The Option

You wake up because the house is talking.

Not in a haunted way. In an old-house way: the radiator ticking, a shutter knocking softly, the slow drip of the kitchen faucet, gulls arguing on the roof. For a long minute you lie in Aunt Hep's spare bed under a quilt that smells of cedar and don't know where you are, and your heart doesn't race.

That's how you know something's wrong.

It always races in the morning. In Boston you wake at 5:40 with your pulse already sprinting toward the inbox.

You lie there and wait for it. It doesn't come.

The Kettle in daylight is exactly the way you remember it and not at all. Low ceilings, wide pine floors, every windowsill crowded with sea glass and beach stones and chipped mugs holding pens. Hep's reading glasses are still on the kitchen table, folded on top of a seed catalog. Her yellow slicker hangs by the door. You don't touch it.

And there are notes everywhere.

Not Hep's. Hep's handwriting looped and sprawled like her garden. These are small and square and careful, on index cards, taped up with blue painter's tape.

Back door sticks. Lift and push.

Dahlias: don't water the leaves. They sulk.

Hot water takes 4 min. Be patient with it, it's older than both of us.

Kale's yours. Please eat it. I can't eat any more kale.

You stand in the kitchen in your socks and laugh out loud, alone, for the first time in weeks. Then you take that one down and stick it to the fridge.

The Mug-Up is warm and loud and smells like cinnamon and fryer oil and wet wool. A bell jangles when you push the door, and every head in the place turns.

"Well," says the small woman behind the counter, "look what the ferry dragged in."

She's maybe sixty-five, with a silver pixie cut and reading glasses on a beaded chain and the posture of a general. She comes around the counter and hugs you before you can put out a hand. She smells like coffee and Ivory soap.

"Lois Mahoney. I changed your diapers once. Don't make that face; it was one time and you were a delight." She holds you at arm's length. "You look like hell, sweetheart. Sit. Blueberry muffin. Don't argue."

You sit at the counter. You don't argue.

The man two stools down is seventy if he's a day, face like a walnut, orange oilskin bib, a mug in a hand the size of a lobster trap. He looks at you for a long time.

"Norris Haddock," Lois says. "He talks on Tuesdays."

"It's Monday," Norris says.

"See?"

The muffin comes, hot, split and buttered. You eat it in four bites. Lois watches you like you're a project.

"You're selling," she says. It isn't a question.

"How does everyone already know that?"

"Galen told the post office, the post office told the church, the church told me." She refills your coffee. "Also a man in a very clean car's been around twice this summer asking about Hep's place. So."

"Shepard Ellingwood."

"That's the one. Nice teeth." Lois's mouth flattens. "I don't trust a man who's tan in September."

Your phone rings, right on cue. You glance at the screen. Caswell Coastal.

"Speak of the devil," Lois says, and goes to bully somebody else.

You step to the end of the counter by the window. Shepard's voice is warm, easy, like you're already friends.

"Ms. Callister. You made it. How's the island treating you?"

"It fed me a muffin."

He laughs, and it's a good laugh. "Listen, I know this is fast. I know you're grieving. So I'll keep it simple. My partners want to survey before we talk final numbers. Totally standard. I'm sending you a short option agreement. It gives us ninety days to survey and decide, and you get a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee today just for the trouble. Nonrefundable. Yours either way."

Twenty-five thousand dollars.

You think about the property tax notice you found on Hep's desk last night, stamped OVERDUE in red. The roof stain spreading on the bedroom ceiling. Your own credit card, which you stopped looking at in August.

"I haven't even talked to the estate lawyer yet."

"You're the heir. You're the executor. It's just an option, Ava. It doesn't obligate you to anything." His voice gentles. "You told me on the dock you were tired. Let me take one thing off your plate."

The email pings while he's still talking. A link. A neat yellow box: Sign here.

You read the first page. Your eyes slide over the second. Optionor. Optionee. All real property of the Estate of Hephzibah Callister situated on Gull Rock Island, Knox County, Maine. The Kettle. Fine. Legal language always sounds like a hostage note.

Outside the window, the fog has burned off. The harbor is blue and the boats are going out, and you are so tired. You've been tired for three years.

You sign with your fingertip. A little looping scribble that doesn't even look like your name.

Thank you! Your document has been completed.

"Pleasure doing business," Shepard says. "Wire goes out this afternoon. Welcome aboard."

The bell over the door jangles.

Marin Seaborne walks in carrying a wooden crate, and every head turns again, but differently this time. Not curious. Glad. Lois lights up. Norris lifts two fingers off his mug, which you suspect is the Norris equivalent of a parade.

In daylight she's worse. Better. Whatever the word is. The braid is pinned up, a few auburn strands loose at her neck. Rolled sleeves, forearms dusted with freckles, a smear of grease on one wrist. Two summer people at the window table actually stop talking to watch her cross the room, and she doesn't seem to notice them at all.

She notices you. Her eyes go to the phone in your hand, then back up to your face.

"Morning," she says.

"Morning." You put the phone face-down on the counter like it's done something wrong. "I found your notes."

"They're not mine. They're the house's." She sets the crate on the counter. Jars, two dozen of them, glowing pink. "Hep's beach-rose jelly. Last batch she made. Lois sells it." She hesitates, then takes one jar out and slides it toward you. "That one's yours. She labeled it."

The label is in Hep's looping hand. For Ava. Spread it thick.

You can't speak. Marin doesn't make you. She just nods once, collects a coffee from Lois, and goes back out into the bright morning, and you sit there holding a jar of jelly and feeling like you've just stolen something.

By evening the fog is back.

It rolls in off the water around six, swallowing the garden fence, then the arbor, then the dahlias one by one, until the Kettle is a small warm box floating in gray. You make a bowl of Lois's chowder and eat it standing up. The pilot light does fuss. You talk to it. It works.

At 7:12 your phone buzzes. A number you don't know.

Fog tonight. Leave your porch light on so I know you're okay. M.

You read it twice. You go to the front door and flip the switch, and the porch bulb comes on, yellow and small.

And out on the point, through the fog, the light begins to turn.