“Well, my family’s just always been really involved in each other’s lives. And when we were younger, it was probably pretty normal. Normal enough that I didn’t notice much difference when I saw other people’s families. And when Sadie, my oldest sister, went to college, she would still call home most days at dinnertime to say hi, and she came home for every break.”

Greta hadn’t thought it was strange. Sadie had always loved their dinnertime go-arounds telling about how everyone’s day was. She always volunteered to go first.

“Then Tillie didn’t go to college. She did an internship with a veterinarian on the mainland near the ferry, so she kept living at home. When it was my and Adelaide’s turn to think about school, Addie just assumed we’d go to the UMaine closest to home, like Sadie did. But I…I wanted something else. I wanted the opposite of Owl Island. I wanted to go to school in Portland. Maine,” she added quickly, since everyone outside Maine thought Oregon when they heard it.

“When I got in, my mom couldn’t even muster fake happiness before she said You’ll be so far away! Just FYI, Portland is, like, a three-hour drive plus a ferry ride from Owl Island.”

Carys snorted smoke out her nose.

“Yeah. Addie had applied because I had, and she got in too, but we both knew she wouldn’t go. She loves Owl Island, loves nature. She’d hate being in a city, even a little one like Portland. Anyway, that was kind of the beginning, I guess. Sadie said it was selfish of me to go to school far enough away that I couldn’t help Mom and Dad out with the business on the weekends. Addie was sad I wouldn’t be around all the time to make her be social. My dad said he worried for me in the big city. For context, Portland is not a big city by any stretch of the imagination.”

Carys nodded thoughtfully. “And what about you?”

“Me? I…was so excited for a chance to start over that I felt guilty.”

The night before she left home, Greta couldn’t sleep. She’d walked around the only place she’d ever lived, gently touching the piano, the ragged lines of her father’s catastrophic Holiday Fair crafts, the magnetic calendar dry-erase board on the refrigerator that told everyone where each member of the family was for the week. Almost as an afterthought, she pulled the cap off the dry-erase marker and left a small note in the bottom right corner of the calendar, beneath Sunday and beneath the list of everyone’s telephone numbers. I love you, she’d written, then a small black heart. G. Five years later it was still there.