It was impossibly strange for her to be in this place with Anthony. Because the pond was walking distance from their house, she’d been there a thousand times, mostly with Poppy. It was their favorite escape when their parents were napping or bird-watching and didn’t want to drive them anywhere. This is where they collected pinecones and ate the wild blueberries and beach plums. She and Poppy looked for tadpoles in the shallows and chased the sounds of the giant bullfrogs. If a childhood could be defined by a place, this was where Ann’s resided.

When they got to the small beach she looked around to see if any campers from the campsite were there, or a hobo, or an insomniac. The shoreline was miraculously empty. There was no wind. The water was as still as a Jell-O mold. Warm yellow lights lit up the windows in the single house on the far shore, like a pair of eyes watching them. That was Ann’s favorite house in the world. She’d always envied the people who owned it. When she and Poppy swam across the pond (it was their ritual to swim across all the Wellfleet ponds each visit, yet this strange summer they’d only made it across Gull and Great Pond), they felt funny getting close to the property. They’d squeal when they touched their wooden raft, and sprint back to the opposite, public shore, feeling as if they’d invaded a foreign territory. The house, tucked into the National Seashore, seemed to have dropped out of the sky. Ann and Poppy had tried without success to find the driveway on the fire roads. She wondered if it was even real, or part of a dream.

Anthony led Ann away from the public beach, walking barefoot through the crystal-clear water to a smaller beach tucked behind scrub pine and oak trees on an inlet a few hundred feet away. He reached down and splashed some on his face. “God, this feels good on a hot night,” he said. “I sweated all through that miserable dinner.”

He seemed more relaxed than she’d ever seen him. She noticed little things about him: the way his hair curled behind his ears in the humidity, the droplets of water that got stuck in his beard, that the skin on his face seemed soft while the rest of him was so solid and hard.

“The water is perfect.” He splashed her and smiled a mischievous smile. She could imagine him as a naughty little boy, full of sneakiness and tricks.