Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky

listed some of the people I’d want to ask for recipes, and then picked people from that list whom I thought were interesting, but if they don’t interest you, they won’t interest my readers, so that’s a good litmus test. I mean, these are just suggestions.”
    “It’s your book,” Charlotte said, feeling like the worst kind of friend.
    “But you’re the writer.”
    “It’s your book, ” she repeated, testier now. If Nicole had been more demanding of Julian, he would never have followed Charlotte to the beach. End of story. “You’re the one who knows your audience, and you’re the one who signed a contract. I don’t know what your publisher wants. And I haven’t been here in ten years, so I’m not the one to make executive decisions. Tell me who to interview, and I’ll do the interview.”
    Nicole had recoiled.
    Only then realizing how sharp her tone had been—and how old and one-sided her anger—she was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. I’m probably tired.”
    “It’s everything I told you this morning,” Nicole wailed.
    “No. It’s cumulative. The last few months…” She let it go at the suggestion. Of course it was what Nicole had told her that morning. “But I really do want you to direct me in this, Nicki. You know what you’re doing.”
    Nicole didn’t look entirely convinced, but at least she didn’t argue the point. Rather, as they finished eating, she went through her list, gaining confidence as she explained why she had chosen each islander on it.
    Charlotte managed to express enthusiasm, though she had no idea how Nicole could so completely immerse herself in this. But then, Julian’s MS wasn’t news to her. She was used to smiling when things were dark. Charlotte had always thought of herself as the tougher of them. Not so just then.
    They finished dinner and cleaned up, and still Charlotte was thinking about MS. She felt she had a lot of knowledge now with nowhere to go. What she wanted was to hear more about the different treatments Julian had tried. Four years wasn’t a long enough time to run out of options. Some of the blog postings she read were from patients who had gone from one protocol to another over the course of twenty years.
    But Nicole didn’t raise the subject; she simply lit the fire as dusk fell, grabbed Salt, and curled up on the sofa. Since she was further ahead than Charlotte, she refused to discuss the book lest she spoil it, and the more Charlotte asked, the firmer Nicole’s headshake.
    Charlotte picked up her own copy, but not even Salt could keep her mind from going places she didn’t want to be. For every three pages read, she had to reread two. Setting the book aside, she went to her room and returned with her knitting—though why she had brought it along, she didn’t know. The women on Inishmaan had started her on what they claimed was the easiest of their sweaters, and she’d actually finished the back since then. Was it easy? No. Thinking that a smaller piece might be more manageable, she had started a sleeve. Did she know what she was doing? No. She studied the pattern, knit half a row, unknit the stitches, and tried again.
    Eventually, she gave up and, sitting on the floor by the bookshelf, looked through picture albums. At one point, she got up to show Nicole a shot of the two of them, gawky and mismatched at thirteen, but Nicole held up a hand and shook her head no without taking her eyes from the page she was on.
    Putting the album away, Charlotte returned to the sofa. Salt was the story of a fisherman, his dog, and a woman who had burst onto the scene unexpectedly, but with whom he was falling in love. Each of the characters had a vulnerability that tugged at her heart. But even love seemed irrelevant to her right now. So she concentrated on the writing style, which was clean and succinct but musical, ebbing and flowing as the ocean would do.
    Thinking of the ocean made her crave air. Saving her place with the cover flap, she put