She found herself at the funky deco terrace at Bradford Beach, where she’d shroomed the night Ann had Noah. She squinted and read the waves on instinct. The wind had blown the snow into drifts, and there were mounds of ice where the waves had crashed and frozen before they could retreat. She’d heard that people surfed here, the way her Cape Cod friends, the “townies,” had surfed in the freezing Atlantic during winter.

All those years she was away, she’d grown accustomed to thinking of Milwaukee as ugly, a tired old industrial city, a place where time stopped. But the longer she was home, the more she began to appreciate the ways in which it hadn’t changed, and the city’s quiet, sturdy beauty. When it snowed, the oak trees in Lake Park looked like they were made of white lace, and the cold steam that rolled over the icy lake at sunrise took her breath away. She loved how she felt her parents here, walking where they’d walked, appreciating nature and the dramatic winter sunsets. It was an unexpected comfort to be in a place where everything was familiar and solid, and people didn’t just come and go. Even Dick Bacon, the legendary Milwaukee man who sat on the beach in a reflective tinfoil contraption to tan himself all year long, was still there in his Speedo, catching rays in the cold.

She called Ann sometimes to catch up, but Ann’s voice sounded clipped, businesslike. “Have you contacted a Realtor yet? St. Vincent’s will pick up furniture if you call them. A coat of paint will work wonders.” She cut Poppy off whenever she asked about the missing will and the distribution of her parents’ assets.

There was so much distance between them. If it weren’t for Noah and real estate, would they have anything to talk about?

She was lonely. She thought about calling some old friends from high school, but she’d been gone too long to casually reconnect. The people who stayed in Milwaukee had kids and busy, purposeful lives.

Desperate for company, she took a few Anusara yoga classes, because the focus of Anusara was on celebrating the heart, goodness, and worthiness, and she really wanted to believe in those things again. The classes were in Cedarburg, a quaint old mill town half an hour north of the city where the main street was lined with ice-cream parlors, antiques stores, and a coffee shop where ladies her mother would have been friends with met to quilt together. Everyone seemed to know each other there, which made Poppy feel even more alone. She was a strange species in the Midwest: a single woman in her thirties without kids or a job. She rolled up her mat and took off as soon as class was over. She wanted to avoid conversations so that people wouldn’t ask about her life story.