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funerals where they’d seen each other for the past thirteen years, they’d stood in corners and talked long beyond the point of good manners. Afterward, she would always tuck the memories of those conversations away behind her heart as carefully as she had stored the worn dish towel.
    She started from the window seat to get the dish towel before she remembered that it had been lost in the fire. Grief, deeper and more scalding than she’d felt for her dishes and her quilts, made a shaking fist in her stomach. She hugged her knees and pressed her face against the soft cotton knit of her skirt.
    A few minutes later, she was able to take a deep breath. A few deep breaths. And laugh a little at herself. She’d been so self-congratulatory that she’d felt scarcely any need to mourn over the possessions claimed by the fire, yet she was brought to her knees by the loss of one threadbare dish towel.
    As though he could hear her thoughts, Ben looked up at the window where she sat. He waved, and she waved back. When he gestured—
come on down
—she didn’t hesitate, just slipped on the jeans and sweatshirt that had become her uniform and ran stocking footed down the back stairs of the B and B. She tiptoed past the closed door of Marce’s private quarters and stepped outside, stopping on the step to put on her shoes.
    When he came to stand in front of her while she tied her shoelaces, she looked up. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she blurted. “It was easy when I was the face and voice people knew at the law office and the woman who owned the duplex on Alcott Street.” She knew there were tears on her cheeks, and if she’d been talking to anyone besides Ben, she’d have been embarrassed by them. As it was, she just let them fall.
    “I wouldn’t have thought my house and job and taste in household items made me into the person I was, but now that they’re gone, I don’t know who’s left. It used to tick me off so much that I was only Sarah Rafael’s little sister or one of the McGuffey boys’ girlfriends, but at least I was somebody. I wasn’t invisible even to myself.” She drew in a sobbing breath. “I’m not even somebody’s mom.”
    Dirty Sally climbed into her lap and stood with her front paws on Kate’s chest to lick the salt from her face.
    “She still knows who you are,” said Ben. He knelt, his gaze meeting hers in the dusky blue light from the moon and the solar lights beside the porch steps. “We’re back in the same place as we were thirteen years ago, aren’t we, Kate? We’ve both lost who we were and we’re both worried about who we’re going to become.”
    She laughed, though it caught in her throat and sounded more like a sob. She supposed that was better than hysteria. “You want to go down to the tavern and break up? It was really horrible the first time, and I don’t understand even now why you did it, but it worked. We stayed broken up.”
    “No.” He smiled at her. “We just
made
up in the tavern the other day. Not that we were ever mad at each other—at least, I don’t think we were. But it’s time we created a new relationship. Call it something new and life changing, like friendship. What do you think?” His expression sobered. “Maybe then we can talk to each other at weddings and funerals without feeling guilty about it.”
    She frowned at him. She hadn’t felt guilty. Well, except while he was married. She’d still yearned for him, and coveting someone else’s husband wasn’t something she’d liked about herself. Later, when Ben’s younger brother Dylan told her the marriage was annulled, she hadn’t felt guilty anymore. Only sometimes, when the little flare of hope whooshed up under her breastbone and took her breath away. But she’d buried that quickly, stuffing it into a mental drawer that would have been labeled Denial if she’d been willing to give it that much thought.
    Kate loved her friends. She and Penny knew things about each other no one