“I think another storm is coming,” Mitch murmured, listening to the wind kicking up around them. It had an unseasonable chill in it.

  Cassie squinted at the clouds but offered no other commentary on the likelihood of storms. Her mind was elsewhere. She sat with her legs crossed, her can balanced between her slim ankles, and her eyes stayed pinned on the crackling sky above them. “Grandad hated fireworks,” she told him offhand. “They always made his eyes well behind his cataracts. He became detached in time, was back in the war. It scared me. How real it still was. As real as I was.” It must have been frightening for a child to realize the horrors of his past were not gone but sleeping, able to wake up at a moment’s notice.

  “This show is like a war,” Mitch murmured, his voice nearly lost in the distant booms. And the past felt very close. His mind stuck on her grandfather, on his humorous eyes as he repaired something stubborn. Mitch would stare at those clever, knobby-knuckled fingers, as patient as End Times while he fiddled with gears smaller than a pinky nail. “Cassie, I’ve always wondered…” He hesitated. He was venturing into delicate territory, brushing against old secrets. “How did he do it?”

  Mr. Fairchild had owned a lot of the property around the new boundaries of the lake since the Grand Destiny’s earliest construction, all the lakefront the corps didn’t preserve. But as far as Mitch knew, he hadn’t been rich or power hungry. He hadn’t even kept all the land he bought. In a few cases, Mom had told him Mr. Fairchild gave acres away to Prosper residents from the old days. But, when so many had lost everything, how did the son of shop owners get all that land in the first place?

  Cassie had been scanning the woods, but she returned her attention to him with a thoughtful frown. “I never asked,” Cassie admitted. “I didn’t know when he was alive. His accountant called me after he was gone. On my eighteenth birthday, actually.” She picked at the hem of her shorts. “I knew about the land that we lived on and that the shop stood on, but I had no idea what he really owned. I still don’t. I never wanted to know, really. I told the accountant to stay on, only tell me what I needed to know, and that I didn’t want to sell.”

  Above them, yellow stars split apart in the sky. “I was afraid, I suppose,” Cassie said. The reflection of fireworks bloomed reddish on her pale throat. “Overwhelmed. And betrayed. It felt cruel that he didn’t tell me or put Mom in charge, that he didn’t even explain it to me. There are a lot of things I wish he had told me.”

  Quiet fell between them as the Fourth of July rocketed on in the distance. Not a single cricket sang, no rustling came from the bank. All the creatures of the lake were hidden away from the two storms: the fireworks and the earliest hint of lightning.

  “With everything going on, it may be stupid, but I love being out here with you, Cass,” Mitch said at last, looking over at her as the grand finale crackled in the deep of her eyes, its cacophony bouncing between the hills and the trees around them. “I’m really glad—well, you really thought on your feet last night. I don’t know what I would’ve done if Daley had…” The wind tossed the sound around, dark clouds pushing competitively against the leftover firework smoke. A storm really was brewing.

  Cassie looked at him then, a kite reeled back to earth. She seemed to read his mind. “It’s going to be a bad storm. Worst of the season.” Lightning flared overhead as the weather turned, startling them both. Cassie found Mitch again, her face set. “Come inside.”

  “You’re right.” Mitch roused himself, oblivious. “Better get to shelter.”

  “Mitch.” In the break between rolls of thunder, her voice was solitary and loud. Her eyes were very soft. “Come inside.”

  “That’s what I—Oh. Right.” It was still new, this thing. New and precious and fragile. Numbness gave over to an intense build of heat, of melting. Mitch touched her face, the skin right beside that undeniable stare. He’d never been accused of being a particularly smart man, but she wouldn’t have to repeat her command again. He was hers.

  Rain began to plop down in large, heavy drops as first Cassie then Mitch descended from the roof of the RV to the ground, where she took his hand. It felt unreal, the smell of the rain, the frankness in her eyes, and the way she pressed against his chest as if the years of distance between them were nothing but a moment and a step.

  She pulled him out of the rain.

