Amy awoke to the pinprick pain of numb legs. She opened her eyes to a pure black void; she was afraid to move. She curled her legs up to her body until she could remember where she was and why. It came back to her in short bursts: Nick’s lake house, red wine, dinner, a dizzy sleeplessness that had sent her out to the lake and the large deck chairs, away from her snoring husband. She leaned back on the teak steamer chair—no plastic lounge chairs at the Lowry house.

The night was an erased chalkboard: starless, moonless. She strained backward, gazed to the right and left in the dark, looking for the moon. Her heart rolled as she realized she’d lost all sense of direction, lost the moon.

Where was it? There was always a moon.

Was she facing east, west? She didn’t move, fearful she would fall in the lake. Then she placed one foot on the dock, pushed on the wood, placed her other foot down and stood.

Footsteps echoed through the night, vibrated across the dock. She grasped the arm of the chair, not caring who walked toward her as a need to find the scarred face of the moon consumed her. If she didn’t find the moon in that pitch dark, she would be lost forever, bobbing in this new great divide between the present and the past, between the seen and unseen. She would disappear into the white noise of water, a world without directional markers—vaporous, weightless as she now was.

She scanned the sky.

“Ame, you okay, darlin’?”

Nick.

She rotated her head, careful not to shift her body.

He moved down the dock toward her in the dark, a shape more than an outline. He appeared at her side, apparitional; she reached for him.

“Where’s the moon?” Her fingers curved and grabbed a handful of his shirt as she pitched forward. He caught her and she leaned against his shirt, inhaled his smell of fresh-cut wood and soil—a part of all the land he tried to preserve. She laid her head on his chest, a resting place.

Words came through the vibration in his upper body. “The moon?” His fingers wrapped in her hair and she heard a slight moan. Was it his or hers?

“I can’t find the moon,” she said.

“Well, Ame, the house is facing east. It’s two in the morning, so . . .” He turned her body and lifted her chin, pointed to a faint glow. “There’s a massive cloud cover, but the moon is under there. Right there.” He took her hand and lifted her arm and index finger, wrapped his hand around hers and pointed.

She stared at the diffuse and rounded filtering of a moon with no light of its own.

“Thanks.” She felt her feet on the wood, her hand curled in his denim shirt. “Is it really two in the morning?”