And then Tim was there, wearing a pair of bathing trunks and nothing else because nothing else was needed. “Glad you kids could make it,” he said. “Of course, if you’d got here last week like everybody else you’d have known all this already, because, really, we’re making up the rules as we go along. But welcome to Freedom House.”

Fitz, who was sitting on the tiles beside her chaise, his arms cradling his knees and a beer dangling from two fingers, grinned up at him. “IFIF, right?”

“Right. Internal freedom all the way.”

“External too,” Ken said, hovering over them with a margarita in one hand, a beer in the other, “because guess what—Kellard and Mortenson and all the rest of the drones are three thousand miles away.”

“Where they belong,” Fitz said.

Tim eased himself down on the patio, crossed his ankles and took a sip of his own margarita, of which there seemed to be a limitless supply. “I say good riddance. But really, can you imagine that stiff Mortenson in a bathing suit?”

“No way,” Fanchon said. She was standing there beside her husband, her hip pressed to his, one arm draped round his waist and her hand casually inserted in the waistband of his trunks. “He is a real limp dick.”

Everyone laughed at this, liberated now, not a care in the world, and what awaited them back at Harvard wasn’t worth thinking about, not until this long paradisiacal summer played itself out and they all went deeper than they’d ever gone before, at which point it might not even matter anymore. She didn’t have a job. She didn’t have an apartment. What she had was this, the tropical night that trilled and resonated with the sounds of hidden things, magical things, frogs, cicadas, monkeys and the long sweet release of group laughter.

She thought of the pills then, the two pills Tim had given them for the trip down, and she leaned into Fitz and whispered, “You want to, you know, take the sacrament? Wouldn’t that just cap things off, wouldn’t it be great, I mean, our first night here?”

Fitz was leaning into the chaise, his back pressed to her bare legs, the flesh hot there, slick with sweat. He turned to her and she saw the way his mouth had gone slack at the corners, an indication he’d had too much to drink. The sun was setting now, the shadows thickening, and he reached up to slip off his sunglasses, his eyes floating there a moment, naked and unfocused. “Now? I mean, we just got here—”