On days like this, it was so quiet that Michael could fool himself into thinking that the cove belonged to him alone. It felt like it did: he loved the whole Outer Cape, but this spot was especially sacred. The earthy smell of rotting peat and sulfur somehow made his whole confusing life make sense. He appreciated the danger of the silt, the privacy of the cove, the rhythm of the tides—a change that was predictable, the only kind of change he could stomach.

He wished his daughter, Avery, could be there with him, but she was at school. He’d never brought her to the Gordons’ house or told her about them. But two or three times a week he took her to Blackfish Creek so they could walk along the crunchy straw path that wrapped around most of the cove. They’d stomp on the sand and watch the hermit crabs scamper back into their holes and inspect the carcasses of upturned horseshoe crabs. The small, young ones had golden backs as thin and clear as varnish, while the bigger crabs had thick shells like tree bark, and could live to be over a hundred years old. He liked to run his finger along the spiked toothy ridges of their backs. Avery knocked her small fist against their crab shells so she could create a drumming sound. She’d flip the dead ones upside down and yank off their sandy, barnacled legs like she was pulling petals off a flower. She could do that without hesitation; she was a child of the Cape, comfortable with the ocean and its creatures in a way he never would be, although his distance created a space for a sort of reverence that she’d never understand.

Michael pounded a nail into the side of the Gordons’ chimney and wrapped wire around it. What started as a simple project had become more complicated when he realized the mortar between some of the bricks had started to crumble, and the chimney needed tuck-pointing. He’d taken care of that last week. Now he could proceed with the original task at hand: repairing the grate on the top of the chimney that kept the squirrels and raccoons out. This was something Ed should have checked when he left. It wasn’t like he hadn’t learned his lesson.

That second summer Michael came to the Cape with the Gordons, Connie opened the door and backed away, overcome by the odor in the closed-up house. They discovered a family of dead raccoons in the living room. Their nest had collapsed down the chimney, and the animals couldn’t get out of the house. The signs of their desperation were everywhere: in the dirty animal prints all over the rugs, upholstery, and floorboards, the scratch marks on the windowsills and the nose prints on the windows. He should have seen it as an omen of how that summer would ultimately end.