It wasn’t that Archie suspected his mother was having an affair with Vince, though he wouldn’t have blamed her. He’d forgotten she could be this other person, this lighter person, who hummed to herself, who looked at the sky and the ocean, who noticed the world with something like hope, and he didn’t care who or what was making it possible. Vince had snuck up on them both. In the span of a month, the weirdo next door had become a person who made their house feel, improbably, like a kind of home.
