“My sister and I only speak English and Spanish,” Dani said, “so my parents used to speak French when they wanted to talk about us without doing us the courtesy of leaving the room.” She stuck her tongue out at them. “They still do.”

Everyone was so at ease with each other. It wasn’t that Max didn’t understand, intellectually, that families like this existed. Marie and her mother had been this way. It was just so strange to have crash-landed in the middle of one. Unsettling at first, but then utterly relaxing. It felt as if someone had dispensed a narcotic as he listened to them talk and tease one another. Soon all the relaxation had him yawning. “I beg your pardon. I’m afraid all the food and the sun have done me in. I should be going.” Darkness had begun to descend, and he couldn’t stay forever, though he wanted to do exactly that. “Thank you for a wonderful evening.” He looked at Dani. “And day.” As lovely as Val and Carlos were, the dinner had been merely the icing on top of his beach day with Dani.

When had he last been that carefree? Truly carefree, not tabloid-headline carefree?

“You’re not staying over?” Dani’s mom said to him with seemingly genuine confusion.

It took a moment for her question to penetrate his brain, so fixated had he been on Dani. “Oh, no, I have a hotel room in Manhattan.”

“Nonsense!” Valerie said. “You’ll stay, and you kids can hit the beach again tomorrow. If you want to, of course. We only have a sofa bed. You probably don’t want to.”

He did want to. He wanted to more than anything. He looked at Dani, who said, “I don’t know, man, suite at the Four Seasons or the awful sofa bed here?” She performed an exaggerated shrug but mouthed, “Stay,” as she did so.

Which was how Max found himself tucked into a lumpy sofa bed in the living room of a bungalow in a town on Long Island. As tired as he’d been earlier, once he was stretched out in the dark in a pair of Carlos’s sweatpants, he didn’t sleep. It wasn’t his usual brand of frustrating, involuntary insomnia, though.