a moment in the day: race

I take a break from working on designing a book cover to go downstairs and do some dishes.

Go into the bathroom, where I've been doing dishes during the kitchen renovation, slink back the shower curtain to find the plates, spoons, and glasses soaking in an old cat box. Before I get to work, I pull out an ear bud and stick it in my ear. Audio is kind of the only way I have time to read books these days because when I'm not at the day job, it's book cover, book cover, book cover. Moving fonts around, building things from pixels.

Sometimes I listen to podcasts, and that's what I listen to now as I soap up bowls and run them under the shower faucet. 

The podcast is about a guy building a startup with no human employees at all, only AI "agents."

I listen to him in a Zoom meeting talking with his "employees." He asks them what they did on their weekend. Between segments, music plays, and I wonder if the song was written by AI, performed by AI, sung by AI.

How many years do I have left of designing book covers, this thing I love to do, before AI is doing it all, before my clients are all gone? Ten? Five? Two?

I leave the dishes in another cat box to dry and go back upstairs again. This is why I take every design job I can get my hands on, work all the time, read my books through my ears. Well, it's also a good thing to make money when you're renovating a kitchen and you don't feel too confident about that day job (looming recession, struggling industry, AI, AI, AI), but also:

"I'm racing against the clock." 

It pops out of my mouth as I get to the top of the steps. And it's melodramatic but it's also true. I'm racing against the clock to do this as much as I have the privilege to do this, before it's too late.

I sit back down at my computer. On the screen, built out of pixels, is an image of a clock.

Book covers: 7.13 Second Editions

Recently I had an interesting project. 7.13 Books, one of my favorite indie presses, decided to reissue four of their earlier releases. The books had come out in 2020 but then had been "orphaned," as publisher Leland Cheuk put it, when the distributor Small Press Distribution went out of business. Here's an article about that closing from LitHub.

The books are Misery Boy by Rose Servis, Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox, Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt, and Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick. I designed Beth's original cover, and other designers created the other covers.

The challenge here was to come up with a cohesive look for the series and to then honor the original designs while I created something new for each.

Leland was interested in something similar to classic Europa Editions...

or New York Review of books...

So first I played with what that basic layout would be. I liked the way frames are used in both the Europa and NYRB series. With NYRB, the frame contains all the relevant text; for Europa, it's an elegant white frame bordering the whole. Musing on the four original 7.13 books, I was inspired by looking at the Misery Boy cover, with the thought of creating a frame for the artwork that the artwork could then breach. Like the smoke coming up from The Thinker. Something like [cobbling it together quickly using the original artwork] this:

With a logo stamp for the Second Editions using the 7.13 Books logo. And all text staying outside the frame.

Or, no, what if the artwork were even more contained, like this:

I liked the idea of a chunky font and frame in black against a cream colored background, with a lot of (cream-colored) white space. But I also experimented with a white frame and text against a colored background. I sent Leland a very simplified example of what I was thinking.

He liked black on cream best too so I moved forward with that. My idea was that I would take some element from each original cover to use in the new one, to honor that original artwork. The Thinker from Misery Boy and the Golden Gate Bridge from Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society lent themselves to my design well, so I started with them. 

I built myself a new Thinker

And a new bridge.

That took a while.

Coincidentally, I had already built the Golden Gate Bridge when I was experimenting with the original cover of Edie on the Green Screen...

...before Beth asked if we could pivot to a different San Francisco landmark for her cover because she had already had the Golden Gate Bridge on one of her other books (it's a popular bridge). But that version of the bridge, with its different angle, didn't work well with my frame. There wasn't enough of it to break out of the frame. So I built a new one.

For creating my scene for the new cover of Edie on the Green Screen, I decided to scrap the landmarks in favor of Edie's profession. From the publisher description of the book:

In late '90s San Francisco, Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city's alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn't changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium's end are long gone... 

I decided to put Edie behind the bar, with the bartop being the element that breaches the frame. I pictured her as being very over it, and built both a silhouette version, as on the original cover, and a non-silhouette version, using the description of the character from the book. Dirty blond chin-length hair, tee-shirt and jeans.

Leland and Beth preferred the silhouette version, so that's what we went with. Green screen intact.

