Typically, Lisa loved this time of the day, when it was over, when there was officially no more that could possibly be accomplished or discussed. But tonight she found herself downright miserable in the silence of the room, with her own thoughts suddenly magnified. She realized she was feeling something she hadn’t expected to feel on this trip: deeply, deeply sad. So sad, she was finding it difficult to breathe right. Her throat seemed too long or too narrow. She hadn’t felt this sad and this far away from everything and everyone since the days following her mom’s diagnosis. How could this be? She had thought that spending time with Poppy would be pure joy, that these days together would be a blissful reprieve from daily drudgery at home. But instead she was finding Poppy’s radiant energy cruel in the way that it illuminated her own misery. Poppy was living a good life—that was undeniable. It wasn’t a life that Lisa desired, at least not on its surface, not that husband or that home or that tax bracket. It was Poppy herself who had something that Lisa desperately wanted. Earlier, when she had asked Poppy if she ever imagined herself in another life, Poppy had said no without hesitation, almost incredulous at the question, as though it were rhetorical. This was what Lisa wanted most. She wanted to be so sure she was living the right life that that question seemed absurd. She wanted to stop feeling that somehow she’d gotten confused, fallen off course, and the right path forward had vanished altogether. She wanted to stop feeling like she was doomed, like all that lay before her were different wrong lives, and she was on the brink of committing herself to one of these seriously wrong lives for the rest of her days, leaving no possibility for escape or a redo. Lisa didn’t want to feel that she was on the brink. She wanted to know that her life could be her home.

In their bedroom, Poppy changed into the old extra-large Mobil gas T-shirt of John’s that she always slept in, and John lay in bed bare-chested, wearing only a pair of briefs with elastic that was frayed around the thighs. He had turned the TV on and was clicking absently through the channels. Eventually, he settled on The X-Files.

Poppy turned off the light and crawled into bed. The air conditioning was cranking, the room was cold. She watched Mulder poke at a skull with the tip of a pen. She said, “We’ve seen this one.”

“Have we?” John handed her the remote.

Poppy said, “I wish I had more white clothing.”

“Why?” John said, although he too had observed throughout the day that everyone on the island wore white. “You drop one pepperoni and the thing’s ruined.”

“Is that why we don’t wear white?” Poppy said. “Because we drop pepperonis and they don’t?”

John laughed. “No,” he said. “It’s because they can afford to replace everything they own, times ten, without a thought. Don’t make any sense for us to buy things that can be ruined so easy.”