Joy was smiling. “But I don’t go too rough on the gums,” she said. “My dentist is very clear about that.”

“No,” he said. “You’re totally gentle on the gums.”

She nodded crisply. “Okay,” she said. “That’s a decent list.”

“Now you say, ‘You say things like that, and you make it impossible to hate you.’”

“Oh, brother,” she said. “I’m not going to say that.”

“Because it’s not true?”

“No,” she said. “Because I’m going to do this instead.” She kissed him, long, deep, and then he drew back, and then he kissed her. This was what he needed. This was solace.

“Do you think you could come?” he asked, when they paused. “To the funeral?”

She hesitated. “You don’t want me there. Do you?”

“I do.”

“Well, then I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there. If you want me.”

“Max won’t be there,” he said. “He’s too young. But Cassie will. It might be strange for you to meet them. But then again, it might not.”

“As it turns out,” she said, “I’ve met them both. Sort of accidentally.”

“Really?”

“Really. I’ll tell you the whole story, another time.”

“Okay.”

Her smile was whole and open. Her eyes were a mix of fondness and kindness and possibly—dare he say it?—love. She didn’t know about Dorothy, and what he’d found out about his father’s career. She didn’t know everything that had happened in the bookstore. There was so much left to talk about, so much left to say. “Definitely,” she said. “Another time.”

Taken alone, they didn’t mean much, those two words: another, and time. But together—oh, the promises they held.

Epilogue

FIVE DAYS AFTER the storm, Helen Simmons was laid to rest next to her beloved husband in the Island Cemetery, where, visitors to the cemetery noted, the most beautiful flowers were left every year on both graves in late June.

Later people said that if the winds hadn’t been so strong because of the storm, if the lights hadn’t gone out, things might have turned out differently for Leonard Puckett. If the rescue squad had been able to get there sooner. If, if, if.

“It was just—life, and then no life. Just like that,” Bridget Fletcher said for a long time after that, to anyone who would listen. “No matter what anyone tried to do. The life was just gone.”

When Bridget began the first semester of her MFA program at Boston University in the fall, the first story she attempted was about witnessing the death of a great man. Most everyone in her seminar dismissed it as maudlin, or flat, or insipid. Unrealistic. Bridget, unused to the evisceration that was an MFA seminar, felt hot tears rise. “But it really happened,” Bridget insisted—which, everyone in that program came to learn, was not a defense of a poorly done story. She put the work away for a long time.

Years later, when Pauline Morrison would read the debut novel by the hot new entry on the literary scene, one Bridget Fletcher, she’d recognize a small scene in the middle of a chapter—not crucial to the overall plot—in which a young shop owner performed CPR on a customer, thereby saving his life. In fiction, Pauline (who was no writer herself) understood, we can sometimes change that which we could not change in real life.