Scott didn’t object to the idea of John going for help while he sat in the shade of the cart. He tipped his glass toward John, offered a brittle laugh in response to no joke, and said, “I’ll hold down the fort, then.”

Lisa and Poppy settled themselves on beach chairs that faced the water. Lisa was slick as an otter, gleaming with a sheen of sunscreen. She wore a white bikini and a wide-brimmed straw hat that shaded her face. Poppy had tied her hair on top of her head and sported a distinct farmer’s tan—forearms deep brown and freckled, shoulders nearly as pale as Lisa’s. She wore a navy one-piece and large aviator sunglasses with reflective lenses.

Alex was napping on a towel next to them, a baseball cap over her face, and Rae was on the far side of her.

Lisa called down, “Rae, what’re you reading?”

Rae didn’t look up. “A book.”

Lisa persisted, “What’s it about?”

Rae released an annoyed exhalation and tucked her auburn hair behind her ear. “I don’t know, like, this family. It’s about a lot of things. OK? God.”

“Excuse me for showing an interest,” Lisa said, and gave Poppy a nervous and apologetic smile.

Rae shifted on her towel and fiddled with a hoop earring. She was trying to maintain a nonchalant expression on her face, hoping to high heaven that her mother wouldn’t ask to see the book and open it to the page that Rae had been reading and rereading for the past hour.

Rae spent several hours in their local library each week. Her top quest was to find books in the Adult Literary Fiction section that contained graphic sex scenes, but had benign covers and synopses that her mother wouldn’t question. Lisa wouldn’t let Rae check out erotica or any other sort of genre fiction with a trashy cover, and Rae had already exhausted the YA section for sexually explicit material—Judy Blume was about as racy as it got. So nowadays, library visits consisted of Rae feverishly skimming adult literary novels with an eye for words like “naked,” “throb,” and “breast.” In her current pick, Rae was reading again and again the scene in which a young woman seduced her father’s best friend. The young woman knew it was a terrible idea, but she did it anyway, and they became secret lovers. As Rae devoured the description of the seduction, a foamy sweetness curled up through her.

Rae looked up from her book when she saw that Ryan and Kimmy were making their way in from the ocean. Ryan’s black hair was dripping, blue swim trunks tight around his muscular thighs. Rae kept her chin low, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Kimmy spread out her towel next to her sister, and Rae emitted a small groan, as though Kimmy’s very existence on the beach made it a less pleasant place. Ryan shook out his snorkel gear and set it on the ground next to Poppy. In his hand he cradled a tiny dead crab, its body dime-sized, legs white and delicate as a snowflake.