Excerpt from Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr Roberts, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That night, after the last weary, beer-logged lodger departed to his room, I chopped potatoes for the next morning's chowder, rinsed the starch from my hands, and retrieved the skeleton of the day's largest cod. Already I had picked the bones clean, and a dip in boiling water stripped the last bits away. As my thumbs pried apart the translucent vertebrae, I let my mind wander over the possibilities of life without Hosea. Nantucket was full of women widowed by the sea, left to keep shop with their mothers and sisters-in-law and cherub-cheeked children, but I could claim no kin on the island, and I would not claim the kin I had left. Hosea's parents were long dead, and though his relations doted upon him, I knew they saw me as a trifle of his fancy at best, a trespasser at worst, either way easily swept aside. I had nothing of my own. I could drift elsewhere as I had drifted to Nantucket, call myself by a new name, craft myself a new story, find a new husband, a new kitchen, new pots. But I saw the silver scales embedded beneath my nails despite my scrubbing, the round white scar at the base of my finger from a slip as I split clams, the callus where the thin silver ring Hosea had given me rubbed against my skin as I milked the cow each morning and evening. I closed my eyes, and the ever­present briny steam of the kitchen filled my mouth, my throat. The smell of him. The smell of home.

It would not be long, I knew, before the whispers and suspicions became questions. A preacher would arrive, solemn-browed and white-knuckled, to wonder if I might need prayer. One of Hosea's fleet of cousins would stop in for a chat, rejecting the chowder I set before him as he folded his hands and inquired about my obvious need for assistance. A creditor would come, asking for the man of the house though he knew he would never be home. The questions would not stop until they became actions, and I would lose all I had left.

As I slid the vertebrae onto a length of string and tied the cool bones around my throat, I formed my plan. Some years before, I had discovered how malleable memory could be. How, with sufficient will and enormous effort, I could suggest to someone that a recent moment was not quite as they remembered it. And I wondered whether, if I smudged the paint enough, I might be able to create a new picture.

The next morning, when the first lodger arrived in the public room, I looked into his mind and saw him dropping into Hosea's office, expecting to find the proprietor. I greeted him with the reminder that Mr. Hussey had gone away on business and would return soon. When one of Hosea's old friends visited at midday, reporting that Hosea had invited him, I reshaped our conversation so that he remembered asking when my husband would return, to which I replied that Hosea was expected any day. The next week, Hosea's cousin Peter Coffin arrived from New Bedford for a visit—and four bowls of cod, all in a row—and I explained Hosea's business trip once more. Peter's memory of walking in, assured he would find his cousin, became a memory of knowing, bitterly, he would find only me.

Again and again, through days and months, I nudged more memories with the same tale. Those I told it to spread it to others, until enough people believed the lie was the truth and the whispers ebbed. It did not feel so much like a lie, at times. I still wore Hosea's ring, left his books open on his desk, awoke at night sure I had heard him breathing. Sometimes I, too, almost thought he would walk back through the door someday. I wanted to believe I had changed the story, that the painting of my life on Nantucket now hung on my wall in unchangeable form: I at the inn, Hosea forever on the edge of returning. Yet I came to see I had wrought something far more fragile, an illusion etched on a pane of glass.

a crack appeared on the day the young sailors arrived, two years after Hosea's death. Mr. Davidson, a regular for ale and chowder most evenings at the Try Pots, tugged me to him by the sleeve of my gown and whispered with sour breath that if Mr. Hussey was so lax as to leave his nice things lying about in the open, he might take one for himself. I yanked the mug from Mr. Davidson's hand and hauled him out the front door by his sleeve. It struck me as my fingers twisted into the fabric that it was not Mr. Davidson's usual checked work shirt, streaked with fish blood, but his Sunday woollen, rich purple. For all his brutish indelicacy, I feared he had higher intentions. Perhaps he was beginning to see through my illusion, to guess Hosea was never coming back—and so I had to ensure his thoughts on the subject ended that evening.

Excerpted from Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr Roberts. Copyright © 2024 by Tara Karr Roberts. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.