“So, are you okay?” Tuck said. He must have noticed how thin my face looked or how dark the circles were under my eyes. I considered telling him about the dreams that haunted me at night—the thoughts I couldn’t shake during the day. But they were too private, too wretched. Tuck seemed to like me, he wanted to help me. How could I tell him that against my will I still dreamed of Cole almost every night? That in my unguarded dreams I sometimes loved him, and sometimes ran for my life from a monster that was him, and sometimes Cole wasn’t there at all, just Colin, and I was the one holding him on the deck of the ferry, and I was the one throwing him over the edge and watching his body—with relief—as it sank.

“You’re twenty-one?” I said instead. “Sorry, that’s just younger than I thought.”

“Why does it matter?” he said.

“It doesn’t. I don’t know. I guess I’m surprised you didn’t leave home when you had the chance. Everyone leaves.”

“I did leave. I went to college,” Tuck says. “I went for three years. I have a year left.”

I looked at him in surprise. “What are you waiting for?” I asked. “Why not finish?”

“Once you graduate, then it’s time to do something, and I don’t know what I want to do. Once I figure that out, I’ll go back.”

“So as long as you haven’t graduated, then you’re still technically a student? I’m officially a college student, too, then,” I told him. “And I have been for ten years.”

He laughed and turned back to the bay. The red houseboat rocked quick and fast out on the waves.

“Imagine living in that thing,” Tuck said.

“Oh, I have.”

“It would be like a miracle,” he said. “Waking up every day like that.”

We heard a splash and looked down toward the water.

“Seal,” I said.

Tuck looked but couldn’t see it.

“They’re everywhere,” I told him.

Then we heard—faintly—the chimes from the old clock at the bank on the landing, eleven small chimes.

“Eleven o’clock,” I said.

“At midnight, I think I’ll kiss you,” Tuck said, turning his face toward me.

I looked at my hands, at my fingernails, at the white calcium deposits like specks of confetti in the pink nails. When we were young, girls said that each white spot on your fingernails was a boy who liked you.

“We’ll be in bed at midnight,” I said.

“Even better,” he said. “I wasn’t going to ask, but—”

“I mean—we’ll be sleeping.”

“Okay,” he said, good-naturedly. “I get it.”

“I’m twenty-nine,” I said.

“So what?”

“So—I don’t know exactly. I just don’t want you to—get any ideas about something, you know, happening between us.”