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Dedication

For Katie

Epigraph

From the time that their love is avowed, neither sees the other but in a mask; and the cheat is often managed on both sides with so much art, and discovered afterwards with so much abruptness, that each has reason to suspect that some transformation has happened on the wedding-night, and that by a strange imposture, as in the case of Jacob, one has been courted and another married.

—DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER, NO. 45

One

The beaches were empty, the stores were closed, and after sunset, all the houses on New Hampshire Avenue stood dark. For months, Effie had been telling him about this place and the many things they would do here, but she had only known it in the summer, and this was the end of September. She had not understood what “off-season” meant. They had come up from Georgia on the overnight train. They were supposed to spend two weeks here, for their honeymoon.

“I love it,” Henry said their first evening. “It’s like we got the whole place to ourselves.”

Effie laughed at that. A minute later, she began to cry.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing, really—don’t coo over me. I’m just tired, that’s all.” She smiled at him. “I’m glad you like it. We’re going to have a wonderful time.”

Before this trip Henry had never been north of Atlanta, and he had never seen the ocean. He and Effie had grown up in the little town of Signal Creek, half an hour east of Macon, and in the spring they had graduated from high school: Thomas E. Cobb, Class of 1957. He was twenty—like many people from the country, he had started school late—and she was eighteen. They both, as far as Henry knew, had been virgins.