Four of seven voicemails from my mother. The other three I had listened to in the car on the way up, between Bangor and the turn for Route 3, with the windows open because the air conditioning had given out somewhere around Bath. I could hear her voice through the wind. Without the wind, too. Three months of her voice, and the wind had nothing to do with it.

I put the phone on the soapstone counter, screen against the stone. The counter was cold even in late June. My grandfather had quarried it himself in 1968 from a yard in Vermont, and it stayed cool the way certain people stay calm, regardless of what was happening to it.

The kettle was already on the stove because I was a person who put the kettle on before I unpacked. I had not yet unpacked. The boxes were stacked along the hallway in the order I had loaded them into the car, which meant kitchen first and books last and a wedding-dress box that had no business being here, somewhere in the middle. I did not look at the dress box. I had been not-looking at the dress box for eleven weeks.

The kettle whistled in two notes. The lower note was half a beat behind the higher one. It had always been like that. As a child I had thought the kettle was telling a joke and then telling the punch line.

I poured the water into the blue mug my grandmother had used for forty years. I added one bag of breakfast tea. I let it steep too long because I had nowhere to be.

The kitchen window faced the dock.

I had not looked at the dock since I'd arrived. I had been very busy not-looking. I had been busy turning on the gas, opening the windows on the side of the house that wasn't the dock side, and reading the appliance manuals for the generator in the shed, which was older than I was and had not been serviced since my grandmother died. I had been busy in the way a person is busy when she does not want to do the thing she came to do.

I came here to think. That was what I had told them.

I had told my mother, on a Sunday afternoon in March, sitting in the dining room of the house I had grown up in, with my hands flat on the table because I could not trust them to stay still. I had told my brother Will the same thing twenty minutes later, on the porch, and Will had not believed me but had nodded anyway. I had told Adam, my fiancé, in the hallway of our apartment on a Wednesday night, with the bathroom light still on, and Adam had said, I understand you need space, like I had asked for time off work, and I had let him say it because the words were a door he was holding open for me and I needed to walk through.

That was eleven weeks ago.

I had told no one — not Will, not my mother, not Adam, not even myself, in the kind of sentence that had a subject and a verb — about the bachelorette party.

I drank my tea by the window. The tide was halfway out. The dock was a long shadow across pale water. The pilings were wearing their barnacle-jewelry, which my grandmother had called the ocean's gold-leaf, and which Lou Whitford from two doors down had called the truth about boats. I had not been to the dock. I had not even pretended I was going to the dock. The dock was patient. The dock could wait until I was ready, which would be never, which was fine.

A car door closed.

I looked.

It closed at the cottage two doors down. The road was four houses long and two of them were empty, which meant the closed car door belonged to either someone who had bought a house I did not know was for sale, or someone renting. I knew the cottages were rented out in the summer. I had not asked Renee at the store who had taken which one. I had not asked because if I had asked, the answer would have been a specific person, and a specific person would have meant I would have to consider the specific person, which I had not been willing to do.

The woman at the trunk had dark hair braided down her back. Sun-browned arms. A pale linen shirt that was wrinkled the way clothes are wrinkled after a six-hour drive. She was lifting a cooler down from the trunk and her hands knew the weight of it, which meant she had packed it and lifted it before, and she set it on the gravel without dropping it.

She did not look toward my house.

I knew the line of her shoulders. I knew the way she tilted her head when she was about to lift something. I knew the back of her neck where her hair was pulled up, and I knew, even from a hundred and forty feet, the exact width of her collarbones under the linen.

I let the curtain fall.

I stood with my hand on the curtain and my forehead against the kitchen window and I closed my eyes and I asked myself the question I had been asking myself since I had told Adam I needed space, which was: what am I avoiding by calling off the wedding — the wedding, or the question I asked myself the night before?

The night before, I had been on a balcony at the Whitcombe house in Wellesley, fingertips still cool from the champagne flute I had set down, watching a woman go back inside whose name I had said five times in fourteen months only inside my own head.

I stepped back from the glass.

The phone vibrated face down on the counter. I turned it over without picking it up. The screen lit:

Mom (5).

I let it ring. I waited for the buzz to finish. The kettle, which I had turned off, made a small ticking sound as it cooled.

The kettle could wait. The voicemail could wait. The dock could wait. The boxes could wait. I had come here, I had told everyone, to think.

I walked back to the curtain.

I opened it.

The cottage two doors down had its lights on now. The trunk was closed. The driver had gone inside. There was a navy thermos on the gravel, where she had set it down to lift the cooler, and as I watched, she came back out of the cottage and walked to the gravel and picked it up. She did not look toward my house. She did not look at the dock. She held the thermos in both hands the way you hold something you have driven six hours with.

She went back inside.

I let the curtain fall.

My phone was still buzzing. I could hear my grandmother's kettle ticking. I could hear the tide going out, a small wet retreat below the dock. I could hear my own breath, which was a sound I had not heard in eleven weeks because I had been too busy listening for the sound of the door Adam had opened for me.

I watched it ring out.

The screen went dark, and then I walked to the curtain and I opened it, and I left it open, which was more than I had been willing to do five minutes ago. The dock was a shadow. The dock was patient. The cottage two doors down had a navy thermos and a pale linen shirt and a woman whose name I had been refusing to say out loud since March.

I had come here, I had told them all, to think.

I was beginning to suspect I had come here, instead, to stop pretending I knew how.