My sixteen-year-old walked down a crowded beach to the ice cream stand and never came back. Eight years later, six hundred miles away, the wind lifted the hem of a stranger’s faded turquoise cover-up and I saw my mother’s crooked yellow sun stitched over the tear.
That is the last thing I ever saw my daughter wear. I have one photograph of her in it, taken about forty minutes before she walked off.
Eight years later Peder talked me into a weekend at Portmell, which is nearly six hundred miles from Calder Strand, and which was the entire point.
I had not willingly walked onto a beach since 2017.
We were going past a café near the boardwalk and there was a woman standing with her back to me, fifty-something, holding a coffee.
Faded turquoise.
I told myself that half the women on that coast own something turquoise and I made myself keep walking.
Then the wind came up off the water and lifted one corner of the hem.
And there was the sun.
