Sarah could tell Matthew was avoiding her. He wouldn’t meet her eye. He was a good person, but as Sarah chastised herself for having been unfairly hostile toward him earlier, she was only besieged by more anger.

We’ll wait was what Matthew always said. And after their same sad back-and-forth, his tone would inevitably harden: We will wait for her to come back to us, but we won’t wait to live our lives.

Despite their having run through the woods and being out of breath, the edge of the heat had clearly smoothed itself out; it was time to get going. “What time is it?” Sarah asked. Arman’s impressively large waterproof watch was evidently broken. Because if it worked, wouldn’t they have sold it? If they were truly broke? “What time is it?” she repeated, but no one knew; no one was rushing to check a phone.

“Not sure,” Kiki finally replied.

They slowly gathered the towels and bags and started for the car. As they walked closer to the tent, Sarah started sweating profusely. She didn’t allow herself to look anywhere besides the ground just in front of her. It was as if, instead of this basic trail, she were on a treacherous nighttime hike; she became intensely focused on where to place her feet, hearing, Hey, hey, HEY.

She turned to look, but no one was there. No one had called out to her.

Yet she’d heard this deep searching voice, its muted desire, its timbre, just as she’d heard Leda crying in the night long after she was a baby. No witch feet were sticking out, no stranger, though the tent remained.

As they stepped out of the shaded woods and walked toward the cars, Sarah started to feel a strange pulsing in her left temple, as if a migraine were in her future, but she’d never had a migraine. She’d forgotten to apply bug repellent, and her ankles and forearms were suddenly afire with small but potent mosquito bites. She’d already scratched hard enough to draw blood. She knew the man from the tent—the neighbor—could show up at any moment. The man on the train popped into her head or, rather, more like floated by her eyes and whispered into both ears. This odd old man from Prague had been meeting her grief and recklessness with something like a warning.

You are a good mother, he’d said.

“I’m sorry,” said Sarah loudly, “but I really need to get out of here. Can we pick up the pace?”

“We’re moving,” said Matthew. “Relax.”

“I’m getting ravaged by mosquitoes.” Sarah realized she had to get them all to leave the lake before the neighbor showed up. “No one else is getting bitten?” she asked Kiki and Arman irritably, frantically scratching her legs and ankles.