When You Loved Me by Beatriz Williams
Some houses hold grief the way a cold room holds damp. Windward, the crumbling Cooper estate at the private end of Winthrop Island, is one of them. When You Loved Me by Beatriz Williams opens on a funeral that is not quite a funeral, because there is no body to bury. Bud Cooper folded his clothes on the beach and walked into Long Island Sound a week before his estranged daughter was due to arrive, leaving Lucy to stand at the pulpit and try to eulogize a man who chased pirate gold his whole life and caught only debt. Lucy is a widow and a teacher, raising a small, ferociously composed daughter named Punkin who has spent her whole life in Paris and treats a New England funeral like a Chanel runway. The two of them arrive to settle the estate, and the estate has plans of its own. There is a mountain of unpaid bills. There is a stubborn local legend about a wounded pirate and a fortune in silver buried somewhere on the …

