JEREMY and I made some more sandwiches, this time with the stuff we’d bought in town. He was actually getting into it, laying out the bread, slapping a slice of cheese on each one, putting on mounds of deli meat, squirting a dollop of mustard on each.

“Maybe I should get a job in a restaurant,” he said.

“When I was a little younger than you, I had a job doing dishes in a diner.”

“Just dishes? You didn’t cook or anything?”

“Just dishes. My fingers would be all wrinkly at the end of my shift.”

We took our food up to the deck. Far out in the bay, Jeremy spotted a massive ship.

“I saw some binoculars on the shelf,” I told him.

He went back into the house and found them, then came out and stood at the deck railing, the binoculars up to his eyes. “It’s one of those ones that carries cargo containers,” he said. “They’re all different colors. They look kinda like kids’ building blocks.”

I reached out a hand from where I was sitting and he handed the binoculars to me. I took a look, scanned the horizon where water met sky. If it weren’t for the fact that we were here hiding from Internet nutbars who wanted to hurt Jeremy, this would be a pretty nice place to chill out.

When Jeremy had finished his second sandwich, I said, “Let’s take a walk.”

“Where?”

“The beach.”

“Okay.”

Once we’d descended the set of wooden steps that led us down to the beach, we took off our shoes and left them there where we could find them later. Jeremy ran toward the water, stood in the sand where the waves were coming in, let them wash around his ankles as they receded.

“It’s freezing,” he said, glancing back at me.

“Let’s walk this way,” I said, pointing east. We strolled just along the edge of the surf, our feet getting wet every few seconds.

“I like it here,” Jeremy said. “We’ve almost got the beach to ourselves.”

He was right, although we weren’t the only ones out here. Looking both ways, I saw maybe ten or twenty people wandering more than a mile of shore. Almost no one was in a bathing suit. Most, like us, were in long pants rolled up to the knees. Some were smart enough to wear light jackets, as the breeze coming in off the bay was cool. I wished I’d brought one. But if the cold bothered Jeremy—aside from the waves that touched his feet—he gave no indication.

“I want to talk to you about something,” I said.

“Yeah? What? Is this about how I should have told Charlene’s mom I was sorry?”

“No, but we can come back to that later.”

“I am sorry,” he said.