I'd be open to a phone call. My schedule is flexible — let me know what works foryou.
— C.H. Winters
Clara read it four times. It was two sentences. It committed to nothing except a conversation. It was the smallest possible yes she could manage.
She hit send before she could talk herself out of it.
Then she locked the phone, shoved it under her pillow, and pressed her face into Jack's shoulder, her heart hammering so hard she was surprised it didn't wake him.
It was just a phone call. Just a conversation. She hadn't agreed to anything.
But lying in the dark with the email already traveling through whatever invisible infrastructure carried words from a lighthouse in New England to a literary agency in New York, Clara felt the ground shift beneath her.
Something was starting. Something she couldn't undo with a delete key or a closed app or a cartoon lighthouse avatar.
Something that required her to be seen.
She didn't sleep for a long time.
fourteen
Jack stared at the phone for a solid ten minutes before he hit the call button.
He was on the gallery, leaning against the railing he'd repaired, the afternoon sun warm on his face. Below, the ocean did its thing — waves, rocks, the endless patience of water against stone. Inside, Clara was on a call with that literary agent, her voice a muffled rise and fall through the open window. She'd been pacing for twenty minutes. Jack had decided to give her space.
And to stop being a coward about his sister.
Josie picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Hey Jos, it’s me, Jack.”
“Jack! Oh my God. Oh my GOD. He's alive. He's actually alive. Hold on — Brody, put the hamster down! Not on your sister! I said DOWN!"
Jack winced. "Hey, Jos?—"
"Three weeks, Jack. THREE WEEKS. No call, no text, no email. All of my calls went straight to voicemail. I didn't know if you were alive or dead in a ditch somewhere—where are you?”
“I’m in a small town called Beacon’s End, it’s on the?—"
"I don't actually want geography right now. I want an explanation for why my brother fell off the face of the earth for three weeks and left me imagining him dead in a ditch somewhere while I'm trying to keep two kids alive and Mom from calling the Coast Guard."
"Mom knows I'm?—"
"Mom knows NOTHING because you haven't CALLED her either! Brody! HAMSTER! NOW!"
A crash in the background. A child's shriek. The sound of something falling that probably shouldn't have fallen.
"Sorry," Josie said, not sounding sorry at all. "You were explaining why you're a terrible brother."
Jack rubbed his face. This was going exactly how he'd expected. Josie operated at one speed: full. She talkedthe way other people breathed — constantly, without pause, and if you tried to interrupt, she just got louder.
"I bought a boat, then sank my boat," he said, squeezing the words into a gap between her breaths.
Silence. Actual, genuine silence, which from Josie was more alarming than the yelling.
"You what?"
