“Do you want some help?” Truman offered. “Or company?”

Ash looked pained.

“Never mind,” Truman said quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“It’s not that. It’s…she’s worse in the evenings, and sometimes she gets confused about who people are. It just might be disorienting.”

“I totally understand,” Truman said. Then he had an awful thought. “Does she know who you are in the evenings?”

“Sometimes.”

“Who does she think you are when she doesn’t know?”

“Um. Sometimes my dad. Sometimes her friend Mark. Sometimes she doesn’t know who I am and she tells me to get out of the house.”

Ash’s low voice got tight at the end of his sentence. Truman couldn’t imagine how painful it would be for your own mother to think you were a stranger.

Ash obviously took amazing care of his mother. Truman wondered if anyone ever took care of him.

Chapter 14

Truman

“I asked my mom if she remembered an unfriendly recluse who lived on the island.”

Ash and Truman were in Thorn, hanging flowers up to dry that were on the edge of being unsalable.

“Oh yeah?”

Ash gave a snort of laughter. “Yeah, and she looked me in the face and said, ‘You?’”

Truman laughed.

“I’ll try her during the day when she’s more herself and see.”

“Thanks. I’ve been rereading the series, right, and now that I’m here, I’m noticing all these things that feel so familiar to the books. Like, there’s this cave in book 3 that Clarion has to sleep in to stay protected from a magic storm, and the description is of this place that’s a hole in the rock of the world, a maw with jutting teeth and the drool of the ocean draining from it as the tide goes out. It reminds me so much of what a cave on these shores would be like.”

Ash was making a strange expression. “There is a cave like that. On the other side of the island from where we sat.”

Truman’s heart soared. “For real?!”

Ash nodded. “I can show you if you want?”

“Um, yes, I want!” He pulled out his phone but decided to wait and send Germaine and Charlotte pictures instead. “When?”

“Uh, now?”

Truman tried to make himself say no, but between running the shop and caring for his mom, Ash didn’t seem to have any downtime.

“We can talk about shop plans on the way,” Truman promised.

They got in the van, Bruce choosing Truman’s lap as the place he’d like to ride and licking the window until Truman rolled it down. It was cold, but Bruce helped keep him warm as they drove. Ash stopped at a kind of turnaround dead end.

“This is the north point of the island. It’s rocky enough that no one lives over here. The road doesn’t go any farther, but we can walk.”