The nightgown belonged to his mother, Bernice, who had died of a quiet heart attack three months prior, clutching a laminated photo of Leo’s daughter, Sophie. Sophie lived two hundred miles away with her mother, who had remarried a man who sold MRI machines. Leo wasn’t allowed within five hundred feet of a school or a park or a photograph of a child under twelve. The restraining order, now expired, had become a habit of absence.
“And are you?”
Leo stood up, brushed the sand off his pants, and for the first time in a year, smiled. Not the manic grin of a man talking to a crayfish. Something smaller. Something human. bay crazy