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at least it wasn’t falling out in huge chunks. The bed would probably go or be replaced. All in all, it was rough but salvageable, and he wondered at his own first impression of the place as if it were an unfounded prejudice. The cottage had struck him as impossibly ramshackle (condemnable, really) when he’d first seen it, and the downstairs living area had seemed the same. But looking around now, at a room in slight disrepair (as if the occupant had become sick then died a year ago), Ebon wondered if he was being unfair. Maybe he was still blaming Richard all these years later, taking his remaining hatred out on the home that Richard had left behind.
    Maybe. But wouldn’t that make him a son of a bitch?
    Reentering the living room and kitchen, he found that his perceptions of the first floor had similarly reset. Plaster he’d thought to be in dire shape was merely battered and worn. Furniture that had looked ravaged by wild animals was merely old and beaten by decades of wear, then subdued through lack of attention as its owner grew ill. The room’s corners looked dusty and full of black mold, but even some of the apparent mold was just drifts of the tiny bugs that were as much a part of Aaron life as the sand. The carpet was threadbare, and spiders had spun thousands of webs. That, at least, was par for the course. Spiders on Aaron worked supernaturally fast. You could wake up and walk through a web spanning a doorway you’d used the previous night on your way into bed.  
    He walked to the couch, noting several holes and cigarette burns in its upholstery that hadn’t been there in his youth. He smacked his palm into a cushion, raising a plume of dust. It was only dust. Just as the cracks and crumbles he’d seen all around the room seemed to be mostly the artwork of spiders and flies.  
    It was an old house in need of attention. A father’s place waiting to be made into a daughter’s, one generation giving way to the next in life’s great circle. The cottage wasn’t in a state of advanced decay after all. He’d been surprised earlier, that was all. Since Holly, Ebon hadn’t been sleeping well. Now that he was here — now that he’d finally come home without any baggage except for one stuffed duffel — he could begin to feel right again. He could start to see things as they were, rather than through the rose-colored lenses he’d unwittingly worn for so long.
    Ebon looked again at the couch, considered sitting, then decided that gross was still gross and pulled out a wooden chair instead. He brushed its seat to clear the worst of the grime, then sat.  
    “I guess it’s not too bad,” he said. “We’ll just need easy access to a Home Depot. There are a few of those on the island, right?”

CHAPTER THREE
    A Girl He Knew From ...

    EBON, REALIZING HE PROBABLY LOOKED LIKE a caricature of a man combing beaches to ponder his lost past, left the house wearing khaki cargo shorts that came to his knees with a long-sleeve shirt meant to cut the cool air’s bite. According to the weather forecast, Aaron was expecting heat later today — maybe rising into the upper eighties — but now, at an hour past sunrise, the slight breeze coming off the bay was cool. Ebon stuffed his hands into his pockets, feeling it ruffle his thick black hair, wondering if he should have worn long pants.  
    Aimee wasn’t awake. He’d slept surprisingly well in the small bunk bed and had risen as the sun leaked down the hall from the window and open faux door in Aimee’s room, then made coffee and paced the house, wondering why he’d overreacted to its condition the day before. Yes, the place would take work. They’d need to re-glaze most of the windows and replace a few; they’d have to patch a ton of holes and caulk the tub; they’d need to tighten the shower head upstairs and, Ebon feared, break into the wall behind the inset and do some work on the copper to make the thing work right. The floor was worn in places and