Lara could feel her mother’s contempt, undercut by her need. If they sold the house, their money problems would be over. Everything would be over. Lara thought of her room at home, how empty it seemed in the night without Teddy to wander in and snuggle into her daybed. She found herself walking carefully down the steep wooden steps to the beach, holding the rope banister in one hand, her third cocktail in the other. She felt cut loose, lost, like a forgotten astronaut twirling in space.

The sand along the edge of the sea was cool and moist. Lara’s feet felt rubbery as she splashed them in the silt. Every few steps, the water stroked her ankles. Her lips were slightly numb. She wondered if she had reached her house yet and looked up at the familiar bluff to see Mac sitting in the sand, facing the waves. He was right there, staring at her. She realized she’d been hoping to find him; a little balloon of happiness rose in her belly. She stopped, holding her diaphanous dress down with one hand as the fine silk billowed around her in the breeze.

“Venus on the half shell,” he said.

Lara came and sat next to him, dribbling the cocktail in the sand. “Oops,” she said.

“Just as well.”

“I’ve seen that Venus painting. Botticelli, right?”

“In Florence?”

“Yes. After … Last year, my mother and I went on a trip to Italy. We saw loads of paintings, and that was one of my favorites.”

“You travel often?” Mac asked.

She shook her head. “I grew up here and we never really left much, that’s my house up there, can you see it? It was my grandparents’. We lived there always until my mother moved to Paris and I went to boarding school because, um … my little brother died.”

“Oh, God.”

“He got a tiny cut in school when he was playing sports and then he was throwing up when he came home, and everybody thought it was a stomach bug and my mother put him to bed, but it was septicemia and he died in his sleep. He—he died in my room.” Lara had not yet spoken these words to anyone, and they came out of her with the astonishment she still felt.

“Oh, Lara. I am so, so sorry.”

It was like vomiting. For the first time since Teddy’s death, Lara felt her grief rise up and crash out of her. The hot tears ran down her cheeks and into her mouth; she licked them, tasting the salt, snot flowing from her nose, dripping on the sand. She had a vague sense of turning to liquid and melting into the ocean. The warmth of Mac’s arm against her own was the only thing reminding her she had a body.