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and I need to get home to—”
    Emma came far enough down the staircase to make eye contact…serious, motherly, no-nonsense eye contact. “I chased Joe into the guest room five minutes ago. He’s asleep. Don’t make me chase you into your room, too.”
    Not wanting to upset Emma, Faye did as she was told. As her eyes slid shut, she heard steps in the room next door as Emma walked from one end of the room to the other, paused at the window, then paced back. Sometimes, she paused in the middle of the room for no apparent reason. Or, rather, for a reason known only to her. Perhaps she was studying a carpet stain made when Douglass dropped a coffee cup. Or maybe she was surveying the king-sized bed where she would now be sleeping alone.
    After each pause, the deliberate steps began again, at the exact same tempo. This , Faye thought, is what it sounds like to be widowed.

Chapter Four
    When Faye woke, the glow of late afternoon sun was seeping in her window, and the footsteps in the master bedroom had gone quiet. She would rather eat dirt than wake Emma. Leaving a note on the kitchen table, she slipped out the back door. Joe was on the beach, watching the waves crash. He must have taken his ponytail down when he went to bed, because loose near-black hair played around his face, stirred by the sea wind.
    “I want to go home,” she said. “I want it bad.”
    “Got anything to eat out there?”
    “Peanut butter and bread. I’m out of honey.”
    “How long since you ate that ham sandwich the sheriff’s folks brought out?”
    “Um…”
    “You gotta eat, Faye. You should take better care of yourself than that.”
    Joe reached into the leather bag he wore at his waist and pulled out a handful of jerky. Faye took it, even though she had no notion of what kind of meat Joe had seasoned and desiccated and stored for just such an occasion. It probably wasn’t beef jerky, since Joe didn’t go around shooting cows with his handmade arrows. More likely, it was preserved venison or squirrel or rabbit. Regardless of which animal gave its all for this snack, it was unquestionably tasty. Joe was a man of many gifts, and one of those gifts was a pronounced knack for cooking.
    He rummaged around some more and fetched out some dried blackberries. Like the jerky, they were chewy but good. Faye wondered if Joe’s magic bag held something from every level of the USDA’s food pyramid.
    “This’ll keep you on your feet until we go back inside,” Joe said, adding some pecans to the pile of sustenance on Faye’s palm. “I did want to let Miss Emma sleep, though.”
    “Me, too. She needs a few minutes when she can forget everything.”
    Joe stared at her as if she’d said something idiotic. Faye couldn’t remember ever being on the receiving end of such a look from Joe.
    “Sleep isn’t for forgetting. That’s when the dreams come. The healing dreams. Miss Emma needs to sleep so she can know that everything’s gonna be okay.”
    Suddenly, Faye knew how Joe felt, constantly being treated like a remedial student by everyone around him. Lord, she hoped she didn’t do that to him often. When it came to spiritual matters, Joe possessed the equivalent of a Ph.D. Why did she keep forgetting that?
    Maybe she needed to spend more time dreaming.
    ***
    Faye didn’t know how long she’d sat with her head on Joe’s shoulder, watching the sea birds dive for fish. Something made her look over her shoulder—maybe some of Joe’s intuitive ways were rubbing off on her—and she saw Emma above them, leaning against the deck railing and staring at the self-same birds. The older woman’s face was sleepy and unlined, as if a few hours’ healing sleep had washed away whole years.
    She and Joe hurried up the wooden steps leading to Emma’s vantage point.
    Faye reached out a hand and touched Emma’s shoulder. “How do you feel?”
    “Like I’m living in a brand new world that I don’t like much.”
    “I’ve been thinking,” Faye blurted