“Stop,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t talk about twenty years ago. Not even to make things easier on my father.”

She takes a step toward me. I want her to stay back, because the closer she gets, the more I want to go to her room with her. She is achingly beautiful in the moonlight.

“How did I ruin your life?” I ask.

She shakes her head, absolving me of any possible sin. “You didn’t.” Another step. “But you can save it.”

“Livy, listen—”

“Come with me,” she pleads. “Right now.”

If she had kissed me then, I would have walked away. But she didn’t. She picked up her purse from the pool chair, took my hand, and led me across the parking lot toward the motel, a purposeful urgency in her stride.

The déjà vu of walking beside the numbered doors is powerful enough to dislocate time. If I were to close my eyes and open them again, I would see the eighteen-thousand-dollar gown flowing behind her like a trail of mist. The lifetimes of water that have passed under the bridge since that night have all flowed back in a span of moments.

When she opens the door and closes us inside, I pull her to me and kiss her with the thirst of a binge drinker returning to the bottle. My questions fade to dying sparks, made irrelevant by the absolute connection of our lips and hands. I don’t even know I am backing her toward the door until she collides with it, the unyielding wooden face holding her as I continue forward, pressing against her, my hands groping at her dress, searching for the hem.

“That’s right,” she says hoarsely. “That’s right . . . that’s—”

The moment my hand finds her sex, she is breathing like a sprinter in the last few yards of a race. She kisses me with almost desperate passion, then pushes down the front of the strapless dress and pulls my mouth to a breast. In seconds both her arms are outstretched, fingers splayed and quivering, discharging the frantic energy pouring from her core. Touching her this way is rapture, at once within her and without, needing no other thing, no friend, no thought—

The knock at the door reverberates through our bodies, stunning us from our trance. Yet still Livy presses herself down against my hand, unwilling to let the world back in. I jerk her away from the door and onto the bed, fearing someone might shoot through the thin metal.

The knocking comes again. This time, with the distance to the bed and with half my faculties restored, it sounds reasonably discreet.

“Who is it?” I call, digging in my pocket for Kelly’s gun, hating the ragged edge of fear in my voice.

“Kelly.”