He was smitten. He might love her. He would tell her the truth soon.

It turned out Anthony Puckett was a dog person, after all! Finally he understood what all the fuss was about regarding dogs. They asked for almost nothing, and when you gave them even the little that they asked for, they looked at you with such adoring eyes that you felt loved as you’d never felt loved before. You got so you always had a sense of where the dog was: under the table, sitting by the door, sleeping on the deck, chewing a bone. He took to walking Pickles mornings on the beach. Pickles had lots of local friends: a Lab mix named Titan, a boxer named Sadie, a beautiful golden retriever named Olive.

Maggie was remarkably independent. She was perfectly capable of making a meal for herself or for the three of them. She disappeared into the bathroom and came out with streaks of different colors in her hair. She did her own laundry. When she wasn’t being industrious, she was having a childhood Anthony would have killed for. She went off on a bike with her friend Riley, when she wasn’t helping in the shop or working for Lu. She was learning how to sail a Sunfish. Once she sat all day on the deck of the cottage and read from a battered copy of A Wrinkle in Time.

“Yours?” Anthony asked Joy, pointing to the book, hungry for a little piece of the girl she had once been.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I wasn’t much of a reader.”

He couldn’t tell her the truth.

Once, Maggie said, “Anthony, did you have a favorite movie as a kid?”

The answer was right there, as though it had been waiting only for the question to be asked: The Karate Kid. Cassie didn’t know that. Nobody had ever wanted to know that before.

Anthony dared to order Maggie a shirt from Amazon with a pun about a bear and a deer, holding his breath when she opened it. “I love it,” she proclaimed. “I really love it. Thank you, Anthony.”

The only thing marring Anthony’s happiness was the absence of his son. There was always a part inside of him crying out, Max! Max! Max!

He called Cassie again and again.

“Sorry,” she said. “He’s at camp.”

“He has a playdate.”

“I’m working, Anthony, he’s with the sitter.”

Once: “He’s staying with your mother. Call him there.”

He did, and nobody answered.

He tried getting tough: “You can’t keep me from our son!”

“Oh, can’t I?” And then silence. His bluff had been summarily called. He couldn’t go home to the house where he wasn’t welcome.

But occasionally she yielded and he was permitted short conversations with Max. It was enough—just—to sustain him.

Once he had a ghastly dream wherein his father was standing over him with an unabridged copy of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. I’m sorry, Anthony croaked up at his father. I’m so, so sorry. His father lifted the dictionary, and Anthony covered his head with his hands.