The water bit my ankles, shockingly cold. Ahead of me I saw something moving. What was it? People? Children? No, seals. I could make out their smooth heads. They rose off the rock so I could see their full beautiful silhouettes.

Cole had kicked off his shoes and was wading toward me.

“Seals,” I told him, pointing. But when we both looked, they’d gone.

Cole steered me back to shore. We stood on the sand and waited for our feet to dry. We waited for that and the storm, if it was coming. My brain was busy cataloging. Sand. Stars. Drops of water. The scotch was still shimmering in my bloodstream. It made everything beautiful. Sailboats. Houseboats. Seagulls. Minnows. Hermit crabs. Jellyfish. Mother. Father. Brother. Lover. We were chilly from wading, but the heat from Cole’s body warmed us both.

“Tell me more about the letter,” I said.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Cole said firmly. “Okay? When you and Lucas were in high school, your friends had parties at the golf course, right?”

“They weren’t exactly our friends.”

“The point is you had a golf course. We had a bridge.”

“You had parties on a bridge.”

“On it. Under it. Not parties exactly. We went there all the time. On dates. With buddies. Alone. It’s like we were drawn back there again and again.”

“Like moths.”

“The attraction,” he said, “was that the bridge was haunted.”

Then he told me the story: a long time ago, there was a beautiful girl. Her parents were wealthy, and she was their only child, and they doted on her. She fell in love with a local boy, handsome, kind, salt-of-the-earth. Her parents thought he wasn’t good enough for her and told her she couldn’t see him, but forbidding her only made her love grow stronger, and she and the boy made secret plans to elope. They planned to meet at midnight on the bridge.

“Can you guess what happens?” Cole said. “This is an old story.”

Her parents discovered the plan and paid someone to kidnap the boy, and when the girl arrived at the bridge in the middle of the night, no one was there. She waited in the dark, getting chillier and chillier, but her lover never showed up. The first light came up softly, and she knew she’d been forgotten, or jilted. When her parents found her later that morning, she was swinging from the bridge with a rope around her neck. They saw her shadow swaying on the water.

Cole said, “Her name was Emily. Emily. Say it.”

“Emily,” I said.