“I put your case in the shed where we change.” Eric’s voice makes her jump. He nods at a small building in the trees. “You should find a towel in there, watch out for the ants.”

The green water is very cool. The stress of the past weeks seems to slide from her skin as she swims. She turns on her back, the white circle of sky between the pines is fringed with branches and crisscrossed by darting swallows. Small insects float by her face; a struggling wasp brushes her lips. Mosquitoes hum above her head. After a few more lengths she pulls herself from the water and sits on the edge. Eric hands her the towel from the chair.

“I’d forgotten how much I love swimming.” She dries her face. “I used to swim a lot.”

“Back home?”

Home. People often ask that, as if it’s not possible for her to belong to more than one place or even to the country she moved to. “We couldn’t swim in the dams because of schistosomiasis, but I snuck into the pool of the hotel where I worked.”

“You met Martin out there?”

“I was working in the bar; he came in one evening when I was closing up.”

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world . . .”

“Exactly.” How random it must sound to him, how ridiculous. Another night, a different shift, and Martin wouldn’t have found her, they wouldn’t have fallen in love. They wouldn’t have shared their dreams and she wouldn’t have left her home. The smell in the garden reminds her of her grandparents’ village in Zimbabwe: sun-warmed pine, wild sage, and the faint aroma of dung.

“How old were you?”

“Eighteen.”

He nods as if he gets it, the things love makes you do when you’re young, when you think life will let you make mistakes and there’ll be time to come back from them. He reaches behind her for another beer and his skin brushes hers briefly, very lightly. She flinches.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

It isn’t okay. Her mouth has dried up and sweat prickles in her armpits. The memory has returned in a heartbeat, the mouth at her neck, the desperate struggle to breathe. She gets to her feet. “I should probably check on the kids.” She turns away to hide her trembling lips.

“See you at supper,” he calls after her; she senses him watching her leave, a little puzzled. The silvery green of the olive leaves blurs as she walks through them, as though the landscape itself were drenched in fear. She’d hoped the terror would diminish here, but if anything it’s worse. Counseling is supposed to help, but everything she googled involves money; she’ll just have to wait it out.