“I know we haven’t talked about this in a while—” she said. “But when you turn eighteen, the official custody agreement allows you to get in touch with your father if you wish. And if that’s important to you, I’ll help you find him. But there’s no hurry. You have your whole life to do that. Please believe me when I say that Peter was your real father for all of those years you had him. He was as real as it gets.”

Rebecca put her greasy, clam-roll hand over her daughter’s chickeny hand and they sat like that for several seconds while the sounds of the evening settled around them: the cars going by on their way to and from the island, the kid at the next table having a temper tantrum, raucous laughter from a group of teenagers. In this moment Rebecca felt a shift, as quick as the heartbeat of a bird. It was, maybe, a shift toward possibility. Toward a new kind of happiness.

Although there was still the Colby thing. Which wasn’t happy at all. “We’ll talk about the Colby thing later,” she told Alexa. “We are not finished with this discussion.”

Eventually Alexa took her hand back (clearly, enough was enough) and she said, “Are you done with this?” And she gathered up the paper containers and the balled-up napkins and she shuttled them into the garbage.

62.

Alexa

Alexa studied her face in the mirror behind the sun visor in Cam’s minivan. She looked the same, but she had felt different, since things between her and Cam had really heated up. Since the race. They’d hung out nearly every day. They’d gone mini golfing and go-carting and swimming. She spent a night at the Winnepesaukee house, safely installed in one of the guest bedrooms, hoping the whole time Cam would sneak in in the middle of the night—he did, but only until unexpected hallway noises put an end to their tryst. Cam took her around the lake in the speedboat, and they stopped to fool around on the far side of Rattlesnake Island. He’d put in a lot of shifts at Market Basket, and Alexa had done the same at the Cottage. She had continued to record her Silk Stockings videos, even, with Cam’s help, choosing a few topics she hadn’t thought about on her own.

Cam got really into the research. Sometimes too into it, maybe, but it was helpful having someone off whom to bounce ideas, and his assistance freed her up to do more planning for her L.A. move. She found a couple of long-term Airbnbs where she could potentially stay while looking for an apartment.

Every time she put up a new video, Cam posted a salient, adorable comment; it was as if he was competing with jt76 for the award given to the nicest channel subscriber.