I give him a pat on the arm. “It’s okay, Ezra. It’s no big deal.”

He gets a wounded look in his eyes. “It’s a big deal to me, June. You’re a big deal to me. Always have been.”

“I didn’t mean that you and I aren’t a big deal. I just meant it’s not a big deal if we don’t do anything else.”

He nods but looks a bit confused. “Maybe I should go. It’s pretty late.”

“Can you drive a boat like this?”

“I could drive blindfolded, I know this lake so well.”

I take a step closer, put my hands on his chest. “You could also stay over. We won’t be high all night.” The words sound desperate, I know, but he’s flipped that switch inside me and it’s hard to turn it off if I don’t get what I want.

He groans and moves away from me. “My god. Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Look at me like that. And even if I thought it was a good idea”—he raises both eyebrows—“which I don’t, I can’t stay, not without telling my mom first. If she needed me in the night and I wasn’t there, it would be bad.”

His explanation deflates me. “You’re certainly devoted to her,” I say. It comes out sounding a bit resentful, so I try to soften it. “I mean, that’s good. It’s admirable.”

He shrugs. “She’s the only family I’ve got left.”

“You’ve got me. Your blood sister.” I take his hand and stroke the place where I cut into his palm a million years ago.

He smiles, a soft, warm, authentic smile that twists my insides up for reasons I can’t quite name. “That’s good to know.”

“Have you ever looked for your birth parents?” I ask, thinking he might actually have more than just his mom in the world.

He’s quick to shake his head. “No. I don’t think my mom would be able to deal with that. According to my neighbor Judy, who’s my mom’s best friend, my mom had a really hard time with the fact that she couldn’t have a child of her own. Adopting me was a huge deal for her, and she’s super possessive, to this day. Doesn’t even like me to mention that I’m adopted.”

“Makes sense,” I say, but deep down I’m thinking that his relationship with his mother sounds a tad suffocating.

I walk him down to the dock to say good-bye and thank him for bringing dinner. He says he’ll be away for a couple of days—he has to pick up a boat for one of his customers—but when he gets back, he wants to see me again.

“Too bad we can’t go for a nice dinner at Windset,” I say, nodding in the direction of the closed-down resort. “Whatever happened, anyway?”

“Poor management, mostly, and some scandals with senior staff members, or something like that.”