The minute I step off the ferry and onto the dock in Nantucket, something in my bones shifts.

It’s that familiar, comforting knowing of coming home. That simple completeness of being in the place you feel most like yourself.

“Theo, my boy, welcome home.”

I look to my left and there is Chief Rite, the commander of the police force on the island and one of my father’s best friends. At sixty, he should probably retire, but he’s in such good shape and knows everything about this tiny, inclusive place that no one will argue his rank or position.

“Chief, it’s good to see you.” I stick out my hand, shouldering the backpack filled with a week’s worth of clothes and toiletries.

He’s probably on duty, just patrolling down here as a ferry’s worth of visitors unloads. There isn’t much crime on Nantucket, not anything more severe than shoplifting and drunken brawls, but he probably has his fair share of nonsense to deal with.

“And you. What brings you back? Is Imogen with you?” He looks around my body as if he might see her just stepping off the boat.

“Hey, Theo, good to see you!” Mary, the owner of the Black Dog Store just to the right of the dock, waves as she puts out her sign for the day.

I wave, and nod to Hugh, the tackle and bait store owner, who is opening up shop a few storefronts down.

This is my home, the place I grew up … these people are the ones I feel most comfortable with.

“Nope, just me. Wanted to come back to the cottage for the week, maybe fish, hit up a few of the local spots. I miss it here.” My expression sobers, I feel it.

Chief must see it too because his mouth turns down in a frown. “You all right?”

Looking out over the surf hitting the dock, and the boats moored just past the big, cylindrical wooden beams on the pier, I consider his simple question.

And answer honestly. I’m nothing if not honest. “I’m not. But I think being here will help as much as anything else could.”

He slaps a hand on my shoulder and nods, an unspoken agreement among men not to talk about it further. “Well, if you want to grab a drink, you know where to find me. Gosh, do you look like your old man. The bastard would be proud.”

With that, he walks off, onto whatever official duty he’s down at the docks to perform before I surprised him with my presence.

My heart aches at his last sentence. My father. My parents. Would they be proud? Would they have liked Imogen? Would they have been okay with the way my life had veered so severely off of the course they’d set theirs on?

My parents died about three years before I’d met her, and even though it had been nearly eight since I’d lost them, it was still difficult to talk about. Hell, even to think about.

I remember the day that the Chief had come to the site I’d been working on. He’d told me they’d drowned in a freak accident off the western part of the island, in clear daylight on a Wednesday in March. I’d dropped the nail gun I’d been working with right on my foot and hadn’t even felt it.

The days after their deaths, well, even the months after, were a blur. I drowned myself in whatever liquor I could afford, or find, and did nothing but work in silence among the crews I’d been hired on and get trashed at my house alone. I was an orphan, one with no siblings and no considerable extended family, at least none I’d ever met. It was kind of like my parents had found each other and run away to Nantucket, secluding themselves on the island and making its inhabitants their family.

Slowly, so slowly that it felt like I was gluing myself back together in pieces, those in our small community who had become like relatives helped to pull me out of the horrifying grief of losing my parents.

But as I walk through downtown, rent a motorcycle from the guy who owns the rental place now, who I happened to go to high school with, and drive the lonely roads out to my small house on the shores of my hometown … I can only think of them.

And Imogen, of course.

This was the place where we met. It had been our honeymoon nest in the early days of our relationship. How badly had I wished that my parents had been around to meet her, this girl of my dreams.

The bike rumbles under my thighs as I pull down the long gravel drive toward the sea. Toward the cottage that I saved up to get, the one I’d had my eye on since I was sixteen and finally owned ten years later. It was nothing to brag about, but it was sturdy and I could fall out of bed and onto my surfboard, so it was perfect to me.

My home was situated behind a forest of trees, nothing but a gravel road leading back to the cottage I’d called mine for so long. As soon as the trees broke, the house came into view, situated between thick bushes of hydrangea.

The gray-shingled house is up to Nantucket code although there are mansions on this island that are more than ten times the size of my cozy bungalow. I like it that way though, small, intimate … a place to get lost in the quiet nooks and crannies of the place.

Imogen’s favorite corner in the whole house had been the reading bench under the big bay window. I’d installed it myself years before we met. It faced directly out to sea, and if you sat there long enough, you could almost feel your body slowly rocking, like it did if you’d spent the entire day on deck.

“Jesus.” I shivered as I walked in.

Not just from the cold, but from the memories that assaulted me.

Imogen wrapped in the bedsheets, cooking breakfast.

The time I took her from behind over the couch, our bodies facing the ocean.

The patch of beach just outside the back door, where I’d proposed to her.

And not only memories of our life together, but those of my parents. They’d been so proud when I’d bought this place. I’d cooked them dinner the first Sunday that I’d moved in … and burned it so badly that we’d had to call for pizza.

I swear, I can smell my mother’s perfume now even though she hasn’t been in this house for almost a decade … and I haven’t been here in months.

Ghosts must be following me or making me move of their own accord, because I find myself at the entrance to the attic, climbing the steep stairs.

I haven’t been up here in ages, and what causes me to crack open a particular trunk can only be described as autopilot.

And before I know it, I’m elbow deep in thirty-year-old baby clothes and toys.

Do I think my marriage to Imogen would have lasted if we’d been able to bring a child into it? Well, yes. It was a simple, easy answer for a complicated, spiraling situation, but if we’d been able to have a baby when we’d wanted to almost four years ago, then yes. We would be together right now, raising that little boy or little girl. I can definitely say that.

Because that was the catalyst of our downfall. Not being able to get pregnant, the miscarriages, the IVF madness … it all buried us. The emotional turmoil that infertility causes wreaks havoc on a marriage.

I look at the box of baby things, the crate that’s been packed in my attack since the day I cleaned my parents’ house out and left for the last time. The overalls that I had worn. The book of nursery rhymes that my mother had pointed to every time she got nostalgic when I was growing up. Maybe I’d kept this, as unmanly as it sounds, because I thought that one day my mother would have wanted her grandchild to have these things.

I was back at square one again. An orphan, alone.

With no parents to console me, no child to save our marriage and no wife to love.