She could glimpse Drummer Cove through the wavy lead glass in the window. After the railroad dike was built in the late 1800s, the cove began to fill in with silt deposited with every high tide. When the tide emptied out, it left a mudflat with the consistency of quicksand. Real quicksand, the stuff of fairy tales and nightmares. The cove was a place where boats had been marooned, deer got stuck, and dolphins were stranded. Dead horseshoe crabs littered the edges. Ann hardly ever visited the cove now that she was an adult. The tall beach grass was thick with ticks, and the damp hay path was always squishy from the last high tide. She wouldn’t dare swim in that muck. Still, Ann thought the cove was pretty to look at. It smelled like rotten eggs at low tide, but that was a smell she loved in the same primal way that she’d loved the smell of Noah’s sweet bald head when he was a baby. She’d roll down her car windows as soon as she got to Blackfish Creek and wait for the odor to hit her. When it did, every molecule in her body seemed to change. That’s when she knew she was really there, on the “real” part of the Cape.

She walked back into the living room and pulled down the writing desk of her late grandmother’s beloved antique secretary. She rummaged through the contents of the delicate little drawers, finding only yellowed cash register receipts, nail clippers, and kite string. She lifted the piles of paperwork in the larger cubbies—just old New Yorkers, bills from the plumber that could have been thrown away years ago, and there, on the bottom, some old crayon drawings Noah had made when he was little, the words “I love you Nana” in his sweet, sloppy capital letters. It amazed her, all the fresh new ways her heart could break.

She stuffed the papers back where she’d found them and, more gently this time, closed the desk back up, remembering how her grandmother would scold her if she was rough with the furniture. She looked around the room with a scavenger’s eye. Surely there must be a will—how could her father, who’d spent hours preparing detailed notes for substitutes in his classroom—not have one?