“The thing that’s most important is that she has consistency in her life. Routine. It helps. And she’s lived on Owl Island for forty years, so I’m not going to stick her someplace where she won’t know anyone. Where no one will know who she used to be.”

“But that means you have to be here. And you don’t like it?”

Ash shook his head. “I like it. A lot, actually. I’m not real social, as you might have gathered.” He gave Truman a self-deprecating smile. “I enjoy the peace here. And it’s a beautiful place to live. It’s just… Being here means being alone, mostly.”

He said it so softly the wind almost snatched the words before Truman could hear them.

“You’ve got Greta, right? Well, usually.”

Ash murmured his assent, and Truman realized that he meant alone in terms of romance, intimacy, a partner.

“Oh, I see. That’s so hard.” Truman imagined Ash late at night, hair rumpled and beautiful eyes tired, grief-stricken at the loss of who his mother once was, yearning for comfort, for conversation, for love, and finding himself perpetually alone. “That’s so, so hard.”

Ash shoved the rest of his blueberry muffin in his mouth and patted Bruce’s head. Truman’s heart ached for him.

Truman wasn’t good at aching.

He hated problems that didn’t have solutions, and he hated doing nothing, even in the face of a problem without a solution. He wished he had the power to comfort Ash in some deep, fundamental way, but he didn’t. There was only one thing he had the ability to do.

“If Thorn was doing better, that would take some of the stress off, right? Give you some more options at least?”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do!” Truman pledged.

Ash reached out and put a hand on his knee.

“Thank you,” he said, voice choked up. And a wave broke over the rocks, salty droplets spattering their faces.

A sign.

***

They were sprawled on Greta’s couch in the living room, Ash having decided that since he’d already closed the shop for an hour, he may as well leave it shuttered to dream up ways to save it. Truman chose not to make the first thing on the list maintain regular hours because it seemed passive-aggressive, but he added it as a large bullet point in his mind.

“This,” Truman said, “is a brainstorming session. That means there is no idea too silly, big, small, or seemingly bananas to go on the board. Just shout them out, and I’ll write them down. Okay?”

The board in question was a large freestanding mirror from Greta’s bedroom onto which Truman had taped scrap paper.

“Okay.”

Ash, it turned out, was terrible at brainstorming. He seemed to need to work out every detail of something in his mind before he’d speak it aloud.