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exhausted.”
    “Long drive?”
    “Not so bad.”
    “Look, Ellie, you know that if you need anything—I mean anything—all you have to do is call.”
    “I know that, and I appreciate it. But you’ve already done so much for me. I’ll never be able to repay you for everything, Carly.” Once again, that pesky lump tightened Ellie’s throat.
    “ ‘Pshaw,’ as my great-grandmother used to say. Have I done anything for you that you wouldn’t do for me, if the tables were turned?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Well, then, there you are. Who knows, someday, when things are super for you again, maybe I’ll be down on my luck and you can give me a hand.”
    “Carly, you’ll never be down on your luck.”
    “You never know. We’d have said the same about you two years ago.”
    “True enough but …” Ellie paused. “Carly, is everything okay there?”
    “Perfect, as always. I was just trying to make the point that friends do what they can. Right now you’re in a situation and I’m in a position to help out.”
    “But you’d tell me, right?”
    “Of course. Who else would I tell?”
    They chatted a little longer, Carly exclaiming, “Ohhhh! Waterfront! Fabulous!” when Ellie told her that the house faced the Bay. “I may have to buzz on down there soon.”
    “Anytime. Really. Please. I miss you,” Ellie told her.
    “I miss you, too, El. I’ll fit in a trip when I get back to the East Coast. In the meantime, you can scrub up one of those bathrooms for me.”
    “Will do.”
    “Now, tell me all about your new house and that little town.…”
    After Ellie had told all and the call disconnected, she sat in the silent room, the phone still in her hand. Hearing Carly’s voice reminded her that regardless of how it felt sometimes, she wasn’t totally alone. Everyone else may have written her off, denied their friendship, and forgotten that she’d existed, but there was always Carly, and while Carly wasn’t physically with her, talking to her had cheered Ellie. Such was the power of friendship.
    Ellie locked the front door and carried what she needed upstairs, where she turned on the light in the room she’d claimed as her bedroom and went into the bathroom. She turned on the faucet, and jumped back when a stream of rusty water coughed out.
    “Seriously?” She watched it run down the drain in rusty swirls. After a while the color began to lighten, and a few minutes later, the water ran clear.
    “That’s more like it.” With cleanser and a sponge and the “all-purpose” cleaner, she managed to get the bathroom in respectable order in a little less than an hour.
    “Not bad.” She stood back to admire her work. “Not bad at all. Counselor Wilson, you’d be proud of me.”
    She changed the sheets on the bed, then realized she hadn’t looked for blankets. She found a pile of old quilts in a chest in one of the other bedrooms and brought two of them into her room. One went onto the bed, the other she folded at the bottom. They smelled slightly of mothballs, but she decided it wasn’t so bad that she’d risk freezing. She turned off the lights on the first floor and lowered the thermostat, took a quick shower, got ready for bed, and crawled under the covers.
    Flat on her back and looking up toward a ceiling she couldn’t see, Ellie relived the day, from leaving Carly’s town house to driving straight through to St. Dennis, to meeting Jesse Enright. Stepping for the first time into the house she now owned, navigating her way to find the things she needed. She thought about the waitress at the Crab Claw who’d given her coffee and steered her away from the fish that might not have been so good, and the young girl at the Laundromat who’d offered to put Ellie’s things in the dryer so that she could do her shopping and buy dinner.
    “I told you, it’s a friendly little town,” Jesse had told her. And later, “I hope you’ll think about what I said and that you’ll give the folks around here