My clothes are damp, my hair hangs in strings, and beads of water still stick to my face like warts. Seeing myself like this—a mess in every conceivable way—sends me back to the porch and the glass of bourbon waiting there. The ice has melted, leaving two inches of amber liquid swirling at the bottom of the glass.

  I tip it back and swallow every drop.

  By five thirty, I’m showered, dressed in dry clothes, and back on the porch watching the sun dip behind the distant mountains on the other side of the lake. Next to me is a fresh bourbon.

  My fourth for the day.

  Or fifth.

  I take a sip and look out at the lake. Directly across from me, the Royce house is lit like a stage set, every room aglow. Inside, two figures move about, although I’m not able to see them clearly. The lake is about a quarter mile wide here. Close enough to get a gist of what’s going on inside, but too far away to glean any details.

  Watching their blurry, distant activity, I wonder if Tom and Katherine feel as exposed as I did when I was inside that house. Maybe it doesn’t bother them. Being a former model, Katherine is probably used to being watched. One could argue that someone who buys a house that’s half glass knows being seen is part of the deal. It might even be the reason they bought it.

  That’s bullshit, and I know it. The view afforded to residents of Lake Greene is one of the reasons the houses here are so expensive. The other is privacy. That’s likely the real reason Tom and Katherine Royce bought the house across the lake.

  But when I see the binoculars sitting a few feet away, right where I’d dropped them earlier, I can’t help but pick them up. I tell myself it’s to clean them off. But I know it’ll only be a matter of time before I lift them to my eyes and peer at the opposite shore, too curious to resist a glimpse of the inner lives of a former supermodel and her tech titan husband.

  The binoculars belonged to Len, who bought them during a short-lived bird-watching phase, spending a small fortune in the process. In his post-purchase speech justifying the expense, he talked about their insane magnification, wide field of vision, image stabilization, and top-of-the-line clarity.

  “These binoculars rock,” he said. “They’re so good that if you look up at a full moon, you can see craters.”

  “But this is for birds,” I replied. “Who wants to see birds that up close?”

  When I inevitably do lift them to my eyes, I’m not impressed. The focus is off, and for a few jarring seconds, everything is skewed. Nothing but woozy views of the water and the tops of trees. I keep adjusting the binoculars until the image sharpens. The trees snap into focus. The lake’s surface smooths into clarity.

  Now I understand why Len was so excited.

  These binoculars do indeed rock.

  The image isn’t super close. Definitely not an extreme close-up. But the detail at such a distance is startling. It feels like I’m standing on the other side of a street rather than the opposite shore of the lake. What was fuzzy to the naked eye is now crystal clear.

  Including the inside of Tom and Katherine Royce’s glass house.

  I take in the first floor, where details of the living room are visible through the massive windows. Off-white walls. Mid-century modern furniture in neutral tones. Splashes of color provided by massive abstract paintings. It’s an interior designer’s dream, and a far cry from my family’s rustic lake house. Here, the hardwood floor is scratched and the furniture threadbare. Adorning the walls are landscape paintings, crisscrossed snowshoes, and old advertisements for maple syrup. And the moose in the den, of course.

  In the much more refined Royce living room, I spy Katherine reclining on a white sofa, flipping through a magazine. Now dry and fully dressed, she looks far more familiar than she did in the boat. Every inch the model she used to be. Her hair shines. Her skin glows. Even her clothes—a yellow silk blouse and dark capri pants—have a sheen to them.

  I check her left hand. Her wedding band is back on, along with an engagement ring adorned with a diamond that looks ridiculously huge even through the binoculars. It makes my own ring finger do an involuntary flex. Both of my rings from Len are in a jewelry box in Manhattan. I stopped wearing them three days after his death. Keeping them on was too painful.

  I tilt the binoculars to the second floor and the master bedroom. It’s dimmer than the rest of the house—lit only by a bedside lamp. But I can still make out a cavernous space with vaulted ceilings and décor that looks plucked from a high-end hotel suite. It puts my master bedroom, with its creaking bed frame and antique dresser of drawers that stick more often than not, to shame.

  To the left of the bedroom is what appears to be an exercise room. I see a flat-screen TV on the wall, the handlebars of a Peloton bike in front of it, and the top of a rack holding free weights. After that is a room with bookshelves, a desk and lamp, and a printer. Likely a home office, inside of which is Tom Royce. He’s seated at the desk, frowning at the screen of a laptop open in front of him.

  He closes the laptop and stands, finally giving me a full look at him. My first impression of Tom is that he looks like someone who’d marry a supermodel. It makes sense why Katherine was drawn to him. He’s handsome, of course. But it’s a lived-in handsomeness, reminding me of Harrison Ford just a year past his prime. About ten years older than Katherine, Tom exudes confidence, even when alone. He stands ramrod straight, dressed like he’s just stepped off the pages of a catalogue. Dark jeans and a gray T-shirt under a cream-colored cardigan, all of it impeccably fitted. His hair is dark brown and on the longish side. I can only imagine how much product it takes to get it to swoop back from his head like that.

