At dinner, Maia says, “So what was in the boxes?”

“Christmas ornaments,” Irene says. “And other knickknacks from my house in Iowa.”

Maia takes a knife to her fried chicken. “I had to give up being a vegan,” she says. “It was too hard.”

“How’s the bath-bomb business?” Irene asks.

“I kind of gave that up too,” Maia says. “I’m busy with other things.”

“What kinds of things?” Baker asks. “Not sports? I was supposed to coach the upper-school baseball team but only four kids signed up—three girls and a boy.”

“Not sports,” Maia says. “I hang out with my friends mostly. Joanie, Colton, Bright, and…Shane. Shane is sort of a special friend.” Maia’s face shines and for a moment, her beauty takes Irene’s breath away. She’s Milly, she’s Russ, and she’s someone else—Rosie, Irene supposes.

Maia makes it through the entire meal talking about her life without mentioning Huck even once. This must be on purpose; maybe Maia thinks Huck is a forbidden topic.

Irene clears her throat. “How’s your grandfather?” As soon as the words are out, she feels like she’s lost a test of wills.

“Oh,” Maia says, shrugging. “He’s good.” This seems to be all Irene is going to get. He’s good. He’s good? Then Maia locks eyes with Irene and says, “He misses you.”

Irene is startled by the simple frankness of this statement. I miss him too, she thinks—and it’s the first time she’s allowed herself to admit it.

“He gave me this to deliver,” Maia says. She pulls an envelope that has been folded in half out of the back pocket of her shorts.

“Oh,” Irene says. Her name is on the front in Huck’s handwriting. Maybe it’s an accounting of what she owes him for rent and utilities—but she knows Huck wouldn’t ask for money even if he were angry. “Thank you.” She takes the envelope. “Who wants dessert?”

She would like to throw the envelope away unopened, but she isn’t strong enough. She waits until Baker returns from running Maia home and starts giving Floyd a bath, then she takes the envelope to the back deck and opens it.

It’s a letter.

Dear AC,

Maybe you’ll read this, maybe you won’t. In the event you are reading this, I want to start by saying that this is not an apology because I didn’t do anything wrong.

When LeeAnn died and Rosie got back together with Russ, she was nearly thirty years old. She described Russ as “this man I’m seeing, Russell Steele”—she said his name to me only that once—and I had no idea that this was the same man as “the Pirate,” the one who had gotten her pregnant. She very deliberately led me to believe it was someone new.

I asked the usual questions: Where was he from, what did he do, when could I meet him? Rosie provided no answers. She wanted to keep the relationship private; she was concerned that the island would poke its nose into her business. After the way that LeeAnn rallied every single one of her friends and relations against Oscar Cobb, I couldn’t blame Rosie for feeling this way. Rosie told me that, just like certain plants, some relationships do best with a lot of sunlight, and some thrive hidden in the shade, and her new relationship was the latter. It concerned me, I made that clear, but I also want to explain that I was lonely without LeeAnn and my greatest fear was that Rosie would take Maia and move out. I wanted to avoid that at all costs.

If you read the diaries closely then you know that Rosie didn’t start taking Maia with her to see Russ until 2016. Once this happened, my questions grew more insistent. I didn’t like the idea of Maia spending time with any adult I hadn’t met.

Again, I was shut down.

There were whispers around town about the “Invisible Man,” and some of it reached my ears. I learned he was white, he was wealthy, he had a villa somewhere on the north shore. Did I think he was married? It crossed my mind, but again, Rosie was in her thirties, old enough to know what she was doing.

To be honest, AC, I was worried about Rosie—and Maia—getting hurt. I didn’t give a thought to any woman Russell Steele might have been betraying. When I think of it this way, I understand what you mean about us being on “opposite sides” of this thing.

Although this isn’t a letter of apology, I do want to say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry you were betrayed and I’m sorry you were hurt. I also want to tell you something about my past that you might not know.

Before I moved to St. John and met LeeAnn Small, I was married to someone else, a woman named Kimberly Cassel, whom I met when I lived in Key West. Kimberly was a hot ticket—a star bartender and one hell of a fisherwoman. She was also a serial philanderer and an alcoholic. Before our marriage ended, Kimberly revealed that she had fooled around with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of the men who came into the bar where she worked. Kimberly got pregnant and miscarried at fourteen weeks, which was devastating to me at the time and felt even worse when I discovered the child might not even have been mine.

I put Kimberly in rehab and divorced her, which might sound like a door that shut clean and firm, but I assure you, the hurt lasted for a very long time after.

I tell you this only because I want you to feel less alone and to know that I do have some idea of what you’re battling.

If you made it this far in the letter, AC, then I’m grateful—and not only grateful but hopeful that, at some point in the future, we can have a conversation and mend things between us. I miss you for many reasons, but mostly I miss our friendship. As unlikely as it might be, the friendship is genuine.

With love,

Huck

Irene clears the emotion from her throat and reads the letter again. Then she folds it up and returns it to the envelope. She heads back into the kitchen to unload the dishes from the drying rack and she holds the letter over the kitchen trash. It feels like Huck is, once again, rushing her. If he’d learned anything from watching and listening to her the past couple of months, he would have known that what she needs is time.

She can’t bring herself to throw the letter away. She tucks it into the front pocket of her suitcase.

As she’s falling asleep, she thinks, Huck wrote me a letter. And she smiles.

The next day, Irene e-mails Natalie Key to thank her for the boxes. She doesn’t call because she knows Natalie is handling a new, highly sensitive, high-profile embezzlement case and is very busy. She’s surprised when the phone rings.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get you more,” Natalie says. “Your books and clothes will be returned eventually, once they’ve been documented and it’s been determined that they have minimal resale value. Certain other personal items as well—your teakettle, kitchen utensils. But no antiques, and not the rugs. Not your cars. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Irene says—and the strange thing is, she means it. She owned a house filled with things, some of them very expensive. But none of it matters. She’s doing just fine without things. Why had she put so much time and energy into them in the first place?

“Also…” Natalie says. Her voice takes on a sober tone and Irene assumes she’s about to say that Irene’s retainer has run out. “I heard from the Feds. There were personal journals of Rosie Small’s that were discovered—but unfortunately, these didn’t contain enough hard facts to incriminate Todd Croft.”