“Oh, no, we’re not. Get a jacket. I want to show you something.”

Outside the hut she led him over a path almost obliterated by the low, thick vegetation. He recognized bayberries and here and there a leafless beach plum. The fog was so thick he could see only where he was walking and the fine waggle of her tight blue jeans directly ahead of him.

“You know where you’re going?”

“I could go with my eyes closed. Careful, now. From here on in we go slowly. We’re almost there.”

It appeared to be a sheer drop. They stood on the lip of a sea cliff, the mist like a wall in front of them, but below them a drop—into solid fog—which his imagination told him was horrifying, a replica of the hundred-foot plunge he had used to take for money in Benson’s Aquacade.

“Is it steep? And far down?”

“Very steep. And pretty far down. It frightens people when they see it for the first time. But it’s quite safe. I get to the bottom by sitting down and riding a little sandslide on my rear.”

“Well, look at the vehicle.”

She grinned, accepting it as a compliment. While he squatted nervously a few feet behind her, she dangled her feet over the edge of the cliff, her eyes closed as she sniffed the cold salt fog.

“You love it,” he accused.

“The coastline’s always changing, yet it’s still the way it was when my grandfather had the shack built for my grandmother. There’s a Realtor in Provincetown who keeps offering me a small fortune for it but I want my kids to see it like this, and their children. It’s part of the John F. Kennedy National Seashore, so nothing else can be built here, but the ocean keeps nibbling away at the land, a few feet every year. In fifty years or so the cliff will be worn back almost to the house. I’ll have to have it moved back or the ocean will get it.”

It seemed to him that they hung suspended in the fog. Far below, the surf boomed and hissed. He listened and shook his head.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“The fog. It’s an alien atmosphere.”

“Not so much on land. In the water, it’s completely alien, it’s almost a mystical experience,” she said. “When I lived here, sometimes I wouldn’t bother with a bathing suit and I’d go skinny-dipping in the fog. It was indescribable, like becoming part of the sea.”

“Isn’t it also dangerous?”

“You can hear the surf, even from far out. It tells you where the land is. A couple of times . . .” She trailed off uncertainly, and then, as if making up her mind, went on. “A couple of times I swam straight out but I didn’t have the courage to keep going.”