  * * *

  “Damnation and…hellfire.” Hellfire indeed. Lark’s eyes burned. Afterimages of the grand finale, which had struck the sky over the dam like a dozen snare drums, still hung above the boat, long weeping willow trails of smoke bleeding onto the water. Now it was a stale battlefield. June was soaked from her dive, the swim she’d taken across the lake, which glowed orange and gold in the glow of the arson above. Lark hadn’t thought, had just hauled her into the boat, her hair heavy with water and the scent of gunpowder.

  The show was ending. A few engines roared to life behind them as some boats broke formation and chugged toward home, but most hung under the night’s spell. The air, which felt wet and humid, buzzed and chuffed and hooted with churning water, horns, and motors. And something else: a growing growl of wind.

  June had sooty smears on her cheeks from her labor on the fireworks barge. She was still full of frenetic movement, her muscles trembling with exhaustion she didn’t seem to feel. Her face was electrified, eyes darting with energy yet to be spent.

  Lark tried to catch her breath, blinking the supernovas in her vision away. The little boat she’d borrowed from the Destiny bobbed as others went by them. People were starting to go in; the smoke of the performance was moving fast on a changed breeze, and everyone was waking up. Lark felt several steps behind, nowhere near ready to operate a watercraft, especially with June, mistress of the night’s tricks herself, suddenly there and radiating this energy that got in Lark’s blood. “You did that? That was—something else.”

  June looked sharply at her and nodded with a jerk of her chin. Her fingertips, tapping a rhythm on her knees, were red, pinched. Burned.

  “I never wanted to be like this,” June burst out. The boat bucked dully under them, and she pressed her hands to her mouth, gaze flicking to the smoke that blocked out the stars, hovering right over the water. “If you think I don’t show restraint, I’ll tell you I try. I know I said I was going to go, but I didn’t. I stayed—I try to stay, I try not to be too much, I try to build a solid life. No one ever believes me, but I do. I try so hard to be—”

  Lark could almost sense the words she bit off. Good. Still. Tame.

  The wind stirred up around them, and June curled her fingers together.

  “Jack told me he could help me.” Water dripped from her hair down her cheek. “With how I am. He understood, you know? The way I start fires and can never stay out of trouble, and when I try, trouble just bursts out of me anyway. But tonight…” June shook her head. “I saw under the water.”

  The jeweler’s loupe felt heavy around Lark’s neck at those words. She nodded, keeping her voice low and even. Suddenly it felt like there might be listeners somewhere close. “What did you see?”

  The water seemed even choppier now, and June dropped her gaze. “You know what I saw,” she murmured. “I think he knew too. I think he liked waking them up, liked scaring them. He liked setting fire over their heads, over their town down there, when there’s nothing they can do. That wasn’t ever what I wanted.”

  Lark stared down at the dark ripples of the water, and her throat ached. Some part of her suddenly wanted to stroke the surface, let the crests of the wakes brush her palm. She turned to the ignition. “We should get out of here.” It had started to rain gently, but a distant growl of thunder promised the storm.

  “Stop.” June caught her wrist gently. “Don’t start the motor. I don’t—I don’t want to stir it up anymore. The wind’s towing us back anyway.” It was true; the currents set by the swiftly thinning crowds around them meant the docks already loomed nearer, and beyond, the great monolith of the dam.

  “Okay.” Lark turned back to June and slipped her hand into hers. They bobbed along, nearer and nearer to the bank between E and F Docks as the wakes of bigger boats shunted them into the shallows, the bottom of the boat running aground in soft mud under the fall of a willow tree. The rain was growing fiercer, so Lark gathered up the loose tarps and tossed it over their heads. Inside was warm and still, the rain thumping like fingers on a drum. “You’re okay now. You were so brave to jump in that water.” Her thumb brushed the angry burns. “I saw you up there, lighting all those fuses…” Up on that barge, dancing between rockets in the fireworks exhaust, June had gleamed like an idol, fire rolling off her like she was a sparkler. It hurt Lark’s eyes. “It was—I felt afraid for you, but…you were amazing,” she admitted softly. Thunder growled in the distance, and the air felt like rain. Lark’s stomach was full of lightning.

