He laughed.
“Why are you laughing?”
He grinned at me. “Good use of extrapolation.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“And so you came to my house to—what?”
“Oh.” I shoved my glasses higher on my nose. “I didn’t mean to snoop, honest. But I’ve been trying to get in touch with your grandfather for months—”
“What?”He stared at me. “You want to talk to my grandfather?”
“Yeah. If he was writing my grandmother letters—”
“No.” Noah shook his head firmly. “Don’t drag him into this. What’s your grandmother say?”
“She died. Last year.”
“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
We stood in silence a few moments before another question burst out of him. “What do you want from my grandfather?”
“To know about my grandmother. We had no idea she’d ever been to Nantucket. We don’t know much about her family; she barely said anything about them. Maybe this guy—your grandfather—knows more about her, more about them. Besides, it’s wild to think she was inlovewith someone when she was my age, then never mentioned him again.”
“Because you plan to tell future generations about Impressive on Paper?”
A reluctant laugh burst out of me. “No. Though I’m not sure I’d say we were inlove. I mean, not the way these two were. Also—” I hesitated.
“What?”
I lifted my chin, aware this part could be contentious. “He had one of her belongings. A necklace. I want to know what happened to it.”
He looked out across the flat, endless sea, then back. “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I get being curious about your family’s past.” He shoved his hands in his pocket and gazed down at me. “But prying into things from decades ago? This isn’t worth talking to my grandfather about.”
I bristled. “I didn’t realize you got to decide which conversations have value and which don’t.”
“Look.” He sighed. “I’m sure you’re a nice girl. But you’re not from here. You don’t have the full picture. This isn’t an adventure where you can play Nancy Drew. My grandparents are real people, and they don’t need you stirring things up.”
“I’m not trying to ‘stir anything up’—”
“Aren’t you? Because I’d say coming to an island for thewhole summersays otherwise.”
“I just want to talk to some people—”
He pinned me with an authoritarian stare. “‘People’?”
I hesitated, flustered. “Well, yeah. Your grandfather, and anyone else on the island who was alive then and might have known her—there’s some names and places in the letters—”
“So you’redefinitelyplanning to stir things up.” He looked furious. “This isn’t your family. This isn’t your island. Stay out of this.”
Frustration gathered in my stomach, hot and tight. Usually I tried to reserve my attitude for my family and present everyone else with a softer, politer facade. Girls were supposed to be nice, after all.
