“I wonder if there’s treasure here,” Kate says. “It seems like the kind of place that would have treasure.”

Walter turns his head towards her. His legs are drawn up, his arms resting on his knees, workboots planted against the rock. “You’re right,” he says. “It does.” He narrows his eyes. “Do you remember this place, Kate?”

“I…” She searches her mind for a way to stall, to play it coy, all the tricks she uses to make it through conversations. But her tricks have always been useless on Walter. “I keep thinking I might. But I don’t. Not really.”

Walter nods. “You’ve been here before. Nine years ago. You fell off the cliff into the water and broke your leg.”

“Oh dear,” says Kate. “What does cliff mean again? It sounds so familiar.”

“It’s not important.”

But it is important. It’s important to her. She tries to focus, running through her word associations. Fall. Water. Is this that place? It can’t be that place. “The waterfall?” she asks tentatively. She turns to look behind her, but everything is all wrong. No river. No bridge. No people. Just the remains of the house with the lights that guides boats, crumbling back into the earth.

“It was before the waterfall. You were out on the lake for a while. And then you came here.”

“Oh.” There is something there, something she can almost catch on to, streaking through her mind and then disappearing. Lake, lake. “When I fell through the ice,” she says, uncertainty in her voice. That doesn’t seem right either.

Walter’s shoulders tense up, and she knows she is wrong again. “That was when we were kids, Katie. At Chippewa.”

Chippewa. The word means nothing to her. But in her mind she sees a watery darkness, her path to the light above obscured by something solid, impenetrable. The image scares her, and she picks up a rock and turns it over and over in her hand, its cool, smooth surface against her skin bringing her back to the present.

Holding the stone in her palm, she gazes out over the lake. Not the waterfall, not the ice. The water, here. “I fall into water a lot,” she says.

A beat, and then Walter bursts into laughter. And it is so unexpected and beautiful that she laughs, too, even though she doesn’t know why they are laughing. It feels good. He has been so angry with her lately that it seems like years since she has heard him laugh. But I made him do this, she thinks. I’m making him laugh like this.

“Yes, you did,” Walter says. “And you do fall in the water a lot. I never even realized.” He pauses. “You did other things, too, you know.”

“I wish I could remember.”