“Shit,” Carly says, and I think it’s about the fire, but then she says, “It’s been way too cold to sleep in a car.”

I hand her another log to stack. If Matty were banished to the woods, I bet his first act would be to make a fire pit. To burn things for light and warmth and just to play with flames.

“If I’d known,” Carly says, “I would have— I mean”—she laughs—“Rosemary probably wouldn’t have let you stay, but I could have… I would have found a place for you.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her, and my eyes are stinging, which is stupid. We can’t go back in time so I can stay with one of Carly’s weird friends. And anyway, when Carly needed a place to stay, it was with me and Adam. So maybe the only thing that’s true is her feelings, but that’s still something. “It all just happened the way it happened.”

I can feel the lake. I can taste it in the air. The way the water laps at the gravel shore makes sense, like it’s part of me. “I feel like this is where I started,” I tell Carly. “Like maybe nothing counted before I got here.”

“I feel that way about Ithaca too,” she says. She pulls her lighter from her jacket. Dumps her pack of cigarettes into her hand. She keeps one out to smoke, stuffs the rest in her pocket. After she lights up, she sets the cardboard carton on fire, tossing it under the tower she’s made with our logs.

“You got any paper?” she asks, blowing smoke as she talks. “The leaves are all damp.”

I offer her a handful of pocket lint and gum wrappers. “Is it enough?”

“I can make it work,” she says, and even though everything around us shines in the moonlight, covered in condensation, I believe that she can.

She balls the lint and throws it under the log tower, where it will catch when the flames start to travel. She’s strategic with the gum wrappers, using one after another to keep a flame focused at one small spot.

“Ha ha!” she says, with the first crackle of wood, grinning, like she knew all along it would work. She’s different here. Her makeup doesn’t shape her face in these shadows. In the moonlight, she’s young and strong, and nothing strange. She watches her tower.

“Ha ha!” she says again, when the flames break the surface of another log.

Once the fire is safely raging, we throw damp twigs at it to hear the pop and sizzle. When it gets too warm, we hang our jackets over a tree branch instead of moving further away.

“What was your mom like?” Carly asks.