The sun was like a hot iron and her back felt like the ironing board itself. In a minute, as soon as she finished her margarita and ordered another one, she was going to take a dip in the pool. Tim’s question hung there until she really didn’t care what he thought, one way or the other. He was a magician, their magician, and whatever he didn’t like—bad press, the academic game, Harvard—he could just make disappear with a flick of his magic wand. What, me worry?

Tim dropped his eyes to the shot glass, poured himself another and went through the ritual of sprinkling salt on the webbing of his left hand, licking it off, throwing back the tequila as if he were snapping it out of the air and grimacing over the wedge of lime. “I say all publicity’s good publicity, that’s what I say.” He reached out a hand, put it on Fitz’s knee and gave a squeeze. “Right, Fitz?”

“Right,” her husband said because there really was nothing else he could say.

“Okay, then,” Tim said, giving everybody one of his stagey open-mouthed winks. “Let’s drink on it.”

The accounting came two weeks later. They’d barely settled into the routine—she and Fitz were planning on spending the full summer this time—and all she wanted out of life was more of the same, more living in the moment under a sun that never faltered, more sessions, more abandonment of the ego and tuning in to the group mind as if she were fine-tuning the dial on an FM radio, when what had seemed an unlikely, even paranoid, threat in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, a nagging worst-case scenario that would never come to pass, came to pass.

It was morning, post-breakfast. She was sitting in a wicker chair on the patio with a book and a glass of lemonade. Corey was out somewhere with the other kids, bodysurfing, scrambling up the cliffs, stalking through the jungle catching and killing things, whatever kids do, and she’d never seen him happier. Fitz was up in their room, working on his thesis proposal, which he was forging ahead with even though he no longer had a thesis adviser and would have to go crawling to McClelland or whoever when they got back in the fall. The only sound came from Pedro, who was on his perch by the fountain, preening his feathers and muttering to himself.