He ran out of the house, grabbed Tom’s bike, and took off after Piper, pedaling as hard as he could through the neighbor’s backyard. Fortunately, the grass had been tamped down by Piper’s tires, creating a clear track, which he pursued until it ended at the road. Betting on instinct, he turned left. Sure enough, when he got close to the Graver’s Beach sign, he saw her figure atop the bike up ahead, her curls blowing behind her in the breeze. He kept his distance, without losing sight of her, and made sure he stayed far enough behind that if she turned around she wouldn’t spot him.
By the time he reached Graver’s Beach, Piper was nowhere to be seen; the only evidence she had come that way was her bike lying sideways on the edge of the road. He dumped his beside it and snuck down the sandy path to the beach, expecting to find her sitting on a rock basking in the late October sun. But she was not.
Anders walked the entire length of the beach twice before accepting the fact that Piper had somehow vanished.
So he sat on a rock in the late October sun and waited for her to reappear.
And four hours later, just when Anders was ready to give up, she did.
Anders stood up as he watched a boat approach the shore and then slow to idle. He shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun and recognized Piper, as she hopped over the side and started wading in the knee-deep water. And then his gaze drifted to the man helming the boat. And his heart full-on stopped. His jaw dropped to his chest.
And he stared at the man that—from a distance—looked exactly like Piper’s dead husband, Tom.
Chapter 25
Piper held her skirt bunched around her upper thighs with one hand and her shoes in the other, as she waded from the boat to the shore, and kept her eye on the figure standing on dry land waiting for her, trying to decide what exactly she was going to say to Anders when she reached him. She had seen him following her, of course. She just hadn’t thought he’d actually wait around this entire time for her to return. Turned out she’d underestimated him a lot these past few months. And she knew she needed to tell him the truth. She had wanted to so many times—and she almost had, too, right there on the beach when he asked why she had come back for him but not Tom. What was it about being surrounded by darkness that made it easier to lay your soul bare?
But then—how on earth to explain? If he didn’t already think she was crazy, he certainly would now. And Piper wasn’t sure why she cared so much about what Anders thought of her, but she did. She sighed, as her feet sunk into the wet muck of sand, and then she was free of the tide lapping around her ankles altogether and was standing in front of Anders.
Sweet, freckle-faced, logical Anders.
“Hi,” she said nervously, wishing she could just rewind time and tell him the truth from the get-go.
Anders didn’t smile in return. He looked shell-shocked. “Who was that? On the boat with you?”
Piper looked behind her to the retreating vessel and then turned back to Anders, feeling a little sick to her stomach. “I can explain.”
“Was it Tom?”
Her eyes flew wide. “Tom? No. Of course not.” She squinted, picturing the man in her mind’s eye, and then realized how Anders could think that, with their similar build and sun-kissed buzz cuts. “It’s all really . . . complicated.” She looked around. “We should probably sit.” She walked to the nearest rock to lower herself onto it, then waited for Anders to follow suit. When he did, she wasn’t quite sure how or where to start, but thought the beginning was best. She looked at Anders, took a deep breath, and said: “So . . . you remember that cat?”
* * *
—
Piper, of course, knew the cat was not her dead husband, Tom. Well, now she knew. But when she woke up sick with grief two weeks after Tom’s disappearance and a cat she’d never even seen before was curled on Tom’s pillow staring intently at her with those briny blue-gray eyes, well, she could be forgiven for having the thought. She wouldn’t be the first or the last distraught widow to imagine such a thing—a bird that comes daily to your windowsill, a butterfly, an owl staring into your soul. It would have crossed most people’s minds, because the truth was, no matter what you believed, everyone wanted a sign, didn’t they? That your loved one was still here in some way. Still with you.
And so Piper did. Believe that the cat was Tom—for a few days at least. Long enough to mention something to Pearl that morning in the kitchen of the bed-and-breakfast, which, in retrospect, was what started the whole mess. When she got back home, it wasn’t just the lack of snoring that forced Piper to accept that this cat was not in fact harboring Tom’s late soul. After the cat inhaled the plate of eggs, Piper tried to caress his soft cheek, and the cat promptly scratched her hand and jumped out the open window above the sink. Tom would never have been so rude.
Still, she was sad when the cat left and she was once again alone. So she started leaving the window open and a bowl of milk on the counter to entice him back. And three days later, he returned. He took to sleeping on Tom’s pillow, and it comforted Piper to have another living creature in her space that she could talk to when the loneliness and silence in her house became overwhelming.
She named him Tom. Not because she thought he was Tom. Not anymore, anyway. But because he was a tomcat and she knew it would have made Tom (her husband, not the cat) laugh. And when Tom (the cat, not her husband) was in her house, she was a little less lonely, which was how Tom always made her feel, so maybe she did name him a little bit for Tom. But she thought maybe she could be forgiven for that, too.
“Anyway, that’s all it was,” she continued, ducking her head, unable to meet Anders’s eyes. “A blip. I was grieving and I had a tiny little break with reality that lasted all of about two days. How was I to know Pearl would take it so far?”
Anders stared at her, his jaw so slack, it looked unhinged.
“I know I should have said something, stopped it. But in my defense, I didn’t even realize what was happening until a few days later at the docks. I’d been walking there in the morning and the afternoon, because I thought it might make me feel better to do something that felt routine—and be around people, rather than wallow in my house, which is what I had been doing. Imagine my surprise one day when someone shouted out to Tom! Asked if he had a good haul or something. And then before I knew it, everyone was waving to Tom, and I had no choice but to smile and pretend that he was right there with me.”
“No choice! They were doing it for you. You could have said something.”
“I know,” Piper said, filling with both relief to have said it all out loud and shame at how long she’d let the pretense go on. “But everybody seemed so happy. I didn’t want to take that away from them. And . . . if I’m telling the truth, I guess selfishly, I didn’t want it to end. It was so nice, hearing his name all the time. People smiling at me instead of pitying me.”