The Georgia-accented voice on the phone drawled at her. ‘Ms Piper, my name is Detective Curtis Clay of the St Petersburg Police. I’d like to talk to you about a colleague of yours named Justin Kiel.’

They sat on the beach on the shore of Lake Wales, surrounded by children splashing in the water. Across the lake, they could see the expensive shoreside homes climbing the shallow hill, with manicured lawns that reminded her of antebellum plantations. The air was filled with the motor whine and gasoline smell of powerboats pulling inner tubes across the lake.

Peach wore a one-piece yellow swimsuit, and she had her arms wrapped around her knobby knees. Justin wore trunks that lay like a tarpaulin across his long, skinny legs. They were both damp from bobbing in the lake. He took off his pork pie hat and plopped it on top of her wet hair like a crown.

‘There, that looks good,’ he said.

Peach giggled. ‘You’re silly.’

As they sat with sand on their bodies, Justin took her hand, and in the silence, she realized: He’s my boyfriend. They’d worked side-by-side at the foundation for a year, and she’d grown as close to him as she ever had to another person, but she’d never thought of it as being anything more. Except now it was.

Peach had never met anyone like him. He was quirky, with his little round hats and his old-fashioned mustache. He had a pimply face that most girls probably wouldn’t like. Paper-straight bangs tickled his eyebrows. He was only two years older than she was, but he talked older, like someone who had lived a long time. He had an opinion about everything, delivered with the pompousness of a professor giving a lecture. He was hacker-smart about computers, but he kept almost his entire life off the grid. No cell phone. No credit cards, not even a checkbook. Cash only. He loved visiting antique stores and estate sales and buying hundred-year-old bric-a-brac – anything without a power cord, anything with dents and bruises and water stains, anything with a history of people who had owned it and had a story to tell.

All these years alone, and Peach had finally found a kindred spirit.

‘So do you think I’m wrong?’ she asked him. She realized she was nervous about what he would say.

‘You are never wrong. About what?’

‘Well, I mean, the celibacy thing.’

‘You decided that a long time ago, right?’ Justin said. ‘It’s what you believe in. I respect that.’

‘Don’t you want sex? Men always do.’

Justin scratched his head. His wet hair stood up like matchsticks. ‘People can be really close without having sex. I think it’s cool that you want something different.’