Susan’s directions indicated I was to exit the Taconic shortly before the tollway to Boston and head north on Route 203, cutting through the rural area southeast of Albany and northeast of Hudson, then turn right on Route 7. After a wide spot in the road whose metal sign read UNION VALE, I was to drive two miles and look out for Granger Walk, the dirt road leading to Pine City.

The driveway was a two-mile gravel rut lined with tall, overgrown poplar trees, hemmed in by a thick, dark-green wall of forest and dotted with Granger’s original billboards—DANCING! DINNER NIGHTLY! BOATING! AIR CONDITIONING—upbeat, scripted slogans whose promises were betrayed by their faded and peeling paint. Prickles of excitement, an electric current, raised all my body hair like the hackles of a dog. I let the truck slow to a stop and took it all in—the way the air tasted, the reddish color of the road, the yellowed light dappling the ground. I hoped to remember it forever.

I checked my teeth in the rearview mirror, brushed the crumbs from the SUNY Binghamton tennis t-shirt I’d borrowed from Cady, and flipped my hair to a fresh part.

A few minutes later, I was there. Someone waited at the end of the driveway, in front of a wooden multistory building with a circular drive that had once been the main lodge. Metal posts stuck out from an overhang over the main doors, remnants of the letters GRANGER’S. There was no sign reading PINE CITY—no indication that this was anything more than an abandoned resort. They hadn’t glossed it up. They hadn’t made it for anyone but themselves.

The someone turned. Tyler Savage still looked almost exactly as he had that first time on Grand Street. Divine, untouchable, an athletic, tennis-player kind of body, under an inside-out t-shirt and faded chinos dotted with flecks of paint. He was smoking a cigarette and leaning against an old diesel Mercedes-Benz station wagon, and I thought for a second that I’d never seen anyone lean so perfectly against anything, ever. It was remarkably easy, in that moment, to slide from my independent grown-up identity right back into the body of that nineteen-year-old girl crossing the street, gaping self-consciously at the most beautiful people I’d ever seen in my life.

I pulled around, rolled down my window. A gallery girl sat in his passenger seat, tapping away on a BlackBerry behind a thick drape of hair and silver-dollar Lennon sunglasses.

Tyler was definitely older—his brown hair, dusted with gold from the sun, was clipped short on the sides to contain the encroaching gray and white. Still: Wow, I thought. You’re more handsome than ever. Thankfully, nothing came out of my mouth.

“You’re late,” he said to me, grinding the cigarette beneath his heel.

“Sorry,” I said, tucking my hair behind my ear like a teenager. “I’m—”