"Nobody's taller than me!"

"Max said he'd take me back to the car," Fred said, "I'm on the six o'clock shuttle from Boston so I've got to get going."

"Wait," Rose said. "You can't stay? Even for a little?"

"Mom, watch me jump!" said Ben.

"No jumping! Come here, Ben." She grabbed him by the back of the life jacket.

"Do you want me to stay?"

At that moment, on that dock, with the kids and the water and the boats and the sunlight, she didn't want him out of her life. Their life. "I want you to be home when we get home on the weekend. Back home to Brooklyn. Is that okay?"

"That's good, Rose. Really good."

"I gotta take this thing off, Mom!" Bea said. She was unbuckling her life vest.

"Life jackets on till we're off the dock."

"Come say good-bye, kids," Fred said. "I'll see you in a few days."

"Bye, Dad," Bea said and blew him a kiss. Ben had already strewn his life jacket on the dock and had commandeered a wheelbarrow up on the path to the cottages.

Max had started up the ferry engine. "I better go. I'll be home, Rosie. Come home soon," Fred said.

The ferry cast off. If Bea hadn't been clinging to her leg and Ben hadn't been in danger of tipping himself over in a wheelbarrow, she might have jumped onto the boat too.

She watched it leave, and waved. Fred waved back.

"Don't worry, Mommy," Bea said. "Daddy's okay."

"Thanks, you," said Rose. She buried her face in Bea's now half-purple hair. "Let's go see the others. I'll take you up in the wheelbarrow. Ben! Be careful!"

To her great surprise, Rose felt much better about Caroline once her kids were there, especially since Bea took such a shine to her and because Robert let Ben bash away on a very old guitar. It was hard not to like someone who obviously liked her kids. At night Ethan and Ben and Bea, plus assorted island kids who had been demanding sleepovers, slept in the boys' dormitory, like a den of puppies. Caroline told them stories in her thrilling voice, and Robert sang medieval lullabies accompanied by his lute.

"Better than Hogwarts," Lottie said.

Beverly spent his last week on the island coaxing the cat, whom he'd named Abigail, onto the lawn of the cottage and from there to the porch. Even if he wasn't ready to have a pet yet, she was comforting to have around. Rose learned from another parent that Abigail was one of a litter of cats that had been born under mysterious circumstances. Her mama cat, presumed dead early in the season, had actually been hiding out in the old boathouse and had had enough company there to give birth in early June. "So the pedigree is impeccable," said Beverly. "Little Lost Islanders through and through."

Once Abigail was willing to be touched, Jon took her (kicking and screaming) to the vet in the Harbor, who fixed her up with shots and pronounced her healthy.

"We can't leave her here over the winter, can we?" said Beverly as they took the ferry back to the island. "She wouldn't survive alone."

"No, I don't think she would," said Jon, and that was settled.

Robert had emerged from the third floor long enough to arrange for someone to close up the cottage when they all left on Saturday. The end of the summer.

"We better go home soon, Mommy," Ethan said. "Ben and I have to start being friends at home too. I told him he could go to my school."

"And I want to take care of Abigail! She needs me!" said Bea.

"Oh, so this is how it happens," said Rose. "Children and animals."

"They always upstage one," said Caroline.

"No one upstages you," said Robert.

"Someone, please stop him," said Jon.

"Oh not yet, not yet," said Caroline.

"Turns out," Robert said, "she likes the gawpers."

"Only if they're you," Caroline said.

August 31 was their last day. Robert said they were all welcome to stay longer, but Labor Day loomed, so there was school to get back to and co-op shifts to make up, and books to turn in and movie scripts to read. The weather urged them home too. It was as if the island were conspiring in the end of the season: the night came much earlier; the fog didn't lift in the morning; some of the leaves on the trees were starting to turn red. The pull of real life was strong and, by now, almost welcome. Not that they were tired of the magic of Hopewell Cottage; just that they wanted to take some of it back with them, and try it on for size at home.

The trash and bottles gathered, the food all out of the fridge, the laundry mostly done, the duffle bags dragged out to the island truck-they were ready. Fred and Jon got into the back with the kids and the bags. Robert squeezed next to Warren, Max's second in command. Rose and Lottie and Caroline would walk down with Beverly, who toted Abigail in a snazzy little cat carrier they'd found at an antique store.

"One picture of us all!" said Lottie. "Before we disappear to the four winds!"

"Can you take it, Warren?" Robert asked.

Warren agreed.

"We should take it on the cottage steps," said Robert.

"On the truck! On the truck!" said Ben.

"On the truck!" repeated Ethan.

"On the truck it is," said Robert. They gathered around the flatbed, the Roses, the Carolines, the Lotties, and Beverly with his Abigail.

"Say cheese!" said Warren. They said cheese; the picture was taken. Warren started up the motor. "Meet you at the dock!" said Robert, and the truck rumbled downhill.

Caroline, Beverly, Lottie, and Rose remained in the quiet left behind by the truck's noisy engine. They stood in front of the cottage for a moment, all of them lost in thought. With all the windows closed and the porch empty of towels and books and swept clean, it looked so serene.

"There are about a thousand things I didn't do," said Rose.

"We never went to Bar Harbor," said Lottie.

"Or climbed Cadillac Mountain," said Rose. "And we didn't get to Monhegan. I didn't finish my dissertation. Or even make a start. But I will."

"Did we have lobster rolls?" asked Caroline. Beverly couldn't pinpoint exactly when Rose and Caroline had started speaking to each other again, but he was glad they had. "Oh, right-way back at the beginning of the month. It seems like that happened last year. Beverly's the only one who accomplished what he came to do."

"But we will accomplish what we need to do. I see it."

"You know what, Lottie?" Rose said. "I actually see it too."

"It's yours now," Lottie said to Caroline. "Hopewell Cottage."

"It's hardly mine," said Caroline, as she put a hand on the stair railing. "But I do like Robert a lot."

"Yes, we've picked that up," said Beverly. "My room was directly under your love nest, and I'm not completely deaf."

"Let's cut some of those flowers," said Caroline, changing the subject, "to take home with us. A little piece of the island. Zinnias, right?"

"Zinnias, indeed. Pretty," said Beverly.

"To go with our sea glass and shells and smelly seaweed," said Rose. "We are taking practically a metric ton of the island back with the twins."

"A little more won't hurt," said Caroline. She dug in her shorts and found Robert's pocketknife. She smiled. "Remember when we looked at these the first day, Beverly?" She bent over and started cutting. "The red ones are gone but there are new ones now. Orange."

"Orange?" said Beverly. "I would have called them persimmon."

September.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

The East Seventeenth Street place felt so small and so dark and dirty when Robert got home. His bags and shoes and fleeces from Maine crowded the front entryway. He'd need to get that food into the fridge. And some of the shirts were damp and would have to be taken out of their plastic bags, pronto.

But not yet.

Robert went over to his pigeonhole desk, which took up too much space in his living room/dining room/kitchen. It was the one thing he had taken from Hopewell for his apartment, a little piece of Little Lost in the big city.

He reached into one of the cubbies. Not there. Tried another. Aha.

He drew out a stack of index cards. "The Rule of Robert's Sign," he said. And he tore them into very small pieces, one by one.

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