She spread the blanket out on the beach. She lay down and patted the spot next to her.

The second Fray opened his eyes to the starry sky above and listened to the crash and roll of the waves, he decided to share a realization he’d had earlier but had seemed too private to talk about at dinner.

“It’s the thirtieth anniversary of my sobriety,” he said.

“Tonight?”

“The Friday of Labor Day weekend thirty years ago, yes,” he said. “Do you remember that night? You and I and Mal and Jake went to the Box, and Coop stayed home to talk to Krystel. I went to the bar to get you a chardonnay. You very specifically asked for one from the Russian River Valley, I’ll never forget that, and they didn’t have it, of course, they didn’t have any white wine, only wine coolers, so I got you a beer instead, but then I couldn’t find you. So I checked outside and you were with that preppy kid from the city. You left with him.”

“That was Kip Sudbury,” Leland said.

Kip Sudbury: The name rang a bell, one more recent than that night thirty years ago. Was he a Wall Street guy? A hedge fund guy?

“He was involved in that bond scandal back in…”

“Oh, right,” Fray said.

“He took me to 21 Federal to meet his friends and the next day we went sailing on his father’s yacht.”

“Well, I sat in the back of Mal’s Blazer and drank by myself until the bar closed,” Fray said. Memory was a slippery thing. Fray couldn’t remember what he’d been served for lunch on his plane earlier that day but he could vividly picture himself in his Nirvana T-shirt, smoldering like a red-hot coal in the back of Mal’s car. He remembered being tempted to go with Leland and her New York friends because he’d thought he read some apprehension in her expression—but then Fray realized that what Leland feared was him coming along. She didn’t want him to embarrass her, and expose her for the regular Baltimore girl she was. “And then when we got back to the cottage, we realized Coop had left the island and I snatched a bottle of Jim Beam and headed down the beach.”

Leland turned on her side toward him and laid her fingers across his biceps. He inhaled her scent. She had always smelled spicy—like sandalwood and ginger—rather than sweet or floral. That was one of the many things he loved about her.

“I stripped down to go for a swim,” Fray said. “At least, I think that was my intention because when the paramedics found me, I was buck naked, passed out in the sand.”