Anouk and Nora read that Carolina Cho swam in all kinds of weather. She swam in the dark. She swam when the waves were white-peaked, when they leapt on to shore, each wave like a hand reaching out and grabbing the shoulder of the wave in front of it. She swam in the early-morning fog when the surface of the lake was still, when there was nothing but an almost imperceptible roll and her body cut through the water like a blade through silk.

Some days, Lake Ontario was coloured a rich, navy blue. After rain, it was the colour of stale, milky coffee. Some days, it was pond green. Once, Nora told Anouk, something went wrong at the filtration plant, and from out of Ashbridges Bay there crept a black and bubbly slick of stuff unnamed. It licked up on to the beach for a week before a good rain finally washed it away.

Each week that summer, Anouk cut the Carolina Cho column out of the newspaper. She kept the cuttings in the drawer of her bedside table and imagined what it would be like to be friends with Carolina Cho.

Anouk was bored. Nora was at work most days, as a receptionist in a dental office on Queen Street, a few blocks east of her apartment, and Anouk didn’t have a lot to do. After her meds and physio, she would walk to the beach and hunt for mermaid stones, pieces of glass that had been ground and smoothed over time by the movement of waves over pebbles.

Some days she would walk to where Nora worked, and they would eat lunch together at a restaurant on Queen Street. Some days, there was just the TV. On Friday nights, they would go to a movie at The Fox, a seventy-year-old theatre where the seats (several of them broken) were soft, springy and covered in tattered red velvet, and the popcorn was cheap. After the movie, they would cross the street to the Chinese diner for grilled cheese sandwiches and fries served by waiters who were tired and uninterested and famously rude.

‘Isn’t this great?’ Nora asked Anouk the first time, after their plates were slammed down and half of Anouk’s fries slid across the Formica table, coming to a rest under the tableside jukebox.

‘It’s great,’ Anouk tried.

On a Wednesday in the last week of July, after Nora left for work, Anouk got on her bike and took the bike path, which ran parallel to the boardwalk, to the Olympic pool. She locked her bike and went through the turnstile to the pool building. The entranceway smelled of wet concrete, piss and chlorine. It was dark, and echoed the sounds of the pool, which was above. She bypassed the changing rooms and climbed the concrete stairs into the sunshine, where the pool deck was crowded with kids and wet towels that were plastered by sun-warmth on to the cement. She found a dry spot to lay out her towel and sat down, got a book out of her bag and pulled off her T-shirt and shorts. Stretched out her legs, wriggled her toes. A toddler leapt over her legs, spraying her with his water shake.