For the longest time I didn't know what to do about Each of Us Killers. How to pull out a central image from the conglomeration on the original cover, each of which felt like it wanted to be there? The cool thing about this original cover is that the grouping of seemingly random figures paired with the title says more than the sum of its parts. 

Then I thought, maybe I could do a variation on my original idea in which I have not one but a handful of frames. And each figure sits inside a frame.  

I built a yoga woman.

An auto-wallah.

A man at a computer.

A woman working in a field.

When Leland liked what he saw and sent the samples to the authors, Jenny requested that we remove the field worker in favor of the bartender. I had originally avoided that figure because I had a bartender in the new Edie on the Green Screen cover. But I knew that wasn't as important as it was in my head, so I got a new figure and some new bottles going based on the ones in the Each of Us Killers originals.

In the end, we had four new covers that hearken back to their originals, and a set that works together.

Misery Boy by Rose Servis

Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox

Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick

Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt

All four reissues are available for preorder now. You can find them on Bookshop here:

Misery Boy by Rose Servis

Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox

Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick

Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt

They will officially be out on July 13. More information on 7.13 Books, a wonderful press "by authors, for authors," is here.

Book Cover: If I Go Quiet

One of my winter projects has been the cover to the novel If I Go Quiet, from The Portland Murder series by MM Desch. This series is described as, "a collection of novels and novellas that weaves together intricate plots of psychological suspense and criminal investigation. Set primarily against the atmospheric backdrops of Portland, Oregon, and Durango, Colorado, the series delves into complex themes of corruption, betrayal, and the dark undercurrents of human relationships."

For this project, I was hired by, and worked directly with, the author to bring to life her vision of a third cover after Tangled Darkness...

and Lethal Loyalty...

...two covers that I didn't design but which we knew we should emulate—especially Tangled Darkness, as the story in If I Go Quiet follows the same protagonist, psychiatrist Leslie Schoen, as she goes undercover to investigate a murder at a remote wellness retreat, where the treatment is not necessarily wellness...

Working with Mary (known to her readers as MM Desch) has been great, because she's very savvy and knows what she wants but is open to experimentation. Her first idea was of a small, cramped room where a boy is being kept against his will. She gave me specific information: dim lighting coming from LED strips, a thin mattress against the wall where the boy lies. I started to do image searches, but it was difficult to find what I wanted. Particularly the right kind of small, cramped room. When I went back to ask some clarifying questions about the space, she said:

"I've been thinking about another idea for the book cover, Gigi. What do you think about — A ceramic urn sitting on a stone bench with steam rising, the vapor forming a barely-visible skull shape. — the background is ... Fog threading through Douglas firs at dusk, a single lit window visible deep in the trees."

I went back to my image search, this time looking for different things, the foggy firs, the urn, the stone bench. I left the prospect of creating a skull out of steam for later. I didn't know how I was going to do that. I do like doing things that I don’t know how to do. That's part of why I enjoy cover design, to be honest. But yeah, I wasn’t exactly sure how to make it happen and how to make it look good.

So I started with the forest. I found an image I really liked on Pexels. I loved the slant of the trees, and the layers.

On the same site, I found an image that had a window that I liked, courtesy of Maria Shikhireva.

I took both images and went to work in Photoshop to, first, darken my forest, and then nestle my window into the foggy firs. That's easier said than done. If I were adding a house on top of my fogscape, it would be a much simpler task, but I needed to make it look like that window was hiding in the trees and fog. After the first step...

...I decided I needed more than the window. There had to be a hint of structure around it to make it look realistic. So I added a bit of facade from a different photo of a building, laying that behind the window and erasing meticulously until it looked like the building was behind the tree to its left...

...and then added more trees in the foreground. I did that by taking some clip art of trees, removing the background, and fiddling with the color and darkness and feather in Photoshop until I could lay them on top of my structure and make them blend in as if photographic trees in the same woods.

Then I got started on my urn. 

I was surprised how difficult it was to find an urn. Or. One thing you find out about urns when you start looking for pictures of urns is that urns can be kind of any type of vessel. Containers for ashes, ornamental vases, receptacles for brewing or serving coffee or tea. Lots of things are called urns, and a whole range comes up when you do an image search with that word. I asked Mary what specific type of urn she wanted and she sent me a couple examples.

Here's some of what you get when you try looking up urns through sites with images available for creative and commercial use.

