a song meant something and turn her face to the light like she was listening with her whole skin.

By the time the road bent toward the coast, I was exhausted from memory.

The town looked almost offensively beautiful at sunset.

Cobbled streets.

Faded houses painted sea-glass colors.

Salt in the air.

Bougainvillea spilling over cracked walls.

It was the kind of place that sold itself as charming and hid its rot in the details.

I hadn’t been back since the funeral, and that day I’d seen nothing except a hearse, a church aisle, and the black shine of Marina’s sealed casket.

Clara had said Marina wanted to be buried near the sea where she grew up.

I had believed everything Clara said then.

I turned onto Flowers Street and nearly drove past the address because the house at number 42 no longer looked like a place hardship had touched.

The sagging porch I remembered had been rebuilt and painted white.

The dead yard was now edged with hydrangeas and fresh gravel.

New shutters framed polished windows.

There was even a porch swing.

Somebody had poured money into that little cottage until it looked like a postcard version of itself, and for a long second I sat behind the wheel with the engine running, staring at a house my grief had never pictured.

I grabbed the bank letter, the gift bag, and walked up the new stone path.

I knocked once.

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder, and saw the front curtain twitch.

Someone was inside.

I felt it before I saw it—the alert, prickling certainty of being watched.

When the door finally opened, it stopped short against a chain, and Clara’s face appeared in the gap.

She looked older, yes, but not frail.

Not sick.

Not like the woman I had imagined every month when I pressed send.

Her hair was freshly colored.

Gold hoops flashed at her ears.

A cream cardigan hung neatly over a blouse that looked expensive, and there was color in her cheeks that hadn’t been there at the funeral.

Surprise tore across her face so nakedly that for a second neither of us spoke.

“Rob?” she said at last.

Her voice came out thin and tight.

“What are you doing here?”

I held up the bank letter.

“Your phones are dead.

The account needs updating.

I got worried.”

Her eyes flicked to the envelope, then past me, like she was checking whether anyone had seen me arrive.

“You should’ve called first.”

“I did.”

Something like panic moved through her expression.

Before I could press her, a laugh floated from deeper inside the house.

A woman’s laugh.

Soft, low, familiar enough to make every muscle in my body lock.

Clara heard it too.

I watched the blood leave her face.

“Who’s here?” I asked.

“No one,” she said too quickly, and that answer was so bad it almost would’ve been funny if my heart hadn’t been trying to batter its way out of my chest.

Then I saw the photograph.

It was sitting on a hallway table behind her, hastily turned halfway toward the wall as if someone had tried to hide it at the last second.

Even from the porch I could see two women standing on a beach, smiling into the wind.

One was