How could he even begin to explain Ann to his daughter? If he started to answer one question, he knew it would provoke a landslide of more totally understandable questions, so he didn’t say much at all. Ann was just some “lady” who shared the place, someone he’d known when he was younger. He said the house was a place they’d “invested” in. He brought Avery with him whenever he could because he wanted her to love the house, even though she had no idea that she had a stake in it.

Michael tried to pass the situation off to her like it was the most normal scenario in the world, the way it was normal for him to live with his ex-wife and her partner. This was just another odd arrangement that worked out for them, he said, and that was all there was to it.

THE SILENCE BETWEEN MICHAEL and Ann started to feel suffocating and intense. Connie and Ed’s ashes sat atop the bedroom dresser, untouched, while the rest of the house was subject to almost relentless progress. There was something Michael found disturbing about the emerging aesthetic. It was starting to feel too perfect, like a rental that would appeal to anyone instead of the people who lived there.

He tried to get under Ann’s skin. He put fresh flowers in the vase on the kitchen table shortly before the end of his stays there, because he figured a nice gesture would annoy her. But then she tricked him and did the same thing.

He began to fix Avery’s school portraits and some of her drawings to the refrigerator with magnets. Avery was an amazing artist like her mother, mostly because she had inherited Shelby’s incredible attention span and could focus on a single drawing for hours, and because so many artists stayed at their inn. They all seemed willing to nurture and develop his daughter’s talents. She carried her drawing pad with her everywhere she went. Provincetown was an ideal place for a budding artist, with interesting landscapes like busy Commercial Street, the harbor, the dramatic bluffs at Herring Cove Beach, Race Point Lighthouse, and the iconic Days’ Cottages, little houses that sat like beads on a necklace along the shore of Cape Cod Bay. Avery frequently raided the inn’s lost and found for odd trinkets the tenants had left behind and arranged them in configurations for still-life paintings. She did the same thing at the Wellfleet house. Avery had an eerie knack for finding objects that carried psychic weight, like Connie’s old wind chimes and chipped mugs she’d bought at one of the many pottery places in Wellfleet, or the ship in a bottle that Ed said his grandfather had given him.