I exhaled, and she laughed.

“I’m gonna see if that stove top works,” she said.

She went inside and made up a bit of chili. Mixed in some avocado and some fresh tomatoes and came out with a bag of chips.

“Damn,” I said. “Did you mix pimento cheese in there?”

“I did,” she said, flicking her eyebrows.

I did a twangy voice. “That right there will make a freight train take a dirt road.”

Kelly laughed, and I explained that this was an expression my dad used to say about food that was so good you took a different route to get it.

After the snack, we took a nap on the deck, and a warm breeze woke us at sundown. In the distance along the shore, someone was piling firewood by their lakefront home, six feet high and four feet deep.

We cooked a striper and talked.

“This stuff at your job—it doesn’t always end right, does it?” Kelly asked.

“You mean do the right people get punished?”

She nodded, her face still.

“Most of the time,” I said.

“And when they don’t?” she asked. “How do you deal with that?”

“It’s hard,” I said.

“You never want to take the law into your own hands?” she asked.

“I have,” I said. “And it hasn’t gone well for me.”

She went silent then, not asking for more details.

Kelly had this instinct—when to back off and when to press forward. I wondered how she was coping since the shooting. I wanted to ask her, but inquiring would just open her up to asking me. And I wasn’t really sure myself. It wasn’t just pulling the trigger on Jed Harrington at the school. A cop’s son had been killed at the bar. An innocent.

We stared at the stars, and I saw that Kelly was fading, so we lay down in the bed, each of us in shorts and T-shirts that stayed on all night.

It felt good not to complicate things. To just be with someone.

The next morning I got up and went skinny-dipping. As I swam about in the cool water, I heard a splash around the bow and realized Kelly had dove in the other way.

She swam around my side, and her hair looked different. Wet and plastered back to her face.

She noticed me looking and pointed. “I’m gonna have the craziest frizz about five minutes after this dries.”

“I don’t mind frizz,” I said.

I climbed out by the ladder and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around me. I laid out another one for Kelly and took two more. Draped them across the deck.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and I did.

Kelly climbed out, and after a moment, I opened my eyes. The oversized beach towel was wrapped around her, from her thighs up and over her breasts.

She lay next to me, atop the crisscross of the towels. It was a Monday, two weeks after Labor Day, and the lake was empty of all boat traffic, the kids back in school and the tourists all gone home.