“So you’re saying this now?” she asked. “After a woman I met fell off a cliff?”

“That wasn’t my plan,” he said, a little archly. “I’ve been trying to tell you since I got here. It’s never the right time with you. I’m going to have to go soon, so . . .”

“So you’re dropping this news and leaving?”

“Stevie,” he said, a flinty edge coming into his voice, “I came out here as soon as I could. I’m trying to—”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said, even though she had absolutely no idea what he was trying to do, or even what that meant. That’s the thing about speaking—you can talk and talk and have no idea at all what the words leaving your mouth mean, or where they came from.

“This is an opportunity,” he said. “I need to talk about it, think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?” she said. “It would be terrible if you had to pay for school like a normal person.”

He pushed himself up to his hands and stretched his arms long behind him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Like a normal person.”

The air between them chilled.

Stevie didn’t want to be saying what she was saying. She only sort of meant it. It wasn’t his fault that someone had offered to pay for his school, or that he could take it or leave it. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly fair that, once again, David had the world handed to him on a silver platter. People like David didn’t have to make their own luck. It was fair to bet that no one was going to offer Stevie a free ride to school in England, and she’d solved a murder.

It also meant he might be going far away, and just when they were happy. Was there some kind of law that said things couldn’t go well between them?

“I can’t deal with this right now,” she said, pushing herself up from the ground.

Shut up, Stevie, shut up, stop talking like you’re in a reality show. . . .

“I’m sorry things can’t always follow your schedule,” he snapped back, starting to match her tone.

She was walking away, and she didn’t even know why. She was crying. She walked faster, then she jogged, then she stopped jogging because she still was no good at running. Overhead, the sky continued to darken quickly, turning a kind of green color.

At some point, as she was reaching the road that divided the park with Sunny Pines, she decided to turn back. But that was also the moment the sky decided to open up, and in short order, it began to hail. Stevie had to run with all her might to get back under cover at the entrance of the camp, then dodge from building to building to reach her cabin.

It rained all that afternoon and night, more persistently than it had at any other point during their time at the camp. Things shifted entirely to indoor mode, which was clammy and close. Aside from dinner, all the other activities were off, and the campers retreated to any covered space to stare into their tablets and phones until they went cross-eyed.