Nick calls me “Cap,” short for Captain. It’s not a habit from his army days but a carefully chosen term that I take seriously. Everybody needs a captain in life—a guiding force, a confidant, a rock, an anchor when tumultuous winds blow in. Siobhan had been my captain. Nick had picked me as his when he first moved in, but I had disappointed him ever since. The expression I saw on his face now hurt me, the way remembering how Siobhan danced and sang and listened and laughed hurt. Like a kick to the chest.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked Nick. “I told them I didn’t want a memorial.”

“Those people back there, they loved her too, you know,” Nick said. “You don’t get to be the only person who misses Siobhan.”

“Well, they can go miss her in their way, and I’ll miss her in mine,” I said. “I don’t like circle jerks.”

“You prefer individual jerks?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re a lone wolf who’s lost his mate.” Nick rolled his eyes. “Your heart is broken and it can’t be mended, and now you’re cursed to wander the earth alone.”

“I kind of wish I were alone right now,” I said, nodding. I looked in the rearview mirror at Mrs. Minnow and changed the subject like a practiced master. “What’s Winley done this time, Mrs. Minnow?”

Gloucester is a small town. When Siobhan and I moved into the area, the story started circulating that I was ex–Boston PD, that I’d been sacked and was bitter about it. I hadn’t done anything to quash that rumor, taking up residence at the back of the lobster shack on the waterfront most afternoons, downing JD shots and refusing to answer questions about it. A couple of months after Siobhan got the Inn up and running, people began coming to me with issues they didn’t trust Sheriff Spears to handle. They wanted me to talk to the angry neighbor about his aggressive dog. To hustle the scary homeless guy camped out near the pier a little farther down the road. Find the punks who had spray-painted graffiti on an old woman’s fence and rattle their skulls a bit.

In truth, being the unofficial town muscle was far more satisfying than running the Inn. Riding around with Nick beside me, I could pretend I was back in the city before my terrible fall. I could imagine sometimes that Nick was Malone, the version of my old friend before he’d betrayed me and morphed before my very eyes into a liar and a schemer. Little jobs like this took me into the past that I never stopped thinking about, a time before I lost everything.

Mrs. Minnow had called me once before about her son Winley, after the boy stole her car and drove it into a ditch off the Yankee Division Highway. She shifted uncomfortably now, perhaps remembering.

“Winnie’s much worse this time. He’s gone crazy.” Ellie was staring out the window, rubbing her wrist. “He’s just out of control. I’ve never seen him this angry. He snaps at me whenever I try to get him out of bed. He just slugs around the house. I got a call from the school saying he hasn’t been there in three days. I tried to talk to him about it this morning …”