"I guess so," Martin said. He was still in a daze. The whirlwind he and Sheila had entered while being welcomed into Sinjin's home hadn't helped. The house was filled with Bay people, mostly couples and children. Some pretended to remember Martin. Others didn't bother, nodding their heads politely when Sinjin introduced him as "a famous Big City writer born and raised here in the Bay."

The women seemed keenly interested in Sheila right away and dragged her off to a raucous conversation in the kitchen while Sinjin and a few of the men talked shop in the living room with a basketball game on the big screen TV.

"Laura's got this funny idea we're all connected here on the island," Sinjin said thoughtfully, watching a vape cloud vanish into the air. "God closes a door, He opens a window. He blesses me and Laura with a child, so He has to take something away, you know? Tit for tat."

"Sure. Tit for tat." Martin thought about the last time he saw Nadine, pushing him out the door to her shop and into the street. She'd been so troubled, ranting about his mother, this town. And midwifery, of all things. "Are you and Laura planning a homebirth?"

Sinjin coughed out a lungful of vapor. Once he'd gotten his coughing under control, he said, "Is there any other way in the Bay?"

"I wouldn't know."

"I honestly can't remember the last time somebody had a hospital birth. We've always just done it this way."

Just like Nadine said. "Your mother did?"

Sinjin nodded. "Yours, too. Barrows Bay tradition." He shrugged. "Musta been strange for your ma though, being one of them and all."

"One of what?"

"A midwife. But I guess even garbagemen have to put out the trash for somebody else to collect." He gave Martin a self-conscious look. "I wasn't calling you garbage. It was just a... what do you call it?"

"A metaphor."

"Exactly. And that's what brought you back. A piece of you was always here on the island. Sooner or later, it pulls you back."

"Is that another metaphor?"

"No, I mean literally. When the Midwives tie off the umbilical cord, they let a piece of it dry out so it falls off on its own. Once it does, they bury it down on the beach in the sand, where the original graves used to be, the barrows. You, me, Nadine, nearly everyone here tonight," he said, nodding back toward the bustling house. "A piece of us is always in the Bay, no matter where we go."

Sheila interrupted with a knock on the window. She'd stayed in the kitchen making awkward small talk with Sinjin's immensely pregnant wife and a small group of housewives. She looked annoyed, probably having to field questions about her reproductive plans—or lack of—and whether or not she and Martin were a hot-ticket item.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

"I guess we're needed in the kitchen." Sinjin tucked the vape into his coat pocket and opened the door. The pungent smell of cooking seafood wafted out. "They should make clambake flavor e-juice. I would definitely vape that."