Charlie and Alice spun around. A few feet away from them in the shadows, a guy in jeans and a gray hoodie was tying his sneaker. His foot was propped against the lip of a fountain with a statue in it: a fat naked baby with wings, peeing. It took a second before Charlie recognized him. The valet guy from earlier in the night. He appeared younger out of uniform—her age or maybe a year older, two tops—and handsomer, too, with a pair of bright green eyes to go with that mess of dark curly hair, a slim, tightly coiled body that looked like it could move fast.

“You can’t miss it,” he said. “Not even if you tried.”

“Thanks,” said Charlie.

“Always a pleasure to help two damsels in distress,” he said with a smile, turning and strolling away.

She watched him as he moved off into the darkness, quick but without seeming to hurry. Charlie watched his back get smaller and smaller, wishing she’d thought to ask his name, until Alice tugged her arm. She turned around and they continued to make their way down to the beach.

• • •

Alice and Charlie walked along the beach in silence, each wrapped up in her own thoughts. At last Richard’s beach house rose into view. (The valet guy was right: there was certainly no missing it.) They were home, at least in the strictest sense of the word, although Alice couldn’t imagine she’d ever think of this place as home, as it was the opposite of everything she associated with home as a concept: grand, formal, cold.

It wasn’t until the girls had let themselves in the front door, walked past their reflections in the cloudy gilt-edged mirror that hung in the entranceway, and were standing at the foot of the staircase, wide and curving with an elaborately carved banister, that Alice finally spoke, her voice echoing in the enormous, empty room.

“Do you think it’s weird?” she said.

Charlie looked over at her. “What, that Cybill open-mouth kisses her relatives? And here I thought we were supposed to be the white trash.”

“No. Weird that Richard lied to us. Or, I guess, let us believe the wrong thing. Mom told us that Camilla died in a car crash, and he didn’t contradict her.”

“Well, technically Camilla did die in a car crash.”

“Technically Camilla died by drowning, I’ll bet.” All of a sudden, Alice flashed back to the earlier conversation in the car with Richard, the way he’d gone silent when she asked him about his boat. God, no wonder. Thinking of boats and water probably just made him think of Camilla.

Charlie shrugged tiredly. Then she bent her head forward so that Alice could rub the back of her neck.