—

After Ben leaves, I haul myself out of bed and splash cold water on my face. What I really want to do is climb back into bed and sleep for the rest of the day, but I can hear Hannibal yowling downstairs, so I make my way down to the kitchen, where I find him glaring at me through the bars of his crate. The heaping mound of kitty chow I left for him last night is all gone, of course. It’s too soon to feed him again, so I carry him to the front door and release him outside. Off he goes, a tiger-striped tub of lard waddling away into the garden.

“Get some exercise, why don’t you?” I tell him and close the door.

Now that everyone has packed up and left, the house seems unnervingly quiet. And I feel more than a little embarrassed that I ever asked them to investigate Brodie’s Watch. Just as Ben predicted, they found no evidence of a ghost. He would tell me such evidence doesn’t exist, that believers like Maeve, with their cameras and elaborate equipment, are self-deluded people who think they hear patterns in random noise, who see dust particles floating past a camera lens and imagine supernatural orbs. He would say Brodie’s Watch is just an old house with creaky floors and a notorious reputation and a tenant who drinks too much. I wonder what he thinks of me this morning.

No, I’d rather not know.

Seen in the harsh light of day, my obsession with Jeremiah Brodie looks utterly irrational. He has been dead for a century and a half, and I should leave him to rest in peace. It’s time for me to get back to the real world. Back to work.

    I brew a fresh pot of coffee, heat up the cast-iron pan, and fry diced bacon and potatoes until they’re crisp, toss in chopped onions and green peppers, and pour in two scrambled eggs. It’s my go-to one-skillet breakfast on mornings when I need to fuel up for a long day’s writing.

I pour myself a third cup of coffee and sit down with my skillet-scrambled eggs. I’m fully awake now, feeling almost human, and also utterly famished. I devour my breakfast, glad to be eating alone so that no one sees me greedily shoveling eggs and potatoes into my mouth. I will devote the rest of this day to writing The Captain’s Table. No distractions, no more ghost nonsense. The real Jeremiah Brodie is nothing more than scattered bones under the sea. I’ve been seduced by a legend, by my own desperate loneliness. If there are any demons in this house, then I myself have brought them, the same demons that have tormented me since New Year’s Eve. All it takes is a few too many glasses of wine to summon them.

I set my dirty dishes in the sink and open my laptop to resume work on Chapter Nine of The Captain’s Table, “Jewels from the Sea.” Is there anything new to say about shellfish? I pull out my handwritten notes from my excursion aboard the lobster boat Lazy Girl last Saturday morning. I remember the smell of diesel and the gulls swarming overhead as our boat came abreast of the first lobster buoy. Captain Andy had winched up his trap from the water, and when it thumped down on his deck, there they were inside, green and glistening. With their glossy carapaces and insect legs, lobsters bear an unsavory resemblance to cockroaches. They are cannibals, he told me, and in confinement they’ll eat one another. That bug-eat-bug savagery is why lobstermen band the claws. There is nothing delectable about a snapping live lobster, but boiling water will transform that green bug into tender, luscious meat. I think of all the ways I’ve feasted on it: Dripping with butter. Cloaked in mayonnaise and mounded on a toasted bun. Stir-fried Chinese style with garlic and black bean sauce. Stewed in cream and sherry.

    I begin to type a paean to lobster. Not the food of sea captains, who would have considered it fit only for paupers, but the food of scullery maids and groundskeepers. I write about how the poor would have cooked it, simmered with corn and potatoes, or simply boiled in salted water and tossed into a lunch pail. Despite my hearty breakfast, I’m getting hungry again but I keep writing. When I finally stop to glance up at the clock, I’m startled to see it’s already six in the evening.

Cocktail hour.

I save the new pages I’ve written and reward myself for a hard day’s work by opening a nice bottle of Cabernet. Just one or two glasses, I promise myself. The cork gives a musical pop, and like Pavlov’s dog I am already salivating, craving that first hit of alcohol. I take a sip and sigh with pleasure. Yes, it’s a very nice wine, full-bodied and meaty. What shall I cook for dinner to go along with it?

My laptop chimes, announcing a new email in my in-box. I see the sender’s name, and suddenly I’m not thinking at all about dinner or my work on The Captain’s Table. My appetite has vanished; in its place is only a gnawing emptiness in my stomach.

The email is from Lucy.

It’s the fourth email she’s sent me this week, and my responses—when I respond at all—have been curt: I’m fine, just busy. Or: I’ll write more later. This new message from her has a subject line that’s only three words: Remember this day?

I don’t want to open it, because I dread the tidal wave of guilt that always follows, but something compels me to reach for the mouse. My hand is numb as I click on the message. An image fills the screen.

It’s an old photo of Lucy and me, taken when I was ten and she was twelve. We are both wearing bathing suits and our long, skinny arms are slung over each other’s bare shoulders. We are tanned and smiling, and behind us, the lake shimmers, bright as silver. Yes, I remember that day very well. A hot and hazy afternoon at Grandma’s lake cottage. A picnic of fried chicken and corn on the cob. That morning I had baked oatmeal cookies all by myself, at ten years old already comfortable in the kitchen. Ava wants to feed everyone, Lucy wants to heal everyone was the way our mother summed up her daughters. That day at the lake, I cut my foot on a rock and I remember how tenderly Lucy washed and bandaged my wound. While the other kids splashed in the water, Lucy had stayed by my side, keeping me company on the shore. Whenever I’ve needed her, whether I was sick or depressed or short of cash, she’d always be there for me.

    And now she isn’t, because I cannot bear to look her in the eyes and let her see who I really am. I cannot bear to be reminded of what I’ve done to her.

I sip Cabernet as I stare at that photo, haunted by the ghosts of who we once were. Sisters who adored each other. Sisters who would never hurt each other. My fingers hover over the keyboard, ready to tap a reply. A confession. The truth is like a boulder crushing me; what a relief it would be to throw off this burden and tell her about Nick. About New Year’s Eve.

I refill my glass. I can no longer taste the wine, but I keep drinking it anyway.

I picture Lucy reading my confession as she sits at her desk, where photos of Nick smile at her. Nick, who will never grow old, who will forever be the man she adored, the man who adored her. She will read my confession and she will know the truth about him and about me.

And it will break her heart.

I close the laptop. No, I cannot do it, not to her. It’s better to live with the guilt and die with the secret. Sometimes, silence is the one true way to prove your love.

As night falls, I finish off the bottle.

    I don’t know what time it is when I finally stagger upstairs and collapse onto the bed. Drunk as I am, I do not sleep. I lie awake in the darkness, thinking of the women before me who have died alone in Brodie’s Watch. What secrets did they harbor, what past sins drove them to retreat to this house? Maeve had said that powerful emotions such as terror and grief will linger in a house years later. Can shame? A century from now, will someone sleeping in this room feel the same guilt that gnaws at me like a cancer? My anguish is almost physical, and I curl into a ball, as if I could squeeze away the pain.

The scent of the sea is suddenly so powerful, so vivid, that I taste the salt on my lips. My heart quickens. The hairs lift on my arms, as if the darkness is electrically charged. No, this is just my imagination. Captain Brodie does not exist. Maeve proved there is no ghost in this house.

“Whore.”

I snap rigid at the sound of his voice. He stands over my bed, his face hidden, only his silhouette visible in the darkness.

“I know what you have done.”

“You aren’t real,” I whisper. “You don’t exist.”