OK, yes, I saved those images. Sometimes when I'm doing an image search I get so frustrated by not finding what I want that I save a bunch of stuff I know won't work, just for the hell of it.

But I made a document with the better urns I'd found, which I sent to Mary to look through. In there, I did some cutting and pasting of a few of the pictures to show her how I could, if I spent some time in Photoshop, make the images look more urnlike.

Happily, she liked some of what I had and chose two favorites. I took to Photoshop to turn the image on the left to the image on the right.

And to turn the image on the left to the image on the right.

Then I found a stone bench for the urn to sit on, which Mary liked, and I started to put my scene together. The last step in that scene, outside of the text, was, of course, the skull made of steam. I started with an actual skull. I removed the background and brightened it up until it was white. Then I erased the dark areas like the eye- and nose-holes, the spaces between the teeth.

Then manipulated it with the smudge tool and the eraser tool. I left my steam skull with its face a little slanty so that it didn't look too perfect. 

For the type treatment, I stuck close to Tangled Darkness. It was fun to experiment with different colored backgrounds and text and dark overlays. I sent Mary some samples.

I don't remember why I started with the one urn, but when Mary came back with feedback, she said she'd like me to try using the second urn, because she liked the texture and the wider lip. She also said she was rethinking the skull. That it might be looking too Halloweeny. 

I liked that take and went back in to simplify my skull into a simple wisp of steam. At the same time, Mary was working on writing a tagline, so when I updated my layout, I added a line of text to hold space for that. 

More experimenting with color.

I sent more samples. Meanwhile, Mary had finalized her tagline and sent that my way. And she asked for more steam coming from the urn. 

And finally I hit my stride in the steam department. With more work with the smudge and eraser tools and layering different snippets on top of each other, I was able to take my steam from skull to wisp to something I was suddenly really excited about. 

And with my new steam and Mary's new tagline, and as we narrowed down what we liked best, we finally landed on our cover.

If I Go Quiet comes out officially today, January 27. Mary tells me that in honor of that, the ebook of Tangled Darkness is available for just 99 cents. And watch for If I Go Quiet to drop to 99 cents as well by the weekend.

More info on If I Go Quiet and all of Mary's books can be found on the author's website here. And here's a taste from the opening of the book:

Sunday, May 5th—Afternoon

Leslie Schoen’s finger traced a line on the toxicology report. Fentanyl, 60 ng/mL. Enough to stop a heart in seconds. She flipped the page, avoiding the smiling graduation photo of the dental hygienist. Twenty-three. No chance for naloxone. No chance.

Across the kitchen table, Izzy Turner shook a bottle of prenatal vitamins, the pills rattling like dice in a cup. Golden afternoon light slanted through the window, catching the amber plastic and illuminating the scattered medical documents with a honey-colored beam.

An early May morning left dampness on their outside patio. The wisteria leaves draping their pergola dripped occasionally. Only in Portland, Oregon, could a rainy start to the day make spring even more vibrant. Azaleas in red, salmon, and purple sparkled at the rear of their backyard, in contrast with the warm burnt orange and cream accents of their kitchen.

“Iron makes me queasy in the afternoons now.” Izzy set the bottle aside and reached for the DHA supplements. “Baby’s getting particular about timing.”

Leslie glanced up from the autopsy photos. Izzy’s face existed in a different universe from the stark black-and-white. Her wavy, blonde hair tumbled to her shoulders, framing the creaminess of her face. Warmth radiated from her skin—a brightness that defied the exhaustion pulling at the corners of her eyes. Leslie had once dismissed the “pregnancy glow” as a cliché, but there it glowed, luminous in the afternoon light.

“Try taking them with dinner instead. The protein might help.”

“Already tried that.” Izzy sorted the bottles by size, creating neat rows on the placemat. “This one’s opinionated about everything. Just like their mother.”

The front door burst open, hitting the wall hard enough to rattle the framed botanical prints in the hallway.

“Izzy! Leslie!” Brad’s voice carried an edge that froze Leslie’s hand over the case file. Her father-in-law never barged into their Grant Park neighborhood home—until now.

He appeared in the kitchen doorway, touching the frame three times—index finger, palm, thumb—his unconscious ritual when stressed. Gray hair stuck up at odd angles—evidence of anxious hands raking through it. His leather jacket hung open, shirt untucked on one side.

