“Come on. You were in the navy, weren’t you?”

“They started me in the Office of Naval Safety straightaway. I’ve never been assigned to a ship.”

Gannon looked up.

“This is nothing,” he said. “You should see them thirty, forty miles out in the Atlantic off Eleuthera.”

“Yeah?”

Gannon nodded.

“It’s like outer space. Tell you what. If you ever get down to the islands, I’ll take you out. I’ll teach you how to swordfish. You can give me an astronomy lesson.”

He held the screen door for her.

“Are you putting me on?” she said.

“No,” Gannon said. “I’m serious. Once we get this garbage sorted out, we’ll go out on my boat. We’ll have ourselves a whistle-blowers’ night cruise.”

Gannon watched Ruby’s face brighten for a moment as she thought about it. Then her expression collapsed.

“You mean if we get this sorted out,” she said quietly as they stepped out of the cold back into the warmth of the trailer.

64

It had started snowing when Reyland left the house at 10:00 a.m. that morning, and by the time he made it to Annapolis and finally pulled to a stop before Griffin Island’s one-car bridge, a square of snow fell in one piece from the gatehouse’s sliding window.

He gave his name to the guard. Then he looked over the water at the snow falling gently onto the misty trees.

He had grown up a navy brat in Annapolis nearby and always thought Griffin was more like a resort or a private country club with its own zip code than an actual town. Most of its small body of land was taken up by its world-renowned golf course, for one thing, and there were exactly zero businesses or stores. Even the island’s narrow roads were like golf cart paths, and in the summer, there were more golf carts in the circular driveways of the mansions than cars.

When the booth’s stick went up, he drove to the other side of the causeway and made a left into a zillion-dollar neighborhood they called Cherry Hill Forest. Down on the other side of it was the island’s East Shoreline Road, and he sat for a moment at the stop sign.

Across the road was the island’s famous country-club boathouse and there was a huge peace sign lit up with Christmas lights hanging upon its clapboard side. In the pale yellow glow beneath it was a Crayola box–colored row of flipped-over canoes peeking out of the snow.

Reyland often fantasized about buying a Griffin Island bayside vacation villa one day, and as he sat there, he closed his eyes, imagining it was summer. Breathing deeply, he thought of him and Danielle and the kids walking a canoe across the boathouse dock in life jackets as their goofball hound dog, Charlie, barked excitedly, trying to catch up.

He thought of three hundred–yard drives pin straight down the fairway, martinis at sunset, cookouts with fireworks. Towheaded toddlers collecting fireflies in mason jars. In his mind, he saw himself at exclusive parties where all the wives were blonde and thin and pretty, and all the men were lean and tan and wore dinner jackets with Bermuda shorts.