My eyes lingered on Robin’s profile. The lines radiating from the corners of his eyes were dignified and warm. Which expressions were true? “I’m the one who did nothing! Not that I wasn’t tempted.” That’s what he had said. In anger, possibly. Righteous anger, or something more complicated. Which expressions were true? Maddy’s serenely shut eyes, her quivering lips, her defiance, her naked despair? Or the laughing baby’s face, that invited me in and shut me out? Most of us would never reach the depths Maddy had gone to, facing what she faced, knowing what she knew. I resolved to keep “final final final” for myself, and not to speak again until Robin did.

I heard myself say: “Have you forgiven me?”

He didn’t turn his head. “I don’t know.”

“Can you see why I might have thought . . . ?”

“Kind of,” he said. “I can kind of see it.” He paused a beat. “But it’s an awful way to treat someone.”

“I know. I’m so sorry, Robin. I went off the rails. I was imagining things.”

He turned his head to look at me, shapes from his breath dissolving in the night air and forming again. Beyond him the shoreline trees made a chain around the lake. With their cladding of white, they seemed closer together and blacker at their centers than in summer. Robin’s silence and the smug lines at the corners of his eyes suddenly galled me.

“So were you tempted?” I said, with Alison-like bluntness.

“Was I what?”

“Tempted.”

He studied me. “Not really.”

“Not really? What does that mean?”

“Were you?”

On a cliffside, looking down. “A little.” The words hovered in the air between us and then I was pleading with him, sick with fear for what could not be recovered and for what else could go. “Nothing happened! I told you, it was extraordinary circumstances. It’ll never be like that again.”

Hands in his pockets, shoulders rigid, he turned his head toward the lake. After what seemed a very long time, he said: “Do you know why everything is blue at night?”

“No, why?” I’d heard it before, but I needed him to tell me something, anything at all.

“Night vision is sensitive to the blue-violet end of the spectrum. It’s why in twilight everything takes on a blue tinge. Your rods are taking over from your cones.”

“But that’s not why moonlight is blue.”

“I guess that comes from the moon itself. I’m not sure.”

“There’s not a lot to say about the moon, is there?”

His eye creases deepened. He looked at me. “Not really.”

“Too much has been said about it.”

“All of it true,” said Robin. He got to his feet and clapped his gloves together. “Want to walk on the lake?” Without waiting for an answer, he stepped down through the drifts to the ice.