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“I just got off the phone with her,” Avery said. “She called me last week to see how much the boat was worth.”

Cam was confused, though not about one thing: “the boat” could be nothing other than the twenty-foot sailboat that Birdie’s late husband, Eddie, her grandfather, had built by hand when they first married. Cam remembered it only as a dusty, tarp-covered mass in the barn outside Birdie’s house. But Birdie’s face practically shone when she talked about it, which she did often—how it took Eddie years to build it out on the lawn on sawhorses; Eddie with a beer in hand, painstakingly sanding and slicking the cedar planks with varnish. How they had christened it the Happily Ever After and sailed it out onto the mouth of the Chesapeake every Sunday, when Birdie always packed sandwiches in wax paper and bottles of lemonade in the cooler, until Eddie died of a sudden heart attack. Her grandfather had been only fifty, and Cam was just a little girl of six.

Cam could barely remember Eddie—the only impressions she could call up were a whiff of his spicy aftershave and the way he would bounce her on his knee—but when she thought about the boat, she always thought of him the way Birdie described him. A young man with a tanned face and strong arms. The only man with a comeback to Birdie’s barbs. The love of her life.

“Why would Birdie care how much the boat was worth?” Cam asked. “And why would she ask you?”

“She said it was about insurance, which I believed—at first,” Avery said. “And she asked me because of James.”

The name rang a bell but Cam couldn’t place it. James, James… she searched her memory… Oh right, she recalled. One of Avery’s true loves. Maybe two or three back? He was a fellow artist and into restoring vintage boats, which Avery had thought was the most romantic thing ever until he took a job crewing one around the world and had broken it off. Avery had worked motifs of shipwrecks into her paintings for months afterward.

“Did you call him?”

“Yes, and it was fine!” Avery said, a little defensively. “He married one of the other crew members, and they’re living in Santa Monica. And that was ages ago. I’m so over him. Anyway, I sent him photos I had taken of the boat a few years back, and he told me it wasn’t worth much. Too much dry rot, he said. He said it was a ‘sweet rig’ that we should definitely fix up, but not something collectors were looking for. And when I told Birdie, she seemed… I don’t know, disappointed? Which was odd. I got the feeling she was hoping she had a treasure chest stashed in that little barn. It was weird, Cam. It felt like something was up with her.”

“Do you think Birdie needs money?” Cam asked. Their grandmother had always seemed comfortable. The house she’d lived in since she was a newlywed had long been paid off. She had Social Security and a little pension from her days as a schoolteacher. And she hardly lived in high style—flannels from L.L.Bean and $6 breakfasts at Martina’s Cafe down the street from her house were her only indulgences.

Could Birdie have developed a gambling habit? She did love to play solitaire on the tablet Cam and Avery bought her and taught her how to use. Or maybe she had started buying garbage from QVC like her friend’s grandmother did before they took away her credit cards after her family discovered a guest room crammed full of purses and tacky jewelry? No, thought Cam, Birdie was far too practical.

As Cam was contemplating these implausible scenarios, she heard a babble of voices in the background on Avery’s end.

“Cam, I have to go. Everyone’s headed to this late-night club,” Avery said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Including Mr. Intense Eyes.”

“Go have fun,” Cam said. “I’ll check in with Birdie.”

“Thanks, Cam,” Avery said, her voice suddenly wistful. “You know, sometimes I wish we could just go back to being twelve, before we cared about boys or careers and we were just us, carefree, you and me in our little attic bedroom at Birdie’s.”

Carefree? Cam paused at the word. She had never been carefree. That was Avery, always so confident, so effortlessly beautiful. Avery had looks you’d notice. Even as a young girl, she had been tall for her age, with dark-chestnut hair and fine features, while Cam knew she was medium everything: medium-brown hair, medium height, medium, medium, medium. Cam had never begrudged her cousin her beauty or her ease in the world. If anything, when Avery was around, it made it even easier for Cam to fade into the background, which was more than fine by her.

“Now I really have to go,” Avery said. “Let me know when you’ve talked to Birdie, would you? Feel her out? You know she would never ask us for help.”

“You’re right about that,” Cam said. “Okay, I’ll let you know.”

“Love you, Summer Sis.”

Summer Sisters. That had been Cam and Avery ever since they were little. Inseparable. So close they decided they were more sisters than cousins—at least for a while every year. Avery’s parents would send her to Birdie’s for a month every summer. Cam spent almost all her summers at Birdie’s while her mom was off doing her usual flighty routine. And then, after a car accident killed her mother when Cam was sixteen, she moved in with Birdie full-time.

“Love you, too.”

Cam hung up and immediately called Birdie. She reached her answering machine and began to suspect that her grandmother—usually so eager to chat—was ducking her calls.

“Hi, Birdie! It’s me,” she said after the beep. “Again. Call me as soon as you get the chance. Love you!”

Later that night, as Cam climbed into bed and rubbed her hands with verbena-scented cream to ward away the chef’s curse—dry skin that came with washing her hands a million times a day—Cam considered what Avery had said. Not about Birdie, though the worry about her grandmother sat heavy in her stomach. Cam was struck by what Avery had said about letting her guard down, about working less and finding romance. Her cousin usually left that subject alone, knowing full well Cam would shut her down, fast, just like she always did.

But tonight Cam looked at the empty space alongside her in the quilt-draped bed and wondered if Avery had a point. What would it be like to have someone there beside her? She imagined sweet old Sergio and Sophia. Did they still hold each other at night? She pictured Sophia’s salt-and-pepper hair resting on her husband’s beefy shoulder and Sergio snoring softly. She imagined her beautiful cousin chasing a handsome man across the cobblestoned streets of Budapest under a full moon. Maybe Avery would wake up in his arms tomorrow. Could it all be worth it?

But then Cam thought of the sorrow Birdie carried around for Eddie, who was there one day and torn from her the next. The decades of heartbreak that followed. And of her own mother, who never found love but whose yearning for something more had led her to… Cam pressed her hands to her eyes as if to physically halt the memories. She inhaled the verbena and willed her mind to stop spiraling.

No, Avery was wrong, Cam thought as she scrunched her pillow to just the right shape under her head. She was better off on her own. And besides, she wasn’t entirely alone. “Good night, Parsley,” she said softly to the curled-up figure in his cushy dog bed. Parsley sighed a sleepy whine in response.

And just as Cam was about to drift off, a thought wiggled its way into her consciousness. The orange zest in the rhubarb sauce. It was all wrong. Everyone did orange with rhubarb, she thought. It was too predictable. It needed something else instead… Cam yawned as she sat up, flipping on her bedside light and grabbing the notebook sitting at a neat right angle and a pen from the drawer below.

CHAPTER TWO

Cam paused before making the call. She felt like she was being disloyal to Birdie, prying into her grandmother’s life by pumping her dearest friend for information. But what else could Cam do? Birdie still hadn’t called her back, even though she had left two more voicemails, each progressively more urgent.

Cam kept reassuring herself that Birdie was merely trying to avoid her, which was worrisome but certainly better than the alternative. At this point, Cam’s usual rationality had deserted her, and she was envisioning Birdie lying in a heap at the bottom of those steep steps that rose from her grandmother’s living room like a sheer cliff. Just climbing them could feel like a workout. A few years back, Cam had tried to convince Birdie to put nonslip strips on the risers, which had been worn to a soft sheen by a couple hundred years’ worth of feet. But her grandmother was having none of it. “Stickers? On my oak floors?” Birdie had sniffed. “What a silly idea. I’m hardly some feeble old lady!” She seemed equally offended at the prospect of an ugly mar on her beautiful historic home as she was at the suggestion that she might be slowing down.