“There’s a barn through the woods. I’m showing you the rest of the lake. Pine City is over there,” he said, pointing west. “That’s Max’s dock. Through that path is her yard, where the fire was last night.”

“What’s a Dardanelle?” I asked him, remembering the map.

“It’s a Turkish strait,” he said. “Marlin drew the map. It’s some mythical thing.” Then he was turning around, leaving the dock, squeezing past me without touching me. We returned to the woods, down another bedraggled path, thorns and weeds bending beneath our steps. Cobwebs dripped from the trees above us, their soft nets catching against my skin.

As promised, a barn appeared.

It was 60 feet across, 120 feet deep, and sturdy—the opposite of the moldering shack he’d given me on the first day—with a double-height loft and reinforced steel doors. I could barely believe it. It was more than a barn—it was a warehouse; it was a gift.

A paved road led away from it to the east.

“That driveway hits the main road just past Granger Walk, the Pine City driveway,” Tyler explained. “We took the scenic route, so you could get your bearings,” he continued, pulling a key off his ring and fussing with the padlock as the first raindrops fell. I helped him wrench the doors open. Lightning struck behind us as Tyler disappeared inside the barn, into the darkness. I was left alone as the rain came down, hard, the drops ricocheting off the ground and bouncing back up over my ankles. Moments later, the fluorescent beams hanging from the rafters lit up in rows, illuminating the interior all the way to the back, where an extra-wide staircase led to the hayloft.

It was a beautiful, completely professional studio. The concrete floors were level; the windows brand-new; the sinks stainless steel. A gorgeous cast-iron woodstove was installed in the center of the room. There were kilns, too—three electric, and one gas, the size of a walk-in closet. Huge sections of the roof were tiled in sheets of clear corrugated plastic to let in the light, and the side walls were bisected by a high stripe of windows. A small kitchen was partitioned in the back.

The rain started pelting the roof, the drops hitting hard. Tyler waited for my reaction. I couldn’t help but stare back at him—at the golden skin running under the holes of his thin black shirt, at the curve of his collarbone and the long lines of his neck, at the raised burn marks on his forearms that I wanted to reach out and touch one by one. He waved at the studio and raised his eyebrows expectantly. I was supposed to speak.