“William’s missing.”

Izzy’s hand slipped. The vitamin bottle clattered to the floor, pills scattering across the hardwood.

“What are you talking about?” She gripped the table edge, knuckles white.

“Four days. His girlfriend called me a couple hours ago. He told her he planned to attend some wellness center for the weekend, left Thursday night. Haven’t heard from him since.”

Typical William. The thought arrived before Leslie could stop it, sharp and automatic. Always disappearing, always—

She caught herself mid-judgment, guilt twisting in her chest. Her brother-in-law wasn’t some case file to categorize and dismiss. He belonged to her family. Their unborn child’s uncle.

“Did she try calling there?” Leslie bent to gather the spilled vitamins, needing something to do with her hands.

“That’s the thing.” Brad paced to the window above the sink, back to the table. “Place called Ascension Grove, up in the West Hills. They claim he checked out Friday morning. Said he seemed fine, mentioned heading to the coast.”

“But he didn’t go there?” Izzy’s voice stayed level. Her hand moved to her belly, fingers splayed protectively.

“His car’s still in their parking lot. I alerted them anyway. Claimed they never noticed.”

Book Cover: The Sea-Glass Shore

Back when I learned that Forest Avenue Press had acquired a novel about a selkie, I had a quick vision of designing a cover that would depict that mythical creature. But Julie Salmon Kelleher's The Sea-Glass Shore isn't a straight-up fantasy. It's a literary novel with a hint of otherworld. Sure, Rona is a selkie. But the book is really about family, about identity, about the longings we all have for the life we leave behind when we make big choices. 

Here's from the current description from the publisher:

When Jack, librarian and curator of legends, meets Rona, she puts aside her sealskin to live as his human wife. Jack knows all selkie stories end the same: the seal-woman always finds her stolen skin and leaves. But he hasn’t stolen Rona’s skin, and they both believe their relationship is different. He doesn’t need to be that guy. She doesn’t need to run. But as their children grow into troubled teens, Jack and Rona begin falling into roles they’ve sworn to put aside. 

Most selkie stories are about the beginning or the end, but this one is about the middle. How do you live with a family past of people disappearing into the sea? How do you avoid the same wrong act everyone has committed before you? And what is love—for a child, a spouse, a mortal world—in the face of history?

Every author who signs with Forest Avenue Press gets an Author Questionnaire to fill out, and one of the questions on the survey is, Would you like to make any suggestions or special requests about the book to the editors, designers, or salespeople? An idea that Julie suggested for this designer was to explore the visual theme of a small figure in a big landscape.

The landscape where the story takes place is coastal Washington, and Julie based Rona's cove on two specific spots:

Teddy Bear Cove

And Larrabee State Park

Julie shared a few examples of small-figure-in-big-landscape covers.

I particularly like this one, for Yangtze Choo's The Fox Wife.

For The Sea-Glass Shore, there were a few angles we could take with this concept. It could be Rona alone in the big landscape, or the family of four together, or the landscape could even be an underseascape, and the figure a seal.

I started looking at pictures online of families standing on the shore. I had an image in my head of the four figures—Rona, her husband Jack, and their two kids—maybe in silhouette, their backs to the viewer. They'd be close together, enjoying the waterside in a huddle, but mother Rona would be stepped off just a little from the others. Still close, still touching, maybe with a hand on one other's shoulder or back, but turned away, looking out into the bay. Togetherness with a tension of longing for something else.

But in my image search, I wasn't finding quite the positions I wanted. When I tried to superimpose my imaginary family on the photos I'd collected of Larrabee State Park and Teddy Bear Cove, they weren't meshing well from a layout perspective. At the same time I gave the seal-in-the-sea idea a try. It was one of Julie's thoughts, and I liked it. I built a half-above-half-below-water scene with a seal and waves of bull kelp. A big sky for the title. It was turning out... OK. As a flat illustration it was too simple, too... friendly. The seascape needed more details. I already thought that whatever layout I landed on, I'd take the flat art and turn it into something more dimensional with shading and nuance, but as I played around with this concept, I found I was losing interest.

I did up a sample or two.

That above-the-waterline landscape, by the way, is from a video of Larrabee State Park that was in a link Julie sent us. I watched that video, starting and stopping, taking screenshots when I liked the angle. Which, I'll admit, is a lot of dedication to theme for a few shapes of land that could be in any part of the sea.

