A truck rumbled down Route 6. It was easy to spend time at the Gordons’ undetected. The neighbors on either side of the Gordons’ house didn’t notice Michael’s presence. They were gone for the winter, and even if they’d been there, their houses faced the cove—they reminded Michael of chairs with their backs set away from each other. Michael drove a landscaping truck, and landscapers were hired to routinely check on houses during the winter—nothing suspicious about that. The police wouldn’t care much, either. The force was thin after the budget cuts, and the few officers who remained were busy with bigger problems, the kind you wouldn’t think you’d find on the Cape: thefts, drug abuse—stuff that kept Michael up at night worried over trouble that could befall Avery when she got older.

He finished his repair work, climbed down his tall ladder, and loaded it back in his pickup, which he’d parked on the service drive under the trees so nobody would know he was there. He figured he’d check to make sure the pipes hadn’t burst. Ed and Connie emptied all the water, but sometimes they did a shit job, like three years ago, when they’d neglected to drain the water heater and Michael caught it just in time, before the heating element cracked.

As much as Ed and Connie loved their house, and as much as Ed liked to tinker, they weren’t really house people, not the way Michael was. That was why Michael figured they probably hadn’t ever noticed his small repair jobs. But he couldn’t help leaving little messages behind, like the dried leaves he inserted between the pages of some of Connie’s books, a shiny penny dropped head-up on the floor because Poppy used to be superstitious about pennies, or a jar of grilling spices he thought Connie might like tucked in the back of the kitchen cabinet. Last fall he’d set a pretty slipper shell under the pillow of Poppy’s bed. When she was young, she told him the shells were cribs for babies. He noticed when he lifted the pillow up that her bed was covered in dust; he figured it hadn’t been slept in for years.

But Michael never left a secret message for Ann. He didn’t know how to communicate with her, not even in the smallest and most subtle way.