We stood on the shore where the dock would have been. Late as it was, the moon had been high for hours, a cold half circle piercing the blue-black sky. In winter the dock was dismantled in sections and stored under a tarpaulin by the woodpile. One section we propped up sideways on the ground to put the chairs on. They sparkled now with frost. When we sat down, the chill burned without delay through my coat. Robin held himself stiffly.

“We got it out just in time this year.”

“It’s always a gamble,” I said. In the old days my father used to pull the dock up on Labor Day, but in these warmer times, we often pushed it back to October.

“I think your dad likes the gamble. Has the dock ever gotten stuck in the ice?”

“Once, I think. It had to be hacked out.” The time was past when my father could do any heavy work alone. The time would come when he couldn’t do it at all. “Thanks for helping him, Robin. When you came along, he could see a future for this place.”

Snow had a gleam of its own, duller than water. In winter there was no reflection and hence no doubling of worlds.

“I called Glenda Sedge.”

“You did?”

“I told her she could use Maddy’s animation.”

From the way Robin smiled with his lips together, I knew he’d thought all along that’s what I should do. “Feel okay? Now that you’ve done it?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“I could always say no later on.”

He studied me, ice crystals glittering in his beard. “I don’t think you will.”

“Maddy’s the one who put it out there in the first place,” I said. “For the campaign. It was her way of . . . facing things. But still it’s scary.”

“Because you don’t know exactly what they’ll do with it?”

“You never can be sure what the world’s intentions are toward your child. Do you feel that about Vince?”

“All the time,” he said. “That’s another story. But as a parent you don’t have a lot of choice. They have to go out there in the end.”

I was grateful to hear myself described as a parent. I would be, until the day I died.

Robin’s mustache hid his upper lip and made him look secretive and holy. I wanted to rip it off and expose his true expression. What had really happened between him and his ex-wife? After three years I thought I had the measure of Robin, but how much could we really know about each other and what we were capable of? Antonio’s long body, Antonio’s eyes and lips, existed in another dimension, outside the logic of what was happening to me now.