Annabelle remembered pulling that square envelope out of the stack of mail and seeing his handwriting. She wasn’t sure anything would have prepared her for that, really, whether Mom had told her the letter was coming or not.

Traffic slowed down on the highway, and Mom glanced over. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. Which was bizarre. Annabelle had kept the letter a secret and snuck away to Boston, and Mom was apologizing. “I wanted to protect you, and I couldn’t.”

She thought of Kayla and Elisa. How they’d been trying to protect her, too, but that hadn’t worked, either. How maybe she had to make her own mistakes with Dad and with Connor, as humiliating as they were.

“I’m sorry, too,” she told Mom.

“I know, honey.” Mom patted Annabelle’s hand, and her bracelets clinked. “We’ll have to talk about some consequences for what happened today, but it’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

And Annabelle felt like maybe that was true. Especially after they got back to the ferry terminal in Cape Cod, and Mom told Annabelle something else she’d never known: the real reason Mitch had wanted to move to the island two years ago.

“It’s true that the house was a good deal. And it was brave and entrepreneurial. But some investments he’d made hadn’t done so well. We needed to sell the New Jersey house; we didn’t choose to.”

At first, Annabelle thought she must have misheard. Mitch, the “mover and shaker” who got profiled in Gray Island Magazine, had made bad investments?

“Maybe I’ve pushed too hard for you to be at the Academy,” Mom added as they parked the car on the bottom level of the ferry. “I felt guilty that the public schools were so highly ranked in New Jersey, and here we were pulling you out of them because moving to the island was right for us, not for you. But maybe the Academy just isn’t a good fit.”

Annabelle tested out the idea of leaving the Academy, the way she sometimes pressed against the slowly healing bone in her thumb to see how much it still hurt. It didn’t feel good . . . but it wasn’t quite so sharply painful anymore.

“When we met with Mrs. Sloane,” Mom went on. “I don’t know. I don’t want you to be at a school where they don’t appreciate you.”

Wait. Where they didn’t appreciate her?

Mom had always been a teacher-is-always-right parent, never listening to excuses about how some teacher was mean or unfair or didn’t assign something until the last minute. Annabelle had assumed that if she left the Academy, it would be because she wasn’t right for the school, not the other way around.

They climbed the stairs to the ferry’s top deck, where they could watch their progress across the open ocean and then see the familiar black-and-white Bruck Point Lighthouse as the island came into view.

“Well, we don’t have to decide anything today,” Mom said.

So they didn’t. They bought Hershey bars at the snack stand and didn’t care when the chocolate melted all over their hands. And Mom helped Annabelle find some more Dad memories—good ones, like how he’d taken her to her first swimming lessons when she was two, and how he used to push her on the swing at the park down the road for hours and make up silly songs to help her remember her spelling words.