Angel leans close, clutching her arm, and says, “Peter didn’t kill himself.” He points up the stairs and says, “They did. They murdered him.”

And Grace Wilmot says, “Misty dear. You need to get back to work.” She shakes her head, clucking her tongue, and says, “We’re so, so close to being done.”

And Angel’s hands, his leather driving gloves let go. He backs off, now a step lower, and says, “Peter warned me.” Glancing from the crowd above them to Misty, to the crowd, he backs off, saying, “I just want to know what’s happening.”

From behind her, the hands are closing around her shoulders, her arms, and lifting.

And Misty, all she can say is, “Peter was gay?”

You’re gay?

But Angel Delaporte is stumbling backward, down the stairs. He stumbles to the next floor lower, still shouting up the stairwell, “I’m going to the police!” He shouts, “The truth is, Peter was trying to save people from you !”

HER ARMS ARE NOTHING but loose ropes of skin. Across the back of her neck, the bones feel bundled together with dried tendons. Inflamed. Sore and tired. Her shoulders hanging from the spine at the base of her skull. Her brain could be a baked black stone inside her head. Her pubic hair’s growing back, scratchy and pimpled around her catheter. With a new piece of paper in front of her, a blank canvas, Misty picks up a brush or a pencil, and nothing will happen. When Misty sketches, forcing her hand to make something, it’s a stone house. A rose garden. Just her own face. Her self-portrait diary.

Fast as her inspiration came, it’s gone.

Someone slips the blindfold off her head, and the sunlight from the dormer window makes her squint. It’s so blinding bright. It’s Dr. Touchet here with her, and he says, “Congratulations, Misty. It’s all over.”

It’s what he said when Tabbi was born.

Her homemade immortality.

He says, “It might take a few days before you can stand,” and he slips an arm around her back, hooked under her arms, and lifts Misty to her feet.

On the windowsill, someone’s left Tabbi’s shoe box full of junk jewelry. The glittering, cheap bits of mirror, cut into diamond shapes. Every angle reflecting light in a different direction. Dazzling. A little bonfire, there in the sun bouncing off the ocean.

“By the window?” the doctor says. “Or would you rather be in bed?”

Instead of “in bed,” Misty hears dead .

The room is just how Misty remembers it. Peter’s pillow on the bed, the smell of him. The paintings are, all of them, gone. Misty says, “What have you done with them?”

The smell of you.

And Dr. Touchet steers her to a chair by the window. He lowers her into a blanket spread over the chair and says, “You’ve done another perfect job. We couldn’t ask for better.” He pulls the curtains back to show the ocean, the beach. The summer people crowding each other down to the water’s edge. The trash along the tide line. A beach tractor chugs along, dragging a roller. The steel drum rolls, imprinting the wet sand with a lopsided triangle. Some corporate logo.

Next to the logo stamped in the sand, you can read the words: “Using your past mistakes to build a better future.”

Somebody’s vague mission statement.

“In another week,” the doctor says, “that company will pay a fortune to erase its name from this island.”

What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.

The tractor drags the roller, printing its message again and again until the waves wash it away.

The doctor says, “When an airliner crashes, all the airlines pay to cancel their newspaper and television advertisements. Did you know that? None of them want to risk any association with that kind of disaster.” He says, “In another week, there won’t be a corporate sign on this island. They’ll pay anything it takes to buy their names back.”

The doctor folds Misty’s dead hands in her lap. Embalming her. He says, “Now rest. Paulette will be up soon for your dinner order.”

Just for the record, he goes to her night table and picks up the bottle of capsules. As he leaves, he slips the bottle into the side pocket of his suit jacket and doesn’t mention it. “Another week,” he says, “and the entire world will fear this place—but they’ll leave us alone.” Going out, he doesn’t lock the door.

In her previous life, Peter and Misty, they’d sublet a place in New York when Grace called to say Harrow was dead. Peter’s father was dead and his mother was alone in their big house on Birch Street. Four stories tall with its mountain range of roofs, its towers and bay windows. And Peter said they had to go take care of her. To settle Harrow’s estate. Peter was the executor of the will. Just for a few months, he said. Then Misty was pregnant.

They kept telling each other New York was still the plan. Then they were parents.

Just for the record, Misty couldn’t complain. There was a little window of time, the first few years after Tabbi was born, when Misty could curl on the bed with her and not want anything else in the world. Having Tabbi made Misty part of something, of the Wilmot clan, of the island. Misty felt complete and more peaceful than she’d ever thought possible. The waves on the beach outside the bedroom window, the quiet streets, the island was far enough removed from the world that you stopped wanting. You stopped needing. Worrying. Wishing. Always expecting something more.

She quit painting and smoking dope.

She didn’t need to accomplish or become or escape. Just being here was enough.

The quiet rituals of washing the dishes or folding clothes. Peter would come home, and they’d sit on the porch with Grace. They’d read to Tabbi until her bedtime. They’d creak in the old wicker furniture, the moths swarming the porch light. Deep inside the house, a clock would strike the hour. From the woods beyond the village, they might hear an owl.

Across the water, the mainland towns were crowded, plastered with signs selling city products. People ate cheap food in the streets and dropped litter on the beach. The reason the island never hurt is—there was nothing there to do. There were no rooms to rent. No hotel. No summer houses. No parties. You couldn’t buy food because there was no restaurant. Nobody sold hand-painted seashells with “Waytansea Island” written on them in gold script. The beaches were rocky on the ocean side . . . muddy with oyster flats on the side that faced the mainland.

About that time, the village council started work to reopen the closed hotel. It was crazy, using the last bit of everyone’s trust money, all the island families chipping in to rebuild the burned-out, crumbling old ruin that rose on the hillside above the harbor. Wasting the last of their resources to attract reams of tourists. Dooming their next generation to waiting tables, cleaning rooms, painting souvenir crap on seashells.

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.

We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Curled on the quilt, a part of every person for generations, Misty could put her arms around her daughter. Misty could hold her baby, her body cupped around Tabbi, as if she were still inside. Still part of Misty. Immortal.

The sour milk smell of Tabbi, of her breath. The sweet smell of baby powder, almost powdered sugar. Misty’s nose tucked against the warm skin of her baby’s neck.

Inside those years, they had no reason to hurry. They were young. Their world was clean. It was church on Sunday. It was reading books, soaking in the bathtub. Picking wild berries and making jelly at night, when the white kitchen was cool with a breeze, the windows up. They always knew the phase of the moon, but seldom the day of the week.

Just for that little window of years, Misty could see how her life wasn’t an end. She was a means to the future.