Alex makes a funny coughing sound in the back of his throat. I can feel him trying to make the fact that he is looking out the window as obvious as possible, but it also helps when he loudly says, “I’m looking out the window.”

Nolan’s half-smile presses his cheek more firmly against my hand, and I smile in return.

“I’ll get the golf cart for you,” Nolan tells me. “I don’t want you walking on that ankle.”

“Try to keep it on the path. Alex will kill us both if you mess up his grass.”

“Thank you,” Alex mumbles. “Still looking out the window here.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” Nolan says, but he waits another six heartbeats before he drops his hands from my face.

I try to watch him race across the muddy grass, but the rain is too heavy to see much past the hood of the truck. Wally goes berserk when Nolan leaves, and Alex quickly opens his door to let him out.

“I suppose it’s safe to stop looking out the window?”

“Yes,” I say. And we turn toward each other, his eyes as startled as I feel.

Alex folds his arms. “Are you going to tell me what really happened, or am I going to have to pry it out of Nolan?”

I drop my gaze to my feet, pretending to look at my ankle. “What are you talking about? Nolan told you what happened. Wally ran out to the lighthouse and we had to bring him back.”

I glance over. He’s tightened his arms.

“Nolan doesn’t cavort around water willy-nilly. Spill.”

I make myself look directly at Alex when I tell him about Nolan and me holding hands as we worked our way to the lighthouse. His face is carefully composed as I speak, but he unfolds his arms when I say we almost got stuck when Nolan had to lead us back to shore.

“How?” Alex asks. “How did you get him to cross back?”

I shrug and look back out the window, unable to meet his gaze. “I … I distracted him.”

“How?”

A number of lies spring to mind, but none sound plausible enough to have worked. Alex would know how frantic Nolan was. He must also know why, but I don’t ask.

Maybe it’s that I’m soaked through and the truck’s heater isn’t doing much to warm me up, or maybe it’s because Alex’s silence has lapsed into the comforting kind instead of the judgmental kind, but I tell him the truth.

Eye contact is too much, so I tell it to the window. I tell the raindrops about the pictures of Jenna, my mom, and the squirrels. I tell about leaving little bread crumbs of myself up and down the walkway to the lighthouse to lead Nolan, Wally, and me to safety.

“That’s how,” I finish.