The Friday after the storm, Joy and Maggie were wearing gloves and picking up the larger pieces of glass so that the smaller ones could be cleaned up with the shop vacuum. The day before, Joy had taped cardboard over the broken part of the window, but she decided to wait for the power to come back before doing the real cleanup. Maggie had said that she and Riley would be happy to decorate the cardboard later if Joy wanted, using miniature spray-paint cans they’d procured in sixth grade for a history project on the Wampanoag tribe. Riley, for all her questionable decisions with the vaping and the boys, was a pretty good artist, so Joy figured she’d probably take them up on that. Later that day, she hoped, she could reopen Joy Bombs and everything would go back to normal. Mostly normal.

“When we’re done here, Mags, can you zip down to the terminal to pick up a copy of the paper?” In all of the frenzy Joy had forgotten. She wanted to see the storm photos.

“Sure,” said Maggie. She seemed affable and compliant. Most likely she’d been more scared in the storm than she’d ever let on.

Joy had been terrified for a good long time too when the lights first went out and the wind picked up and the whole island seemed to be shrieking and wailing. She’d closed up the shop and taken refuge at home, texting Maggie to please please please come home or let her know where she was so Joy could collect her. There had been a solid twenty minutes when she’d imagined Maggie swept out to sea, never to be seen again.

When Bret Holyman brought Maggie home and told Joy Maggie had helped find a missing little boy, Joy had gotten so dizzy with relief that she’d had to sit down. Her head was actually spinning. When she learned it was Max—Anthony’s Max, the Max who had just been in the shop while his mother told Joy, in so many words, that Joy made Anthony happier than Cassie ever had—she’d gotten even dizzier, and then, in an unexpected display of emotion that had made Maggie wince and cringe, she’d sobbed.

“You did all the right things, you know,” she said now to Maggie, to keep the conversation going. “With that little boy. Max. Keeping him calm.”

Maggie shrugged. Her shrug said, Whatever, but her smile said, Thank you: the contradiction of the teenager.

“What’d you talk about with him?” asked Joy.

“Oh, nothing.” Maggie didn’t meet Joy’s eyes, and Joy wondered if her name had come up. Then Maggie asked, “Was Dad a good singer?”

Joy paused to consider this non sequitur. When she’d first seen Dustin with his early band, the Chiclets, she’d thought he was fantastic. She’d watched him up there, tossing around his hair, his eyes closed, a trickle of sexy sweat traveling down from his temple to his slender jaw, and she’d thought, That guy is something special.