He looks at the ground, like he’s suddenly talking more to himself. It takes a second for Grace to see that he’s observing something. A stray penny. He crouches, picks it up, puts it in his pocket.
“But slowly, in time,” Caleb continues, rising, “I’ve also found that being immersed in those memories—not just remembering who you lost but also who you were when you were with that person ...” He makes eye contact with her again. “Well, it can start to help, too.”
Caleb leaves, the door swinging shut behind him.
“Here.” The bartender sets another beer down in front of Grace. “This one’s on the house.” He twists off the cap. “I overheard your conversation. Thought maybe you needed it.”
“Oh,” Grace says, surprised by the gesture, but also not turning it down. “Thanks.”
He nods, walks off to help someone else.
Grace remains seated, takes a sip—the liquid cold, carbonated, crisp—then another, deciding to stay for this next round by herself. Alone, yes, but no longer quite as lonely. For the first time since arriving, not only to the Dive, but to Sea Drift, Grace isn’t in a rush to leave.
On the jukebox, an old Bruce Springsteen song she and Birdie always loved comes on. Grace listens, the lyrics reintroducing themselves into her thoughts. She looks down at her bottle, already half empty, thinking about the house and all the memories—not only hers—that live inside its walls.
“I’ll do one more,” she tells the bartender as he walks past, wondering if Caleb is right.
Maybe not everything on this island stays lost forever after all.
Nineteen
Tuesday
Morning. Again. Only this time, Grace wakes up refreshed. For the first time in ages, she actually slept. After Caleb left the Dive, Grace stayed for a few more beers. She grabbed a sandwich on the walk back, ate quietly while one of Birdie’s Hallmark movies played in the background—the sand dollar, the arcade tickets, the paper bracelet, and the clunky necklace piled on the coffee table like a makeshift shrine—then curled up on the not-so-comfortable bed and passed out. She didn’t stir all night. If she dreamed, she doesn’t remember it.
Now Grace pulls herself up, sitting. Her limbs are still heavy with slumber, though her mind feels a bit clearer than it did yesterday. She stretches, rolls out her neck, then reaches toward the nightstand and pulls her journal—the one she had with her out on the jetty—onto her lap. The room, cast in slices of golden light, feels calm. She tries not to think too much about the final product. Instead, she just writes. Not a story—certainly not the one she’s supposed to be finalizing for Mollie—but a mishmash of her thoughts. Questions. Little scenes that pop into her head. Bits of characters. Memories she puts back together with a fictional edge.
This is how it starts,Grace remembers. A story. Not at the end when everything is neat and tidy, when every problem’s already been cleverly solved. Not on the computer, where the pressure to get each line perfectand polished glows back at you from the screen. A good narrative never starts from a clean place. It begins when it’s messy. When the end feels so uncertain and far away that you’re not sure it’ll ever come.
When she’s done, Grace closes the journal, knowing she’s nowhere near finished with the work that’s still ahead or even what it might become.
But for now, at least it feels like something.
A step.
Once she’s dressed in a fresh tank and shorts, Grace bikes a few blocks to the bakery, eats a too-big jelly doughnut, and downs a coffee. When she’s finished, she moves north again, though not with any intentions of traveling as far up the island as she did yesterday. This time, there’s a different place she knows she needs to stop by, and not just loiter, but actually walk in.
Ten minutes later, she parks the cruiser in front of the shop and goes inside. It’s a small spot, overstuffed but welcoming in a no-frills sort of way. Every square inch of the space is in use. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, stacked with paperbacks. Bins of books—old, slightly tattered secondhand choices—line the floor. Unlike some of the bookstores Grace came to love over her years in the city, all offering little cafés in the back or of-the-moment aesthetic choices—moody paint, themed reading nooks, strategic lighting—this beach bookshop is just the basics. The whole place smells like dust and old pages. There’s not even a soft soundtrack of jazz or lo-fi playing. It’s just shelved stories and silence.
Grace smiles at the older woman at the counter, then wanders into the stacks and pretends to browse, even though she knows she’s here to find one specific thing.
It’s not out on a front table like it might have been all those years ago when the cover was arranged in artful pyramids in bookshop windows across the country. It’s not even out on a summer readingor “staff picks” table display. Grace has to walk to the back to find it, searching alphabetically through all the spines until she reaches theWsection and lands on it.
There’s only one copy. Grace’s sophomore novel isn’t in stock at all. She pullsThe Tidesfrom the shelf, runs her fingers over its cover—a transportive photograph of a sunset over the ocean filtered with hues of pinks to lightly suggest the novel’s romantic themes. Grace opens it, flipping through all the pages she once worked so hard to create and get just right. It’s like seeing the inner workings of her heart in print. Before she carries it to the register—paying, in part, to remember certain parts of her past—she turns back to the dedication page at the beginning.
For Birdie—we’ll always have our beach.
Now Grace blinks away tears, closes the cover, and takes a step, turning past the next endcap, just to see what else is out.
That’s when she sees her.
At the end of the aisle, sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing too many turquoise rings, the nameplate necklace, cutoffs, and a faded college hoodie. She holds an opened copy of Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse—a seaside novel about time, relationships, and the quest for meaning—in her lap.
Cece. Nineteen. Midway through college and on the cusp of a new decade.
She’s not the lovestruck girl in the arcade. Not a breezy teen, a half-tipsy twentysomething, or a trying-too-hard adult, either. This version looks a little sleep deprived, sort of overcaffeinated, and completely engrossed. She doesn’t see Grace; she doesn’t seem to see anything, actually, outside of the pages she’s reading, except maybe her pile of writing utensils and journal, where she keeps jotting down notes. Grace recalls reading the book a half dozen times that summer. Not for an upcoming fall class, but because a former professor told her she should. He’d said she might be too young to understand it, but that if she read and reread it and kept returning to it, eventually the true meaning would set in.
Grace considers speaking up, maybe calling out her name just to see how she’ll respond. Instead, she decides to watch this version from afar. Cece’s focus is intense and yet relaxed—completely absorbed in what she’s reading, not because she has to read it for a deadline or an exam, but because she wants to understand it, as if some secret she longs to comprehend—something about love or life—might be hidden within the language.
