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“Because Beau is wonderful.”

“I’m sure Beau is delightful.”

“He is.”

I snort. The way she talks about him, you’d think he personally invented world peace and then donated it to the public domain. Beau Sorensen — captain of the Whitmore Ravens, campus golden boy, professional reorganizer of other people’s attention. I’ve never met him. Not once in three years, which feels statistically impossible given that his grandmother is essentially my second family, but somehow our paths have never crossed.

Not that I’m complaining. Everything I’ve heard about him sounds exhausting.

“He’s coming back to campus next week,” Margaret says, with the air of someone dropping a gift on a table.

“Congratulations?”

She laughs. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re biased.”

“I’m his grandmother. Bias is my job.”

Fair point.

I grin despite myself.

The afternoon passes in the easy, ambling way of good summer afternoons. Customers come and go. The afternoon light shifts from gold to amber. I shelve three boxes of new arrivals, help a woman find a book she describes only as “blue, with a flower, from the nineties,” and successfully talk Margaret out of responding to a one-star review with her personal philosophy on the moral failings of people who give one-star reviews.

By the time I lock the front door at six, the thing beneath my ribs has upgraded from trapped fireworks to something more pressing.

My girls are home.

Finally.

The drive from the bookstore to Sailmaker Lane takes less than ten minutes, which is one of Haven’s better qualities. Nothing in this town is far from anything else — it’s one of those New England towns that somehow remained its actual size while everything around it expanded, the kind of place where you can walk from the green to the edge of campus in twenty minutes and pass three churches, a library, and a diner that has been run by the same family for forty years. In September it smells like woodsmoke and cut grass and the sharpness of leaves starting to turn, which is the smell I’ve come to associate with arriving somewhere that matters.

The campus end of Main Street is already busy — students moving back in, hauling duffel bags and furniture and the optimistic organizational systems that won’t survive the first week of classes. I pass the coffee shop on the corner of Whitmore and Elm, the one with the good espresso and the uncomfortable chairs that somehow always has a line. I pass the arched stone entrance to the main quad, the iron gates standing open, the bell tower catching the last of the light. I pass Corbin Arena, its parking lot already dotted with cars — preseason training, probably, or one of the early skates. The lights inside are on.

I keep driving.

Sailmaker Lane is two blocks off Mill Street, a narrow residential street of old houses that the university bought up over the decades and converted to student housing — the kind of housing that still looks like actual houses, with front porches and garden plots and the occasional original window that drafts badly in January. The Sailmaker is at the end of the lane, a three-story white clapboard with a wraparound porch and blue shutters and a history that the university’s website describes as “significant to Haven’s founding,” which is a diplomatic way of saying it’s old enough that several things inside it work only in theory.

It is the first place I have ever lived where I was not performing being fine.

I pull into the driveway.

The SUV parked crookedly at the curb is still warm — the hood ticking as it cools.

Before I’m fully out of the car, the front door bursts open.

“MOTHER HAS ARRIVED.”

Margo.

She comes down the porch steps like a blonde hurricane in a white sundress, arms already open, smile already at full wattage, the kinetic energy of someone who has been in a car for three hours and is now releasing all of it directly at me.

I barely get my feet on the ground before she slams into me.

“Oof.”

“Missed you.”