I look away, unwilling to explain my actions on the night of the ball without reciprocal explanations from her.

“We should have drunk that bottle twenty years ago,” she says. “The extra time it would have taken might have changed everything that came after.”

I shake my head, unwilling to grant her this easy revision of history. “Then I wouldn’t have Annie.”

For a moment she looks as though she might make some cruel remark, but her face softens. “I didn’t mean it like that. We’re here now. I’m not complaining.” She brings herself upright in the water, flips a wet strand of hair from her eyes, then reaches out and touches my nose. “Will you do one thing?”

“What?”

“Kiss me.”

Livy has given me nothing that I need, not a single answer. But I want to kiss her. Between the fatigue of treading cold water and the proximity of her naked body, I feel as though every capillary in my skin has dilated, magnifying sensation. She swims closer and slips a hand behind my neck. I lean forward and press my lips to hers, gently at first, then harder in response to her passion. Treading water is impossible now. I take a quick breath through my nose as we slide beneath the surface.

Undulating in the slow current of the spring, time is the oxygen remaining in our lungs and blood, but there is enough to remember her taste, the pressure of her breasts against me as we sink like a single creature, an incarnation of salt water, only slightly denser than the fluid surrounding us. As my chest begins to burn, I feel the soft roughness between her legs, pressing against my thigh, seeking more complete union, and I swell with unthinking eagerness. Then my lungs betray me, sending me fighting toward the shimmering surface. I smash through gasping for air, resenting the fact that I need it. Livy gently breaks the surface beside me, her neck and shoulders flushed the color of broken seashells. She pulls back her hair, then treads easily as her clear blue eyes search mine.

“I want you inside me.”

I shake my head.

“I love you, Penn. I always have. I just didn’t have the courage to choose you.”

Her words are like needles thrust into my heart, triggering emotions too intense to withstand, much less interpret. Caitlin’s warning on the plane sounds in my head: She could really mess you up—

“You don’t have any right to say that, Livy.”

“I know. I won’t say it again. But I had to let you know.”

I roll away from her and swim back to the fallen tree that leads to the shore. As I climb onto it, I turn and see her perched on the cypress knee where she left her bathing suit, slipping on the white lycra as gracefully as she does everything else.