On days off together, they took Leo to the beach and went for swims and walks and napped in the sun. They crabbed and fished and retrieved recycling from all the condos, sorted through the glass bottles and aluminum cans and took them to the collection site at the Piggly Wiggly in Ashby, where they would get fifteen cents for every recyclable. In the evenings, they played Cribbage and Spider Solitaire; they watched sitcoms on a tiny rabbit-eared television set and sunsets from the deck.

Keats eventually proposed marriage with the engagement ring his mother had worn—his father had kept it for all the years since her death—and they were married one October afternoon at a courthouse in Beaufort.

They intended to leave Fripp Island as soon as Keats’s time on the registry had expired. They were eager to go, but if they were to move while he was still listed, they would be required to alert all their new neighbors to his status, which would of course contaminate relationships in any new community. So the plan was to head south with as many of their possessions as they could pack into Keats’s truck as soon as his time on the registry was up. They had a few small fishing towns picked out on the coast of Georgia, where they thought they could happily start a new life.

Five months. Assuming the paperwork went through, they would be in Georgia by Christmas.

8

POPPY WOKE AT five o’clock the next morning, when the air was still blackish blue and certainly not cool, but not yet hot. She shuffled to the closet for her running shoes and sports bra, dressed quietly so as not to disturb John, and went down to the kitchen. She boiled water on the stove and stirred in a spoonful of instant coffee, just like she did every morning at home. She had noted yesterday that the house contained a French press and an espresso maker, but she preferred her instant. Better flavor. She didn’t care what anybody said.

When she stepped out onto the back patio to do her stretches, she noticed a set of footprints in the sand leading from the house to the beach. She did not see a return set of prints. It entered her mind that Scott, in midlife-crisis mode, might have gone skinny-dipping, and she decided not to follow the footprints to investigate.

She drank her coffee, walked around to the front of the house, and out to the street, where she took a left. She planned to go to the tip of the island and back, a two-mile circuit.

Cicadas buzzed and air-conditioning units roared. The air smelled of fish and gasoline and sweet blossoms. Poom-poom-poom-poom-poom, her tennis shoes padded softly along the footpath. She passed gorgeous modern condominiums with entire walls of glass. Sprawling plantation-style homes with white-pillared porches and immaculate lawns that looked too good to be real, surrounded by sand and scraggly brush. Every tenth house, it seemed, was not a mansion but a small shanty with a beat-to-hell roof and pastel wooden signs stuck crookedly into the ground near the entrance, messages like Seas the Day and Peace, Love, and Sandy Feet.