A teenage couple bumped into me, and the girl was squealing as the boy told her to “gig it; just spear it. You can do it.” She tried and laughed and held on to him all at the same time. I reached down, gigged a flounder, lifted it, and stared. I touched the scales; its life squirmed below my fingers.

Sadie and I netted crabs, screaming and yanking at the one that snatched the end of her T-shirt. I held my hand out over the water and stopped.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The water,” I said. “Look. It’s not reflecting the light; it is the light. Moving light. Water-light.”

The crab released, dropped to our feet, and scurried into deeper bay, safe for the moment. “It is,” she said. “You’re right.” She dipped her hand into the water and allowed the light to run through her fingers, dripping onto her shirt and shorts. “Wow.”

“Is this real?” I asked.

“Of course it is.”

“It feels too much, like more than real. Like life will never be the same after this.” I paused before I told her, “You know, Mother wrote about this.”

“About you?”

“No, about a jubilee. I had no idea what she was writing about—she saw it as an omen of her new beginning, of a fresh start. That she would be with the man she loved forever. It was their beginning.”

“That’s what a jubilee is. Mom can tell you more about it, but it has something to do with letting go and with forgiveness, too.”

The sweet salt-smell born deeper in the bay rose to the surface as we inhaled the unseen. Standing in the water surrounded by fish and crab and shrimp, I sensed a presence next to us, an appearance I hadn’t felt all night—one I knew. I looked up to see his face: Hutch, standing next to Sadie and me, looking down at us as if we were mermaids or something even more mysterious than that.

“You just never know what a jubilee will wash ashore, do you?” Hutch asked in this voice surrounded by and drenched in fascination.

In this simply mysterious night, in a moment of sheer surprise, I jumped to my feet and threw my arms around Hutch. A flashlight in his hand blinded me.

“Hutch,” I cried in abandon until I remembered who I was—not an eighteen-year-old girlfriend swimming in the bay, but a married forty-something-year-old woman. We pulled back, quick shame filling my heart and face with blood as warm and light-stricken as the bay water. “Fancy meeting you here,” I said with that hint of sarcasm I knew he’d hear.

“Fancy indeed.” He motioned behind him, where a man sidestepped a small child to come to Hutch’s side. “You remember Drew?”

“I do,” I said. “Hey, Drew … .”

Old college friends, Sadie, Drew, Hutch, and I stood in the moonlit water.

Sadie walked closer. “Hutch, how are you?”