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and the older woman made a wry face.
    â€œStill ticking, more or less.”
    â€œHopefully more.” Mary gave her the change, which she tipped into the plastic box for the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. “Mary had a heart attack last winter,” she told Lucy as they walked to a table by the window. The sun had retreated again and rain spattered the glass.
    â€œIs she okay?” Lucy asked, turning around to gaze at Mary before Juliet tapped her on the shoulder.
    â€œShe’s not going to fall down dead, so you can stop rubbernecking,” she said, meaning it as a joke, but it didn’t come out like one. She clearly had trouble with delivery.
    â€œDo you know everyone in the village?”
    â€œNo.” She didn’t actually know that many people, considering she’d been here ten years. She certainly didn’t know many people
well
.
    â€œSo, how unusual is this for August, really?” Lucy asked. Juliet had seen that the thermometer outside the café had registered eleven degrees Celsius. “Tell me the truth.”
    Juliet shrugged. “Not that unusual, I suppose, but we keep hoping for better.” Mary came over with the coffees and after thanking her, Juliet stirred hers slowly, her gaze on the gray clouds, a wisp of blue just barely visible underneath. The definition of hope. “When the weather’s good here, it’s really, really good.”
    â€œAnd when it’s bad, it’s horrid?” Lucy finished with a smile, and Juliet let out a sudden, rusty laugh that seemed to take them both by surprise.
    â€œâ€˜There was a little girl, who had a little curl,’” she quoted. “Yes, like that.” Then, impulsively, she added, “The day I arrived here, I came from Whitehaven on the Coast-to-Coast walk and the sun was just setting over the sea. It was amazing, really. It had been the most wonderful day, pure blue skies and bright sunshine the whole time. And warm, even though it was September. I stood on the top of the head by the beach right there”—she nodded towards the window—“and watched the sun turn the water to gold and I felt as if—well, as if I didn’t need to go anywhere else. Finally.”
    Lucy was looking almost weepy, and Juliet felt a flush rise on her face. She didn’t normally sound so bloody sentimental. She didn’t think she’d told anyone that story before, or even articulated it to herself. And yet somehow the words had spilled out to Lucy of all people.
    â€œWhy—why did you . . . ,” Lucy began, stammering a bit, and Juliet braced herself for whatever prying question her sister was going to ask. Then Mary plonked their plates on the table and the moment broke, much to Juliet’s relief, although she couldn’t quite suppress a flicker of disappointment that Lucy hadn’t finished asking her question—not that she’d intended to answer it.

5

    Lucy
    ON THE FIRST DAY of school Lucy woke up with a stomachache. She used to get them quite a lot when she was younger; seventh grade in particular had been the Year of Stomachaches. Her mother had been commissioned to do a sculpture in Boston Common, and the day before school had started, it had been installed: a huge, lumpy breast with a grotesque nipple pointing heavenwards. Just remembering that awful thing still made Lucy cringe fifteen years later.
    It had been controversial, of course, and her mother had always thrived on controversy. She’d been in all the papers, on all the news networks, defending her creation against the “uninformed bigots” who protested against shepherding their children past a huge, ugly boob. Lucy had sympathized with those so-called bigots, although she’d never told her mother so.
    And then that first day of school . . . walking into a strange new middle school with everyone knowing who her mother was and the sculpture she’d made.