  Tom leaves the office and appears a few seconds later in the bedroom. A few seconds after that, he disappears through another door in the room. The master bath, from the looks of it. I get a glimpse of white wall, the edge of a mirror, the angelic glow of perfect bathroom lighting.

  The door closes.

  Directly below, Katherine continues to read.

  Because I’m unwilling to admit to myself that I picked up the binoculars just to spy on the Royces, I swing them toward Eli’s house, the cluster of rocks and evergreens between the two homes passing in a blur.

  I catch Eli in the act of coming home from running errands—an all-day affair in this part of Vermont. Lake Greene sits fifteen minutes from the nearest town, reached by a highway that cuts southwest through the forest. The highway itself is a mile away and accessed via a ragged gravel road that circles the lake. That’s where Eli is when I spot him, turning his trusty red pickup off the road and into his driveway.

  I watch him get out of the truck and carry groceries up the side porch and through the door that leads to the kitchen. Inside the house, a light flicks on in one of the back windows. Through the glass, I can see into the dining room, with its brass light fixture and giant old hutch. I can even make out the rarely used collection of patterned china that sits on the hutch’s top shelf.

  Outside, Eli returns to the pickup, this time removing a cardboard box from the back. Provisions for me that I assume he’ll be bringing over sooner rather than later.

  I direct the binoculars back to the Royces’. Katherine’s at the living room window now. A surprise. Her unexpected presence by the glass hits me with a guilty jolt, and for a moment, I wonder if she can see me.

  The answer is no.

  Not when she’s inside like that, with the lights on. Maybe, if she squinted, she could make out the red plaid of my flannel shirt as I sit tucked back in the shadow of the porch. But there’s no way she can tell I’m watching her.

  She stands inches from the glass, staring out at the lake, her face a gorgeous blank page. After a few more seconds at the window, Katherine moves deeper into the living room, heading toward a sideboard bar next to the fireplace. She drops some ice into a glass and fills it halfway with something poured from a crystal decanter.

  I raise my own glass in a silent toast and time my sip to hers.

  Above her, Tom Royce is out of the bathroom. He sits on the edge of the bed, examining his fingernails.

  Boring.

  I return to Katherine, who’s back at the window, her drink in one hand, her phone in the other. Before dialing, she tilts her head toward the ceiling, as if listening to hear if her husband is coming.

  He’s not. A quick uptilt of the binoculars shows him still preoccupied with his nails, using one to dig a smidge of dirt out from under another.

  Below, Katherine correctly assumes the coast is clear, taps her phone, and holds it to her ear.

  I let my gaze drift back to the bedroom, where Tom is now standing in the middle of the room, listening for his wife downstairs.

  Only Katherine isn’t talking. Holding her phone and tapping one foot, she’s waiting for whoever she just called to answer.

  Upstairs, Tom tiptoes across the bedroom and peeks out the open door, of which I can see only a sliver. He disappears through it, leaving the bedroom empty and me moving the binoculars to try to catch his reappearance elsewhere on the second floor. I swing them past the exercise room to the office.

  Tom isn’t in either of them.

  I return my gaze to the living room, where Katherine is now speaking into the phone. It’s not a conversation, though. She doesn’t pause to let the other person talk, making me think she’s leaving a message. An urgent one, from the looks of it. Katherine’s hunched slightly, a hand cupped to her mouth as she talks, her eyes darting back and forth.

  On the other side of the house, movement catches my attention.

  Tom.

  Now on the first floor.

  Moving out of the kitchen and into the dining room.

  Slowly.

  With caution.

  His long, quiet strides make me think it’s an effort not to be heard. With his lips flattened together and his chin jutting forward, his expression is unreadable. He could be curious. He could be concerned.

  Tom makes his way to the other side of the dining room and he and Katherine finally appear together in the binoculars’ lenses. She’s still talking, apparently oblivious to her husband watching from the next room. It’s not until Tom takes another step that Katherine becomes aware of his presence. She taps the phone, hides it behind her back, whirls around to face him.

  Unlike her husband’s, Katherine’s expression is easily read.

  She’s startled.

  Especially as Tom comes toward her. Not angry, exactly. It’s different from that. He looks, to use Marnie’s description, intense.

  He says something to Katherine. She says something back. She slips the phone into her back pocket before raising her hands—a gesture of innocence.

  “Enjoying the view?”

  The sound of another person’s voice—at this hour, in this place—startles me so much I almost drop the binoculars for a second time that day. I manage to keep hold of them as I yank them away from my face and, still rattled, look for the source of the voice.

  It’s a man unfamiliar to me.

  A very good-looking man.

  In his mid-thirties, he stands to the right of the porch in a patch of weedy grass that serves as a buffer between the house and rambling forest situated next to it. Appropriate, seeing how he’s dressed like a lumberjack. The pinup-calendar version. Tight jeans, work boots, flannel shirt wrapped around his narrow waist, broad chest pushing against a white T-shirt. The light of magic hour reflecting off the lake gives his skin a golden glow. It’s sexy and preposterous in equal measure.

  Making the situation even weirder is that I’m dressed almost exactly the same way. Adidas sneakers instead of boots, and my jeans don’t look painted on. But it’s enough for me to realize how frumpily I always dress when I’m at the lake.

