Sophie nodded, as if this answer satisfied her. “It gets lonely, but that’s when you make your discoveries, right in the middle of your loneliness. People these days can’t be lonely for a second. I see it with my guests—every one of them wants to know about Wi-Fi, or the cell reception on the beach. They can’t bear to be with their thoughts. Also the repeat offenders—people married again and again. What are they looking for?”

“Wasn’t Frances—the owner of my inn—married a few times?”

“More than a few,” Sophie said. “Five? Six? She outlived them all, and good for her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lonely. I mean, she always had some project. Like the school, I guess. I haven’t seen her since she moved into the old folks’ home.”

“Did you know her?”

“A little. Her inn was getting a little crumbly when I bought the Manatee, and her last husband had died by then. She started a walking group, and I went once or twice. She had a Christmas cookie exchange. Then she had a book club, and I thought, well, that’s nice to see. But the books got weirder and weirder—she picked all of them herself. That was maybe two years ago? After that she moved. I assumed she’d sold. It’s not an easy business to keep up as you get older.”

It was a relief to hear Frances identified as a reader, though Marianne wondered about the strangeness of her choices—she hadn’t seen Sophie’s own bookshelf, so it was hard to know what she meant. “I’ve been thinking about visiting her,” she said. “But Eric says she wants everything to be hands off. He says she’s busy.”

“She loved being busy, that’s what I remember. Eric—he’s the not-exactly significant other?”

“He’s my business partner. We used to date.”

Sophie turned away to look at something happening down the beach, and Marianne felt the sudden desire tell to her the whole Eric story—how they met, their engagement, his marriage and divorce. How now she got anxious before she Skyped with him, a nervousness that stretched hours before the appointed call. Suddenly she remembered her first boyfriend, a soccer-playing stoner, and how her desire to talk about him was constantly at war with her other desire, to keep everything about him private.

“I’ve been here since September,” she said, drawing her knees up to her chest. “And it is lonely, but I expected that. New York was lonely too. I thought if it felt more like I was choosing the loneliness, if it was deliberate, it wouldn’t be so bad. It would feel heroic, maybe. That’s what I’m waiting for.”