He killed the engine and stepped out into the ankle-deep water, held on to the boat’s ragged white line.

She touched her hair in embarrassment. She hadn’t bothered to braid it or brush it this morning. And she was wearing the exact same outfit she’d worn to school today and the day before. Her flannel shirt probably smelled like wood smoke.

Oh, God.

He pulled the boat up onto the beach, dropped the rope, and walked toward her. For years she’d imagined this moment; in her musings, she always knew exactly what to say. In the privacy of her imagination, they just started talking, picked up the thread of their friendship as if he’d never been gone.

But in her mind, he was Matthew, the fourteen-year-old kid who’d showed her frogs’ eggs and baby eagles, the boy who’d written her every week. Dear Leni, it’s hard at this school. I don’t think anyone likes me … And to whom she’d written back. I know a lot about being the new kid in school. It blows. Let me give you a few tips …

This … man was someone else, someone she didn’t know. Tall, long blond hair, incredibly good-looking. What could she say to this Matthew?

He reached into his backpack, pulled out the worn, banged-up, yellowed version of The Lord of the Rings that Leni had sent him for his fifteenth birthday. She remembered the inscription she’d written in it. Friends forever, like Sam and Frodo.

A different girl had written that. One who hadn’t known the ugly truth about her toxic family.

“Like Sam and Frodo,” he said.

“Sam and Frodo,” Leni repeated after him.

Leni knew it was crazy, but it seemed to her as if they were having a conversation without saying anything, talking about books and durable friendships and overcoming insurmountable odds. Maybe they weren’t talking about Sam and Frodo at all, maybe they were talking about themselves and how they had somehow grown up and stayed kids at the same time.

He pulled a small, wrapped box out of his backpack and handed it to her. “This is for you.”

“A present? It’s not my birthday.”

Leni noticed that her hands were shaking as she tore open the paper. Inside, she found a heavy black Canon Canonet camera in a leather case. She looked up at him in surprise.

“I missed you,” he said.

“I missed you, too,” she said quietly, knowing even as she said it that things had changed. They weren’t fourteen anymore. More important, her father had changed. Being friends with Tom Walker’s son would cause trouble.

It worried her that she didn’t care.

*   *   *

AT SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, Leni could hardly concentrate. She kept glancing sideways at Matthew, as if to assure herself that he was really there. Ms. Rhodes had had to yell at Leni several times to get her attention.