Behind my own reflection in the window, barely visible, I could almost see it: the wraparound porch, the white railing, the old rocking chair that had been there since before I was born, and beyond all of it the Atlantic, gray-green and infinite.
My mother’s voice came back to me the way it often did when the beach house entered my thoughts. We had been sitting on that porch, the two of us, the summer before she got sick, watching the sun go flat and molten on the water. She had been laughing about something, leaning back in the rocker with her feet tucked up, her hair loose and salt-rough from the afternoon. She had said, in the middle of the laughter: Alex, look at that wave. Bigger than you were at five, I swear.
“Thanks for letting me know about the locks,” I said.
There was a brief silence. “What does that even mean?”
I hung up before she could arrive at an answer.
The apartment felt quiet in the specific way that follows a loud thing. The city hummed outside, sirens somewhere distant, a car horn, the bass from the floor below. I stood in that quiet for a moment and then walked to my home office, the small room that was mostly bookshelves and a filing cabinet and a plant I kept meaning to water more consistently.
I got down on my knees and opened the bottom drawer of the cabinet.
The manila envelope was where it had always been. Thick, its edges worn soft with handling, the flap sealed with a strip of tape that had gone amber with age. My mother had pressed that tape down herself. On the front, in her handwriting, which still had the power to stop my breath: ALEXANDRA, BEACH HOUSE, IMPORTANT. The word IMPORTANT was underlined three times, which was very much in keeping with who she was.
I sat back on my heels and opened it carefully.
The smell of old paper rose up, warm and faintly sweet, and underneath it something that might have been the ghost of the lavender drawer sachets she had kept everywhere. Inside, clipped neatly together, was the trust document she had created three months before she died, and behind it the deed to the beach house. I traced one finger over her signature, the familiar loops of her name, and felt the usual complicated mix of grief and gratitude and the particular relief that comes from preparation.
