“You have, like, no tits,” the man said, still leaning on the tree. But then he muttered something else she couldn’t hear, with a tone that suggested some kind of deep approval. The path was right between them. At any moment, anyone might or might not come along.

She said nothing. She didn’t avert her gaze.

“What’s with you? You do something wrong?”

“Why?”

He laughed. “You have a guilty face. What’d you do?”

“Nothing.”

“C’mon, what’d you do?”

Was she losing it? Why now? She suddenly loved being alive with surprising—even desperate—conviction. She was too attached to her husband and her daughter. She felt incredible despair several times a day. But she’d never feared being actually unstable. Where Leda’s instability came from Sarah did not know, but this was the first moment she considered it could be her.

“You want something?” he asked hoarsely.

Still she didn’t back away or dive into the lake.

He was moving toward her, across the path.

“Don’t touch me,” she said calmly, her voice low.

“Don’t touch you?”

“That’s right.”

He came closer. She could smell his sweat—loamy, woodsy, but maybe ketchup, too?—and also something like embers, the morning after a fire.

She’d been flirting with Arman. But it had been harmless. Hadn’t it?

She was standing by a tree and he put his hand on that tree. He leaned in to her. She hadn’t removed her suit but she felt as if she had. She wasn’t scared or angry or sad. In the absence of those more familiar sensations, there was a hollowing out that extended to her head, a rush of air like a plane taking off. This, she remembered. This, she could do. She was a breezeway with a door about to slam. He leaned even closer. She could feel the heat coming off his chest like that of a sweaty wiry dog, and she could tell that he was hard, she could feel it brush against her thigh. Inside her head, on a loop: the same word she’d invented five years ago after attending an introduction to Transcendental Meditation and balking at the idea of paying for a mantra.

When he put his fingers on the ridge of her wet bathing-suit bottom, when he pulled the elastic back just the slightest bit, she said, “Stop,” and shoved his hand away.

He took his hand back and crossed his arms at his chest. She watched him breathing evenly, not embarrassed or defensive. She stood amid the dead, dry leaves and wet earth and he towered above her. She knew he could do whatever he wanted, and this excited him and it excited her, too, because she knew she was not going to let him.

Then—from far away, almost inaudibly—“Sarah?”

When she shouted, “Hi!,” her eyes were still locked with his.

Then he silently backed away, crossed the path, and headed to his tent.

She ran in Kiki’s direction. Sarah saw her in the distance and she seemed to be alone.