I should pause and say something about color, here. Back before the concepting even began, publisher Laura Stanfill and I talked about having the colorway for this cover be sea-glass colors. In fact, when she and I were in Spokane, Washington, for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association trade show last fall, we happened past a window displaying big wind chimes in sea-glass colors, and she said, there! Those are the colors for Julie's cover! 

They were a good choice conceptually, but they also were colors that worked beautifully with Julie's author photo (which I'll keep to myself for now in case she decides to use something else when the time comes). Those blues and greens with hints of white and a salmony orange. I kept that array in mind throughout the whole concepting process for The Sea-Glass Shore. But those same colors were part of why the seal-under-the-sea design wasn't working for me. Not the colors alone, but the way they worked within the whole. The brightness of the colors, the prominence in the layout of the seal (seals are so cute), the fluffy clouds and sun, it all made the design too buoyant to me.

And I could adjust the colors, tone down the mood, add details and dimension to the seascape, take the illustration from flat to dimensional with texture and shading—there was lots I could do to turn it from a simple, scrappy design to something better—but I was also aware that my seascape could be anywhere. Sure I could research the specific aquatic flora and fauna (can you call fish fauna?) of that area of Washington, but to the untrained eye, it's just going to look like a scene under the sea. 

At the same time as I pondered these things, I kept coming back to the idea of Rona by herself in the big landscape. And specifically a suggestion I'd been given about using an early scene in the book of a young Rona sitting on a rock in the cove, just out of the water, contemplating the wonder and danger of being in the above-sphere. Here's a tiny piece:

Don’t fall in love.

She’s heard those words each time she’s come ashore. To her they’re part of this world of cloud and stone, an echo of alarm. She sinks her hand deep, deep down into the fur skin she holds folded in her lap. The fur is dense and silk and the color of every beautiful colorless thing in the world. Water. Starlight. Phosphorescence. The mist on those evergreen hills.

And the other thing that I kept coming back to is this photograph of Teddy Bear Cove.

That rock down at the end, dipping into the water, not the tiny one at the very end, but the one just before it. Wouldn't that be the perfect spot for Rona to perch all alone in her big new world?

So I pivoted. And started building that cove. Starting with lines.

Then filling in with solid color. Not necessarily the shades I'd be using in the end, but just a starting color scheme as I created my solid shapes.

Sketching Rona out the same way.

I made a thick band of water using wavy strips of different shades of green. Here's a screenshot showing it in Illustrator, when I'd pulled those strips all together into one layer and laid that over the top of the 6" x 9" area that would eventually be not only Rona's cove but her cover. On the right you can see some color variations I was playing with and then the many layers in the file.

Once I had my cove with land and sea and sky, I added Rona on her perch. And I stole my seal from the earlier design and experimented with where that might go. I wasn't sure whether Laura and Julie would want a seal in the scene or not, so I experimented with a few layouts with and without the seal, with and without a line of trees, tried some different type treatments.

I was still being a little too literal with our idea of using all sea-glass colors in the design. The salmon in particular—there was something in the back of my mind that said it wasn't quite working, but I felt like I needed a warm color to offset the blues and greens, so even though white was standing out better for the title and author name, I kept trying shades of salmon. 

No, not because of the author's name. Or was there something subconscious going on?

When I sent my first samples to Laura, she zeroed in on the color too. She liked the design and its various iterations but said the bright blue of the sky and the salmon of the lettering made the cover look more tropical than Pacific Northwest. She said, "I wonder about making the sky more gray, or the clouds more rainclouds, to earn the salmon colored font. Like, if that was gray or gray-blue background, the salmon wouldn't conjure Florida or whatever."

And I swear my brain went, I could make the sky gray? Like somehow I'd decided I couldn't. That the sea had to be green and the sky blue. What does it say about me that I kept myself confined in this sea-glass box? Laura and I talked about layout and lettering and details, and for the next pass, I stretched my colors, trying a gray sky, a gray-blue, even another shade of green. Straight gray looked strange, but I liked the gray-blue.

Did that gray-blue earn the salmon-colored font? Did sticking with greens in subtle variations create a nicer effect?

I sent a handful more samples to Laura... 