  June’s lips twitched, a cinder of a smile in the darkness. “That’s what makes it difficult. It would be easier if it were only terrible. But it’s dangerous. And fun. And all-consuming and exhilarating. If I swallow it down, if I pretend it’s not there, it comes out anyway, and it comes out explosive. I’ve always thought I could smother it, but it doesn’t die. It only builds.” June’s eyes, raw and singed as the night sky, found Lark’s. “I don’t want to be like him.”

  “You’re not,” Lark promised, brushing wet locks of hair from June’s face. Touching her skin sent a shock through Lark, as if her fingertips had skimmed a hot plate. “You’re not.” Lark caught her mouth. Even in the rain, June smelled faintly of flowers. Flowers and gun smoke. Lark crowded her down into the bottom of the boat, the tarp pooling around them, dark and hot. June was only surprised for a moment before her fingers seared up Lark’s back, shifting her knees so Lark fit herself over her, close enough for the buttons on their denim shorts to clink.

  June’s voice was a soft rumble, drowned by a roll of thunder, breath on her ear, a hint of teeth. “Sweetheart—”

  Lark bit at the soft skin of June’s neck, breath ragged, pushed cold hands up under her sooty tank top. Lightning pounded into the water off the back, someone’s car alarm starting to howl from shore. Rain was soaking the tarp, the downpour on the lake’s surface deafening. There was no way home now; they’d have to wait it out here, tucked into this little cove.

  June sweetened, giving with gentle hands, one cupped at the small of Lark’s back. They’d been on different rhythms all summer. When Lark had expected her to understand the importance of things, the delicacy of her life, she had swarmed in, wildly offering sweet escape. When she had wanted to be alone, June swam to her boat and clung to the side with damp fingers. Now she matched Lark breath for breath, touch for touch.

  Outside, the world heaved on uncertain water. Shadows puddled between them, and they didn’t speak anymore.

  * * *

  After Mitch fell asleep, cramped on her Murphy bed, Cassie remembered she had left the double-wide open and unguarded. The rain was still coming down, but the wayward sparks from the fireworks that had collected on top of the double-wide still flickered. She ran between raindrops to take shelter in her own doorway, where windows were open and rain fell on the floors.

  Mitch was caught, carried through the weather with her in the folds of her shirt, the places high on her neck that he had kissed. She touched one of them and, for a moment, closed her eyes.

  Cassie walked through the double-wide, turning lights off as she went. Here was the sink where she had washed the same plates thousands upon thousands of times and where Mom had stood the last time she’d seen her. Here was the kitchen window Cassie had painted over to block the view of Lake Prosper.

  Here was the hall she had run through in bare feet, trying to rush out the door when Mom opened it to get the mail. Here was the corner where linoleum had begun to curl up from the floor in the heat of the summer, which Cassie used to grip and pull and pull and pull until Mom put her in her room for a time out. Here was the bedroom where she had waited up at night with her eyes on the woods, hoping to see a fox or a doe silvery and slippery with moonlight, until she fell asleep with her head on the windowsill.

  Here was Bolt’s room, clean as if the boy himself had just left it, with the radiator that hummed in the window and a mobile Grandad had made hanging over the twin bed, special red cardinals spreading their wings just for Bolt, each one built around a heavy antique key.

  Here was Mom’s old room, which always smelled like her, where Cassie would go in the evenings to curl against her side and hear stories about the places she wanted to go one day and the one summer she’d followed a boy in a band around Tennessee, when Mom would ask that wonderful question: Did I ever tell you…?

  When the lights were all off and she reached the very farthest corner of the house, Cassie turned back. The light in Cassie’s old bedroom flickered back on.

  Her breath left her body. Nothing in the house made a sound. There was nothing in here. No one in the house. Nothing in her old bedroom, no one to be turning on lights. There was nowhere to hide in a double-wide. Nothing but hall and rooms. No one could have gotten past her to the kitchen, not without her seeing. A double-wide’s layout flowed one way, along one channel. There were no other routes. She charged down the hall and braced herself in her bedroom doorway.

