At the entrance, Justin drops his robe, preening, before slipping in hip-deep. Sadie peels her clothes off, folds them neatly into a pile. Consciously unselfconscious as she moves.

Maeve knows that no one is thinking more about Sadie’s body than Sadie herself. Twenty-three, and with everything to prove; there must be someone here she’s trying to impress. She finds herself watching the girl. The fallout from that walk in the woods surprised her.

It surprises her that Karo more or less has a spy.

It’s a wide enough pool, with its nooks and corners, that Maeve’s own space seems oddly private. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again, Anna is there, crouched beside a stone lion, water pouring from its mouth, her face obscured by a camera. The lens makes her look one-eyed, a Cyclops. Maeve stares into it, first startled, then steady. It’s only after a moment that she thinks to wrap an arm around herself to cover her breasts in her thin lace bra. Her bathing suit forgotten back at home.

“Tell me again what kind of work you do?”

Anna laughs.

“You’re deep enough, don’t worry.” She lowers the camera to her side. “Most people, that’s their first instinct—cover up! It took you a moment to even worry about it. I like that.”

Maeve lets one shoulder rise and fall. “Dancer, you know. We don’t have any privacy. The body is everything. But it’s also just a thing. Right? You get used to that idea. This thing to form and reform, push around.” Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Dan on the far deck, examining some piece of jutting tile. Karo, her pants cuffed neatly to the knee, sits checking her phone on a bench.

“That’s me too.” Anna holds up her cracked fingers. “Like you say, form and reform.”

“Is that from the chemicals?”

“Nah, just paint, and then paint remover. I’m using a technique called rotoscope, where I draw right on top of the film. Right onto the humans, really, as they move.” She zips the camera into its waterproof case and sets it down. “Man, I wish you were staying longer! I’d love to do some work with a dancer.”

She strips down to her underclothes and slides into the next pool over but turns back to keep talking across the divide. Maeve is grateful; it’s easy to feel alone when you’re new. She hasn’t had close girlfriends, not since her days in the corps. Her star rose too quickly at Nouvelle Vague, and then of course Iain wanted her to himself.

Anna brings an easy intimacy to everything she does. Insta-pal. She leans her elbows over the pool’s edge: “You had the dream yet?”

“Dream?”