“Because you want me to get in that water. Because you want me to feel the freedom you felt when you had the chance to swim away.” Kiki stopped and looked up at Sarah with her big gray eyes. “You’re generous like that. Or needy.” Kiki forced a laugh. “Or … something. I don’t know anymore.” She looked down, fidgeted with a button on her gauzy and somehow fashionably tattered dress. “I don’t know. It’s been such a long time since we’ve really talked so I don’t want to speak out of turn, but—”

“Can we take a walk?” Sarah interrupted.

“Aren’t we doing that?”

“I mean a longer one.”

“I don’t know. Sylvie will need to—”

“Can’t Arman take her?” Sarah knew she sounded impatient, which she was, and her heart was still racing from the thought of that man, with his flesh and bone and muscle and blood and how she’d let him touch her.

She hadn’t exactly wanted that man. But she hadn’t wanted to scream.

“Fine.” Kiki’s unembellished tone made Sarah realize that up until this moment Kiki had been faking something. “Fine. We’ll pass by them without stopping. We can’t stop. If Sylvie sees me, I’ll get sucked in.”

They walked in silence, finding the same rhythm.

“Why do you keep turning around?” Kiki asked.

“I don’t.”

“Did you see that tent back there when we walked from the cars?”

Sarah’s stomach dropped before she nodded.

Kiki nodded. They were both quiet for a while. “I hate it here,” Kiki finally said.

“You—”

“Hate it,” Kiki snapped. “I hate it.”

“At the lake or…?”

“Here. Living here.”

“Oh,” Sarah said dumbly. “But I thought—”

Kiki put her fingers to her lips as they approached a familiar stand of trees. As they crept along silently, Sarah looked through the skein of branches toward the lake. Arman stood on the sand, facing the water. Matthew sat on a towel, drying in the sun. Arman must have been holding Sylvie, but with his back to the woods it was hard to tell. From this vantage, with the sun bouncing off the water and casting a golden blur, it might have been twenty years ago; they all took the train to Long Beach once, early on a Sunday morning. Right now, the years might mix together and a five-year-old Leda might just pop out of the water and demand a towel. Or an eight-year-old Leda could ask to hold Sylvie by herself; Matthew would show her how.

They walked swiftly past their husbands. The woods became denser, the path less clearly defined. They walked in silence long enough that it felt awkward to break that silence.

“Why are you living here?” Sarah finally spoke.

Kiki didn’t stop walking, but Sarah had the feeling Kiki was about to. “It’s cheap.”

“But surely you could rent something in—”