“What’s the deal with Graham not having a car?” she asked Harry.

“I don’t know.”

“Is this about the bad thing that had happened in Seattle?”

“What bad thing?” asked Harry.

Polly and Helen were leaving for the pool when Drake walked through the gate an hour later, carrying a bouquet for Maude—they had planned to go for lunch—and another tote bag of Hollywood blather. Polly, forgetting about the lesson, had told him she could work, but Drake claimed to find the whole outing interesting, though his face dipped when Helen explained why they were taking a walk first: to look for Ari, of course. The three of them took the path along the river with the dogs. Drake had never noticed the osprey nest, despite floating by it a dozen times in the last four days. It was a little like the time he said he’d never seen the grapevine on Polly’s porch, after two summers walking underneath it.

At the pool, Helen plopped right into the water now, a happy otter. At the far end, the city’s athletic director was training the season’s lifeguards, all teenaged and female and buzzing with Drake’s presence. He made it worse by waving to them.

“Did you ever play a lifeguard?” asked Polly.

“Never.”

“You won’t lead Maude on at lunch?”

“I’m being led,” said Drake. “I’m being used, but pleasantly. She wants me to know her stories. She thinks someone, someday, should do justice to all the shit she and her cousins got up to. Or the earlier stuff, all these strange stories about her mother and her father and her stepfather.”

“Jane won’t want anyone knowing most of it.”

“I’m invited to your picnic, and I know your beautiful mother will give me the stink eye the whole time. I won’t tell her secrets.” He waved to Connie, who pretended not to see him.

Polly went to the edge to tell Connie about Helen’s nightmare—boiling pool water—and Connie hissed that it was humiliating to be seen in a bathing suit.

She’d spent every summer morning in a suit for years. “Connie, you look great.”

“I know how I look.” The girl’s face was dusty pink, a flush over queasiness.

Drake and Polly buzzed through script turndowns, as usual without acknowledging that there were only ever turndowns: Irishmen in Mexico in 1848, a romantic comedy about ecologists, a murder drama about cooks (though Drake found the number of available murder weapons compelling). He still liked a story about a predatory bartender; he was at this point attracted to anything that could be filmed in Montana and incensed that no one wanted a second fly-fishing movie.