He shrugged. “My house is right there.”

She looked to where he was pointing, and saw a large but not abnormally large—not Richard large, in other words—house a dune or two away.

“It’s sort of like camping out in the backyard,” Tommy said. “I can go inside, tuck into my nice warm bed anytime I want to. It’s just, sometimes I don’t want to. Sometimes I like it better out here.”

Alice nodded her understanding. “Sometimes I hate people, too.”

He laughed, looking different suddenly, younger, less serious.

“Not hate people,” Alice quickly amended, realizing how that sounded. “More love alone time. It was hard to get privacy where we lived in Cambridge. Our place was small and kind of cramped for four people, and I shared a room with my sister. When it got to be too much, I’d climb out onto the roof. I would do it even in the winter when it was freezing cold. I’d just bundle up, bring a blanket. Anything to be by myself, you know?”

“Yeah, I do. There just are times you need to be alone with your thoughts.”

She dropped down beside him in the sand. When she did, she saw that it wasn’t his thoughts he’d been alone with last night; it was the view. In the distance, but dead ahead, front and center, was the Greeves Bridge, the spot where Camilla had chosen to end her young life. Alice flashed back to a book she’d read in American Lit last year, The Great Gatsby, and the green light shining at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, the one Gatsby would spend hours staring at across the bay.

They sat there in silence for a while, listened to the sound of the waves, the scattered seagull cries, the occasional crack of a golf ball.

After a bit, Tommy said, “You play golf?”

Alice shook her head. Then it occurred to her that he might have been about to ask her to go golfing with him, and she began kicking herself for her answer. She was about to revise it when he said, with a sigh, “Me either. It’s the world’s most boring game, as far as I’m concerned. My dad loves it, though. He can’t get enough of it.”

Unable to think of anything else to say, she said, “My stepdad’s teaching my mom.”

“Poor her.” Tommy stood up, brushed the sand off the seat of his khakis. “I think I’m going to head home, catch a couple hours’ sleep. I’ll see you around.”

As he started off toward his house, Alice called out to him: “Hey, you forgot this.”