrance, he turned. He didn’t look like himself. The months had whittled him away; his sweater and jeans bagged. He had grown a beard that was half gray. “Hi, Leni.”

“Hey,” she said, her gaze cutting to the bed.