“Maybe we’ll even get Mom in the water this year,” Mickey said, laughing. Ruth leaned forward from the middle seat.

“You don’t swim, Mrs. Harrison?”

“Mom wouldn’t swim in that lake if I were drowning in it.”

“Of course I would,” Lily snapped.

“You’ve never gone in deeper than your knees!” Mickey retorted.

“Well, you’ve never been drowning.”

“Pssh,” Sean said, and Mickey jumped, remembering him. “I had to save her that one summer.”

Mickey had forgotten about that.

Sean snuck into the canoe during Marco Polo. He glided past Mickey’s blind, outstretched hands over and over, each of his “Polos” and hoots of laughter coming from an opposite direction. Mickey swam until her arms went rubbery, and then she kept swimming. She resisted the urge to cheat and open her eyes. If he was able to swim that fast, so could she.

But she couldn’t.

When she finally opened her eyes, the shock of her distance from shore took the last of her energy straight out of her, as if her body decided to quit before it had to fail. She slipped under the water with zero dramatics, barely any splashing. She could hardly remember it now, except that her bathing suit had a ruffle, a mangy tutu that billowed out around her, like a tutu is supposed to. It had flowers on it, that bathing suit. She remembered that.

“You saved Mickey from drowning?” Ruth asked Sean, turning in her seat to look at him. “That’s incredible!”

Sean shrugged, his color deepening.

“It was his fault in the first place.”

She had been nine at the time. She remembered his arm around her chest, the way he kicked straight and hard for the shore. She remembered the way he held her up for air, even when doing so pushed him down.

“You must be a really strong swimmer,” Ruth said. Then she did something so crazy, Silas almost swerved off the road. She threw one arm around Sean’s neck and pulled his upper half into her, his sweatshirt fabric gripped in one hand and one of his headphones smooshed against her cheek.

“Mick might be ungrateful that you saved her, but I’m not!”

Ruth let go after one tight squeeze, and Mickey could feel her parents hold their breath, watching him. Mickey watched him too. As far as Mickey knew, no one had touched Sean like that in years. Certainly, none of the family. When they used to try, he made it clear they never should again.

“It was—I mean, whatever,” he said, shrugging again and collapsing back against the car door, adjusting the neck of his sweatshirt. “She’s my sister.”