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stampede.” She felt a little guilty about lying, but in saying the hopeful words, she could make them come true.
    “You’re so remote out there.”
    Lily heard all the things her mother didn’t say.
Why did you take off like that? Are you crazy? You can’t just uproot yourself. You’re losing your mind.
And on a deeper level still:
How could you leave me? Abandon your parents?
    “I don’t go to the well for water. I don’t use an outhouse. I have electricity—”
    “You know what I mean. You’re on an island.”
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude, but lots of people live on islands.” Lily tightened her grip on the phone. Had she become bitter? She imagined turning into a crotchety old battle-ax of a widow, or however the cliché went. The eccentric woman living alone in her shuttered, dingy house in the boondocks, lashing out at every well-meaning stranger.
    “Honey, Dad and I can’t help wondering…”
    Wondering what? Whether she planned to jump off a cliff? Drown herself in the sea? “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”
    “I hope you’re getting out. Is there anything to do in that small town?”
    “Farm festivals. Chocolate tastings. Mammoth fossil hunts. But I don’t have time for luxuries. It’s a lot of work to set up a shop.”
    “If you don’t go out you might, oh, I don’t know. You might get too isolated. Some people end up that way. Or they do drastic things or make decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make.”
    Like move to a sleepy island? Like use all her savings to open a clothing shop in a drafty old cottage? “Moving here
was
getting out.” Lily turned the page in the newspaper—another row of obituaries.
    “Maybe you could take a buying trip to San Francisco?”
    “I’ve got to get this place off the ground first.” Perhaps it would be an impossible task. Lily imagined her parents hopping the next plane, and she would have her social worker mom and high school teacher father offering kind but useless advice about how to run a vintage clothing boutique.
    “Dad and I read that fifty percent of all businesses fail in the first year, and ninety-five percent of them fail within five years.”
    “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” Lily focused on the last obituary, for a woman who died of breast cancer at twenty-five. She’d already outlived the woman by several years. She should be grateful for the extra time, for her health, but…
    “You could move your shop to the city. People are buying used clothes in San Francisco like crazy. Probably in Seattle, too.”
    “I appreciate the suggestion. I just opened. I have to give it time.” Lily closed the newspaper, carefully folded it for the recycling bin.
    “If things don’t work out, you can always move back home,” her mother went on. “The extra room is always here.”
    A nearly forty-year-old woman living with her parents? Worse things had happened. But it would be a last resort. “Thanks, Mom. Give Dad a hug for me.”
    She hung up and inhaled the scents of silence, dust, and mothballs. What decision would she have otherwise made? She’d done what was expected of her, at first. She’d attended a widows’ support group, but she’d felt light-years removed from the other women, who’d either been much younger or much older than her. She’d fallen into a strange middle zone—not young enough to start fresh, not old enough to share fond memories. So where was she, exactly? In crazy limbo-land, surrounded by old clothes in a quaint but flawed cottage on a remote island where she’d met only a handful of people.
    She returned to the front of the shop in time to see a man shuffling up the sidewalk. A paying customer? No, it was Harvey Winslinger, her accountant. She’d hired him the day after she’d arrived on the island, at Jasmine’s recommendation. What terrible news did he have to impart?
    She rushed to the antique wall mirror to check her hair—wild as usual. And she hadn’t dressed well or put