“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Just shut up about her. I won’t hurt you if you shut up.”

“Okay,” I said.

He looked around the cabin, then reached for something on a hook over the window. A flashlight. He tried to turn it on, and when nothing happened, he dropped it.

“Come here,” he said.

I wouldn’t. I stayed where I was on the floor, watching him.

He crossed the cabin in three steps and stood above me, his features all erased in the gloom now. I wouldn’t offer him my hands, so he pulled me up by the armpits like a child. We crossed the room and squeezed behind a kind of half wall, into a small space with only a bench and an old-fashioned steering wheel, the kind that looked like a star. Cole pushed me gently onto the bench. He stood over me, looking out the window at the dark water. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring of keys, one of which he used to turn the boat on. The motor rumbled. The boat shook.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

The boat began to move. Beside me, Cole’s body tensed. I turned to look at his face. His fast breathing. His strange look of fear. Afraid of what? Of me? Of what he was doing? Stealing a boat. Afraid that he would hurt me, after all, whether I shut up or not, that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself?

The boat maneuvered through the dark water, around Bhone Bay’s other inhabitants, the sailboats, the motorboats. It was slow and rough, rumbling through the water like some ungainly creature, half above the surface, half below. Cole steered with one hand, keeping the other on my shoulder.

“You are really something,” Cole said. “You are about as selfish as they come, Lydia. Really, you disgust me.”

The boat ground against something. A rock? A buoy? I couldn’t see anything out in the foggy night. Cole didn’t seem to hear it.

“Does it surprise you that I call you selfish?” Cole said, looking down at me. “It shouldn’t. You don’t think of anyone but Lydia. It’s all about Lydia.”

I looked from his face to the water we were moving through so swiftly, trying to gauge which was the bigger danger.

“I used to think you had the perfect life,” Cole said. “Perpetual vacation! That’s what I thought, but I was wrong. It’s perpetual childhood. It’s you and Lucas running around like children in your big house, with your little summer jobs and your little disagreements. You think that’s life? No. That’s playing house.