And then . . . Nothing. All my effort, wasted. All my work, gone.

All my fault.

It was one of those warm North Carolina days that happen sometimes in winter. The trees stood like sentinels along the bank. Our footsteps rustled as Trey and I picked our way to the dock, the slope to the water littered with decaying leaves and fallen pines. The brown river reflected the blue sky, like a child’s landscape decorated with puffy white clouds.

Our family had two boats, an old johnboat we used for fishing and swimming on summer days, and my father’s canoe that he’d made himself at summer camp in Maine. Very Hiawatha.

Trey rowed the flat-bottomed johnboat out to the middle, away from the weeds and mud and encroaching trees. Away from everything. A blue heron hunted motionless in the shallows. The wind wrinkled the glassy water. I tilted my face to the sun, breathing deep, trailing a hand over the bow. Beneath the sunny surface, the water was winter cold.

“Jo! Jo!” Amy cried from the dock. I turned my head away. “Jo, I’m sorry!”

Trey lifted the oars, raising an eyebrow in question. “Go back?”

I glared, annoyed he’d even suggest it. My grievance burned inside me. I was so mad at Amy.

How dare she delete my letter to Dad?

Meg said I could write another. Mom said I needed to forgive. Even Beth—my baby, my ally—suggested wistfully we should make up after Amy had apologized.

They didn’t understand. I’d worked on that letter forever, one day, one page at a time, making it the best I could, polishing it like a college application. And Amy deleted it all out of spite because Trey and I wouldn’t take her with us to a stupid party at the Gardiners that she was too young for anyway. Before I sent it. Before I printed it. Before I backed it up.

I couldn’t forgive myself for being so stupid.

Or her, either.

“No.” It was easier to be mad at Amy than to blame myself.

“She’s got the canoe.”

I looked indignantly toward the dock, where our NO TRESPASSING sign was stapled to a tree. “She can’t take that. It’s Dad’s. Anyway, she can’t get it into the water by herself.”

We both watched as Amy half lifted, half pushed the upside-down canoe from its rack and dragged it to the splintery dock. Squatting, she gripped the gunwale on both sides. I felt a moment’s unease. Amy was not an experienced canoer. Or a strong swimmer.

“She’ll give up when she figures out she can’t paddle solo,” I said. To Trey? To myself?

But Amy, undeterred, shifted her weight over the boat’s centerline and put one foot, then the other, into the canoe. Without a life jacket.

I cupped my hands and yelled, “Don’t! It’s not safe.”

“So come back!”

“Go away!”

She pushed off from the dock. “I want to talk to you!”