  “Sorry?” I say.

  “The view,” he says, gesturing to the binoculars still gripped in my hands. “See anything good?”

  Suddenly—and rightfully—feeling guilty, I set the binoculars on the wobbly table beside the rocking chair. “Just trees.”

  The man nods. “The foliage is beautiful this time of year.”

  I stand, make my way to the end of the porch, and look down at him. He’s come closer to the house and now gazes up at me with a glint in his eyes, as if he knows exactly what I’ve been doing.

  “I don’t mean to sound rude,” I say, “but who are you and where did you come from?”

  The man takes a half step back. “Are you sure you didn’t mean to sound rude?”

  “Maybe I did,” I say. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “I’m Boone. Boone Conrad.”

  I barely stop myself from rolling my eyes. That cannot be his real name.

  “And I came from over there.”

  He jerks his head in the direction of the woods and the house slightly visible two hundred yards behind the thinning trees. The Mitchell place. An A-frame cabin built in the seventies, it sits tucked within a small bend of the lakeshore. In the summer, the only part of it visible from my family’s house is the long dock that juts into the lake.

  “You’re a guest of the Mitchells?” I say.

  “More like their temporary handyman,” Boone says. “Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell said I could stay for a couple of months if I did some work on the place while I’m here. Since we’re neighbors, I thought I’d stop by and introduce myself. I would have done it earlier, but I was too busy stuck inside refinishing their dining room floor.”

  “Nice to meet you, Boone. Thanks for stopping by.”

  He pauses a beat. “You’re not going to introduce yourself, Casey Fletcher?”

  I’m not surprised he knows who I am. More people than not recognize me, even though sometimes they’re not sure how. “You just did it for me.”

  “Sorry,” Boone says. “The Mitchells told me your family owned the house next door. I just didn’t think you’d be here.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “That’s up to my mother,” I say.

  A sly grin plays across Boone’s lips. “Do you do everything your mother tells you to?”

  “Everything except not doing this.” I lift my glass. “How long will you be staying?”

  “Another few weeks, I suspect. I’ve been here since August.”

  “I didn’t know the Mitchells needed so much work done on their house.”

  “Honestly, they don’t,” Boone says. “They’re just doing me a favor after I found myself in a bit of a lurch.”

  An intriguing response. It makes me wonder what his deal is. I don’t see a wedding ring—apparently a new obsession of mine—so he’s not married. Not now, at least. I peg him as recently divorced. The wife got the house. He needed a place to live. In step David and Hope Mitchell, a friendly but dull pair of retirees who made their money in pharmaceuticals.

  “How do you like life on the lake?”

  “It’s quiet,” Boone says after thinking it over for a few seconds. “Don’t get me wrong. I like the quiet. But nothing much seems to happen here.”

  Spoken like a man whose spouse wasn’t found dead on the lakeshore fourteen months ago.

  “It takes some getting used to,” I say.

  “Are you also here by yourself?”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t you get lonely?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, if you ever get bored or need some company, you know where to find me.”

  I note his tone, pitched somewhere between friendly and flirtatious. Hearing it is surprising, but not unwelcome to someone like me who’s watched way too many Hallmark Channel Christmas movies. This is how they always begin. Jaded big-city professional woman meets rugged local man. Sparks fly. Hearts melt. Both live happily ever after.

  The only differences here are that Boone isn’t a local, my heart’s too shattered to melt, and there’s no such thing as happily ever after. There’s only happy for a short period of time before everything falls apart.

  Also, Boone is more attractive than the blandly handsome men of the Hallmark Channel. He’s unpolished in the best of ways. The stubble on his chin is a tad unruly and the muscles evident under his clothes are a bit too big. When he follows up his offer of company with a sleepy, sexy grin, I realize that Boone could be trouble.

  Or maybe I’m simply looking for trouble. The no-strings kind. Hell, I think I’ve earned it. I’ve been intimate with only one man since Len’s death, a bearded stagehand named Morris who worked on Shred of Doubt. We were postshow drinking buddies for a time, until suddenly we were more. It wasn’t romance. Neither of us was interested in each other that way. He was, quite simply, yet another means to chase away the darkness. I was the same thing for him. I haven’t heard from Morris since I got fired. I doubt I ever will.

  Now here’s Boone Conrad—quite an upgrade from Morris and his dad bod.

  I gesture to the pair of rocking chairs behind me. “You’re welcome to join me for a drink right now.”

  “I’d love to,” Boone says. “Unfortunately, I don’t think my sponsor would be too happy about that.”

  “Oh.” My heart sinks past my spleen. “You’re—”

  Boone interrupts me with a solemn nod. “Yeah.”

  “How long have you been sober?”

  “A year.”

  “Good for you,” I manage. I feel like a horrible person for asking an alcoholic if he’d like a drink, even though there’s no way I could have known he had a problem. But Boone definitely knows about mine. I can tell from the way he looks at me with squinty-eyed concern.

  “It’s hard,” he says. “Every day is a challenge. But I’m living proof it’s possible to go through life without a drink in your hand.”

  I tighten my grip around the bourbon glass. “Not my life.”