The rain had been falling since they crossed into Wexford.
A steady gray fall, the kind of October rain that made the leaves look shellacked and the old slate roofs go dark. Enough to soak a box left too long on the truck ramp, and no more than that. Eleanor Marsh sat in the passenger seat with both hands in her lap and watched the harbor slide by through the window: the dry-dock, the last two fishing vessels listing in their slips, a row of closed storefronts with hand-lettered signage going soft in the wet.
She had looked at photographs of this town for months. Photographs left out the smell: salt and brine and something underneath it she couldn't name yet, low tide or old wood or the damp of a place that had sat this close to the water for three hundred years. The smell came through the heating vents, and it filled the car, and Ellie breathed it in and felt, for the first time since her mother died, like she was somewhere other than where she had been.
"Left on Maple," Tom said to the GPS. Not to her. He'd been talking to the GPS since Gloucester, as though it needed confirmation.
"I know," she said.
He glanced over. Said nothing.
Behind them in the back seat, Cleo had her headphones in and her knees drawn up against the seat back in front of her. Fifteen years old and already expert at taking up no room at all. She hadn't complained once since they'd left the old house, which was either a good sign or a very bad one, depending on how well you knew her. Ellie knew her. She watched her daughter in the side mirror and tried to gauge which kind of silence this was.
Cleo was looking at the harbor. Something on her face that might, in certain light, pass for interest.
They turned onto Maple Lane.
Ellie had been to the house twice, once at the showing and once at the final walk-through, and both times she had come alone, on weekdays, when the street was quiet and the light through the maples was still warm and yellow. She had never seen it in weather like this. She had never seen it with Tom beside her, his jaw set like a man driving toward something he'd already half-decided was a mistake.
But even in the rain, even with the stone wall dark with moisture and the lawn gone to that particular October shag, the house was exactly what she had needed it to be. Three stories of Colonial Revival, white clapboard that could use a coat before spring, black shutters, five second-floor windows all looking down at the lane like a face that had been keeping a long watch.
