Elizabeth got to her feet quickly. “I was telling you about Yarkie,” she spoke in a guide’s neutral voice. She pointed eastward toward Bonnie and Craig now sitting atop a distant dune, outlined against the light sky. “Past Bonnie and Craig there, about a mile due east along this north shore, we have a whopper of a kettle. It was covered over years ago, like the Yarkie pirate caves people talk about.”

“Interesting,” Hubbard allowed. There probably had been pirates on Yarkie, he considered. It was a swashbuckling thought for a Californian sitting on this New England shore with this lovely New England young woman so obviously avoiding anything personal between them. Her perfume mixed tantalizingly with the salty air of the sea. From this strand, Peter Hubbard thought, the Atlantic would be stretching north, past Newfoundland to the arctic, if he remembered his geography. To the east, the waves would be rolling in non-­stop from Europe. It brought home again the vastness of the sea and land, and the inseparability of everything on the planet, inorganic and organic alike. As a biologist, this break in his university routine was doubly welcome, Peter Hubbard considered. It was good to get out of the classrooms and museums and into the air—this air, this moonlight, with this beautiful woman. But he had better not think of that. He was on Yarkie Island for other reasons.

To turn his mind, he asked, “What’s a lighthouse doing so far back from the water?” The sand spit before them did indeed run a good quarter of a mile out into the sea.

Elizabeth answered with the assurance of a local. “Everything keeps shifting all over the Cape shores. You can have a beach one year, and nothing the next. Over at Nauset, they had to build four lighthouses to keep ahead of the ocean.”

“So this light was once at the edge of the island?”

“It was once hundreds of feet out there on rocks you can’t see anymore.”

The man turned to look back at the building. It seemed haloed in the moon, tapering gracefully upward to the walkway with its spidery platform circling the old glass.

“It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said. “When I’m on Yarkie, I sometimes think I never want to go back to Cambridge . . .”

He nodded. “I can understand the peace and quiet.” Then he asked, “But isn’t it fierce in the winter?”

She shook her head. “The Gulf Stream runs along here not far off the east shore. It keeps the weather quite moderate. We hardly ever get much snow.”

The man noticed her identification with the “we” of the Yarkie residents. “I suppose that’s why your trees and vegetation are so thick.”