  The box sat on the floor in the center of her room. In the chaos, the fear of Daley, she had never retrieved it from the shop. She had left it there, its secrets unmoored. She had forgotten it. Cassie rushed forward toward it—

  But her bedroom didn’t wait for her in the space beyond. Cassie swayed on her feet. She was surrounded by the smell of horse manure and dark mineral mud. The rumble of dusty cart wheels filled the air. She took an uneven step, packed dirt soft under her feet. Buttercup-colored light filtered between trees, collided with the sides of modest buildings crowded together beside a shallow, swamp-like lakeside. It was a much, much smaller version of Lake Prosper, its current wide, clean edges replaced with shallow marshes, rain feeding a modest river winding west.

  People, a sparse parade of meager faces, walked through the space where Cassie’s bed was supposed to be, and on, toward a humble steeple, a huddled town square. And toward her, racing with a colt’s agility against the current, came a familiar figure. Once Cassie had noticed her strength, her long muscular limbs. Now all she saw was how young her face still was. She wore a dress made for summertime, white linen that hung loose and free. Under her arm was a basket of Arkansas tomatoes, and there was something else clutched tight in her hand. As she sailed by Cassie, she glanced back once, cocking her chin at her.

  There was nothing else to do. Cassie couldn’t hear the rain now. The only way out was through. She staggered after Catfish, away from the crowd, down little paths between houses, through narrow spaces like slots between Old Prosper’s ribs. Old bones. Catfish rounded a tight corner, and suddenly she was leaping at someone in the gap, someone who was laughing, whose pale face, beneath his fading cap, looked familiar too.

  “What do you have there?” he asked, his hand gathering a little of the white linen at the small of her back. Even then, when he couldn’t be any older than Catfish, he’d had a slightly bulbous nose. His eyebrows, designed to worry over things, to quirk and press against each other and furrow, drew Cassie up short. How many times had she watched the grayed and bushier version of these brows waggle over their work at the shop’s repair bench?

  “What, pomodori?” Catfish hid the small surprise in her other hand, coy. “Whatever Nonna says, they grow well here. Pastor Hiram gave me these from his patch.”

  He took one from the basket and pressed its spicy skin to his nose, but his eyes were on her. Full of sunlight, the tomato glowed between them like a carnelian. “Not those,” he said finally, in that low voice of his. He nodded at her fist, replacing the tomato in the basket. “What’s that?”

  Catfish opened her hand to reveal a small brightly colored box. “A man came into town selling these. He’s in the square now.”

  “A firecracker?” Tobias Fairchild examined the gilded paper.

  Catfish hung from his neck, smiling. “Best in the world, he says. He just came in from Memphis.”

  “He gave you this one?” Tobias turned it over in his hand. His other hand still held her against him, here in this tight in-between space, away from prying eyes.

  “Free samples? I don’t think so, bello.” In a sleight of hand, Catfish stole it back, and in its place in his palm sat something small, white, and shimmering. “The lake bought it for me.”

  Tobias held the little orb up before his eyes in wonder.

  “I went to dive this morning before the shopping.” She stashed her firecracker in the pocket of her fraying smock. “I swear, those little things just follow me around down there.”

  Tobias kissed her. “I gotta be up on the dam tonight,” he murmured against her mouth. “But when I come back, let’s you and me set that firecracker off. Make a few more plans.”

  They would have met young, her running from the slurs, dago, dago girl, him from his father’s shabby roadside shop. Catfish would have told him stories of her parents as young children carried on one of the last of the rancid steamboats up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, the end of a journey begun in southern Italian hills. So many families had been drawn to Arkansas by the promise of land bought on credit. By the time they made it to the steamboat, they would have known the land was an overpriced trap. Catfish’s mother, even decades later, wouldn’t step foot on a boat, but her daughter would grow up loving the water. Tobias barely remembered his own mother, who never learned English, only recalling the beautiful Arabic prayers she’d sung in private to soothe him.

  Catfish played over the collar of his work shirt. “I got something to talk to you about anyway—”

  The sunlight slapped off, and there was a brush of air, like someone sprinting by her in the darkness. Gasping, Cassie found her hand on the switch, standing just as she had been, in her dark bedroom. She gulped in the breath she’d been holding.