Inside the room, he pulled her into his arms, and hugged her. His skin smelled of cologne, and he was tall enough that his chin rested above her head. She tilted her head and kissed his neck, and he brought his hand up to her chin, tilting it so that he could kiss her. He brought her to the bed, his hands sliding up her thighs to the elastic top of her stockings. She lifted her hips as he pulled them off.

Afterward, in the black darkness of the room, he said, “No one, absolutely no one, can know about this.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Alice said. “I don’t even want to know anyone else. I just want to know you.”

“I feel the same way,” he said.

Alice woke at dawn to the sound of gulls. She was shivering. They’d left the door to the balcony cracked. She got up to close it, just as the door to the hallway opened up and Jake was coming back into the room. She startled, not aware that he had left. “Where’d you go?” she asked.

“The other room. I made it look like someone had slept there. Just in case. I didn’t want it to look . . .”

“No, I understand.”

He was staring at her, and Alice realized she was naked. She stood, letting him look, and then he came to her.

They returned to the condo that afternoon. They walked the exterior stairs up to the front door. Alice used her key, but before she could step inside, Jake said, “Wait.” Then he lifted her into his arms and carried her, like a bride, over the threshold.

Chapter 10

Now

Harry got back to Grey Lady at just past three. He had walked for miles, eventually winding up at York Hill State Park, where he’d climbed a muddy trail to reach the top of York Hill, less than seven hundred feet of elevation but enough to see the White Mountains to the west and the Atlantic to the east. The rain had stopped completely by the time he got to the summit; the sky was half clear, half darkened by clouds. He was alone, his shoes soaked through, and he felt like screaming at the top of his lungs. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it; a voice at the back of his head was laughing at how clichéd it would be. Instead he sat on a boulder, wondering what would happen if he simply lay back and didn’t move. Would he freeze to death in the middle of the night? He tried it, his shoulder landing in a shallow puddle of rainwater, then immediately sat up again. He couldn’t even fall apart properly, and he decided that he would go back to the house to hear what Alice had to say about the latest developments.