Stakes

You fall asleep with the phone on your chest and wake up with the screen pressed into your cheek.

You read the messages again before you've even sat up. Not because you've forgotten them. Because you like how they look in the morning light: her short careful lines, your longer ones, the gap of four whole minutes before she answered one question, like she'd been standing on the gallery deciding how much to say. The last thing she sent was just Light's on. Go to sleep.

You didn't. Not for a while.

High tide 7:31, says the new text waiting this morning. Low 1:44. Clear till Thursday. Kale's ready.

You type Is that a threat and delete it. You type Good morning and delete that too, because it looks like a corporate email. In the end you send a photo of the kale card on your fridge, and a minute later she sends back one word.

Traitor.

You grin at your phone like an idiot and go make coffee.

You spend two days on Hep.

It's harder than you expected. Not the big things. The small ones. Her handwriting on the backs of envelopes. A coffee can of buttons. A drawer of seed packets labeled by year, going back to 1979. A drawer of your own letters, every one you sent from camp and college and then less and less, tied with garden twine, the last one five years old.

You sit on the bedroom floor with that one for a long time.

You keep finding Marin, too. Not in the house; she's careful about the house. But out the window, every morning around eight, a tall figure in a yellow slicker comes down the road with a wheelbarrow and works in the garden for an hour without knocking. She ties up the dahlias. She cuts back the spent roses. On Wednesday you bring out two mugs of coffee and she looks up, surprised, dirt on her cheekbone, and something about her face in that second makes you nearly drop one.

"You don't have to do this anymore," you say. "I can hire someone."

"I know." She takes the mug. "I like doing it, Ava."

"Why?"

She looks at the dahlias for a while. "Because she'd have hated it if they went to seed. And because it's the only hour of the day nothing's broken." Then, drily: "Usually."

You don't ask what she means by that. You should have.

Thursday comes in bright and windy and loud.

Two white pickups come up the dirt road at nine, followed by a gleaming dark SUV that looks deeply offended by every pothole. Men in neon vests climb out with tripods and orange-flagged stakes. And out of the SUV, unfolding like an advertisement, comes Shepard Ellingwood.

He's even better-looking in daylight, which feels unfair. Wind in his dark blond hair, sunglasses pushed up, a quilted vest that cost more than your first car. He shakes your hand and holds it a second too long and smiles like you share a joke.

"Ava. You look rested. The island agrees with you."

"The island fed me three muffins."

"Smart island." He waves the crew toward the garden. "They'll be quick. Corners, elevation, sightlines. You won't even know we're here."

You know they're here. One of them drives a stake directly into Hep's dahlia bed, through a crimson bloom as big as your face, and you make a sound before you can stop it.

"Careful, guys," Shepard calls. Then, to you, softer: "Sorry. They're engineers. No soul."

He walks the property with you. He's funny. He's genuinely funny, which is the worst part. He asks about your job and listens to the answer. He knows the Leavitt Group, knows the campaign you ran for a sparkling water company last year, says it was the only ad that ever made him want a sparkling water. You hear yourself laughing, easy and practiced, the way you laugh in client dinners.

"You're good," he says, watching you. "You know that? You've got that thing. People want to agree with you."

"It's a job skill."

"It's a gift." He bumps your shoulder with his. "When this is done, you should come to dinner in Boston. My treat. I owe you."

You don't say yes. You don't say no. You've had a lot of practice not saying either.

Then you notice the surveyors aren't stopping at the fence.

They've moved past the Kettle's back boundary, past the stone wall Hep always said was the property line, and they're walking north. Out across the open headland, through the long gold grass and the blueberry scrub, planting orange flags as they go. Toward the point. Toward the tower.

"Why are they going out there?" you ask.

Shepard follows your gaze. Something flickers in his face, quick as a fish. Then the smile's back.

"Sightlines," he says. "We need the whole picture."

Before you can ask what picture, a yellow slicker comes over the rise.

Marin walks straight through the grass toward the nearest surveyor, who's just hammered a stake in about forty feet from her front door. She doesn't run. She doesn't shout. She just stops in front of him, and he looks up, and up, and something about her stillness makes him lower his mallet.

"That's the light station," she says. "You're on Trust land. Take it out."

"Ma'am, I've got orders to..."

"I'm sure you do." She turns her head. Finds Shepard. Her eyes are flat gray, the color the sea goes before a squall. "Mr. Ellingwood. You know where the line is. Hep showed you herself."

Shepard spreads his hands, charming, rueful. "Marin. Always a pleasure. We're just collecting data. Nobody's moving anything."

"Then collect it from the road."

"The light station," he says pleasantly, "is the light station. For now."

He says it lightly. He says it like a man commenting on the weather. And then he looks at you. Not at Marin. At you. As if you should know exactly what he means. As if you're on his side of some line you can't see.

Marin sees him look at you. You watch her see it.

She doesn't say anything else. She just turns and walks back over the rise to her tower, and the surveyors pull up the stake by her door and replant it twenty feet back, and the wind snaps all the little orange flags at once like a crowd clapping.

You don't sleep well. You send Marin one text, I'm sorry about today, I didn't know they'd go out there, and the answer takes an hour to come.

I know you didn't. Goodnight, Boston.

Not Ava. Boston.

In the morning you take the early road to the ferry, because you have an appointment in Rockland with your aunt's lawyer and the Penobscot Dawn leaves at seven. The path to the landing runs past the point. The tower is pink in the sunrise. You don't mean to stop. You stop.

There's a new stake in the turf beside the lighthouse door.

Someone put it there after dark. Orange flag, snapping in the wind. And on the flag, in thick black marker, four letters printed neatly by someone who didn't think anyone would see them before the crew came back.

DEMO.