...and she sent some on to Julie, including one or two of the seal-under-the-sea design. Happily, Julie really liked the Rona-on-the-rock concept, and she chose her favorite of the samples.

Our discussion during the refining process sealed the deal (alright, I did not mean that pun but I'm keeping it) on doing away with the salmon. It was still reading as tropical. Julie said the clouds in the Salish Sea tend to be more layered than puffy, so I went back in to update those. She also said that Rona is race-neutral and the figure on the cover is very white, so we tried some different skin tones. 

She was glad that Rona on her rock didn't mimic the famous image of The Little Mermaid, something she'd worried about when suggesting that scene for cover imagery, but "there’s still the potential for it to read as 'girl and her animal friend,'" so I tinkered with the seal in the water. That seal was a holdover from my earlier design, one that Laura had even said looked like it was smiling. I had selected the photo of that particular seal in my early image search because of the position of the body and the clarity of the picture, which would make it easier to reproduce, but yes, it's a particularly cute and friendly seal. I liked what Julie had to say when we asked her for her thoughts on adjusting the seal:

"I think part of the issue is the sparkle in the eye. I'll paste a link below with a good opening photograph where the eyes look almost vacant and fathomless—more alien, more depths of the sea. You don't know what they're thinking."

More alien, more depths of the sea.

And, "Seals really are plump but they're also just big and sprawling, and from some angles their heads are almost elongated. If you scroll down past the tearing-up meat photos at the link (how's that for not-cute? 😄), there are a couple of photos of longer heads above the water."

The link was really helpful—and actually, one of the things I had wanted to tinker with, which I hadn't gotten around to yet, was the angle of the seal's head. I had wanted to position my seal as I had in the layout because of the way it interacted with the placement of the author's name, but in simply plopping my original seal into that position, I ended up with its head angled in a way that looked kind of like it was looking at Rona... but not really. 

So I drew out and then filled in a new seal head... 

...that I could drop into my design with the updated clouds and skin tone.

They liked my changes and now it was time to transform the flat art into something dimensional. We also removed the stand-in blurb and gave it a stand-in tagline. 

Shading

Texture and detail

Can you see any of that? Sheesh, this old blog. Let's zoom in a bit.

And here comes our final. When blurbs are decided on, we'll move that tagline to the back and put a blurb up top, filling that space better. And I may tinker a bit with the finer detail before we go to press. But I've enjoyed spending this time in Rona's cove.

The Sea-Glass Shore will be out this fall. More information is on the Forest Avenue Press site here. More on Julie Salmon Kelleher is here. And here is a taste of the novel:

“Memory’s odd. There’s a lot of research on it. I could—I could find you a book, if you like. Do you want—”

“Thank you. But I wouldn’t know where to put it.” A book. Jack could find her a book. They stand at the edge of the sea, and you could chase the sun across that open space your whole life long and never catch it. No wonder she can’t remember so much space—more than anyone can ever hold, and in the face of all of that? He would give her a book.

Imagine seeing the world that way: sorting everything you know onto pages and shelves. Ridiculous. Except that Rona has fingers, hands. And what are they for, if not to gather and sort out everything there is to know?

Like Jack would gather it. Like Jack would teach her.

It’s obvious.

He won’t keep her from falling. Jack is as lost as she. Wherever he stands he will always see those trains he hasn’t taken: all those things he can’t understand but will reach for all the same. That’s why he’s what she needs. If you’re going to fall, you want to be with someone who understands falling.

Someone who will know how you should be caught.

“It’s a pretty bay,” she says.

He looks to the water and shrugs, his shoulders a frame, a holding place against the sky. “I could have done worse than end up here,” he says.

Don’t fall in love. But she is falling in love, has fallen, can’t even remember when it was she fell. There was a shore. An edge to the sea. A line that marked the difference between one thing and the next and she has crossed it recklessly, and she is reckless still. It doesn’t matter if she is afraid. “It’s pretty here,” she says. “But the cove where I first met you is prettier.”

He moves his eyes to hers and she can feel the air come swiftly in his giving and taking it. The space between them shifts. Everything shifts on the shore: Once, this whole marina was underwater. Every moment slips away and another takes its place, and she knows already she’ll never grasp as much as she desires. Everything changes. But Jack looks at her like she is the place where all of it begins.

He says, “All right.”