Rolling over, I squint at the alarm clock on the nightstand.

  Nine a.m.

  Late for lake life. Early for me.

  I want to go back to sleep, but the headache and roiling stomach and gargantuan urge to pee pull me out of bed, into the bathroom, then downstairs to the kitchen. While coffee brews, I wash down an Advil with a glass of tap water and check my phone. There’s a joke text from Marnie—that atrocious poster of a kitten dangling from a tree branch that reads, Hang in there!

  I reply with a vomit emoji.

  There’s also another text, this one from an unknown number. I open it, surprised to see it’s from Katherine Royce.

  Sorry about last night.—K.

  So she remembers what happened by the fire. I wonder if she also recalls stumbling into the kitchen at midnight. Probably not.

  No worries, I text back. Who among us hasn’t passed out in a stranger’s yard?

  Her reply arrives instantly. It was my first time.

  Welcome to the club.

  On my phone, three dots appear, vanish, reappear. The telltale sign of someone debating what to text next. Katherine’s reply, when it finally arrives, is succinct: I feel like shit. To drive home that point, she includes a poop emoji.

  Need some coffee? I text back.

  The suggestion earns a heart-eyed emoji and an all-caps YES!!!!!

  Come on over.

  Katherine arrives in the wood-paneled powerboat, looking like a fifties movie star at the Venice Film Festival as she pulls up to the dock. Cornflower blue sundress. Red sunglasses. Yellow silk scarf tied under her chin. I get a pang of envy as I help her out of the boat and onto the dock. Katherine Royce feeling like shit still looks better than I do on my very best day.

  Before I can get too jealous, though, she takes off the sunglasses, and I have to stop myself from flinching. She looks rough. Her eyes are bloodshot. Beneath them, dark purple circles hang like garlands.

  “I know,” she says. “It was a bad night.”

  “Been there, done that, had the pictures printed in a tabloid.”

  She takes my arm, and we stroll up the dock, past the firepit, and up the steps to the back porch. Katherine eases into a rocking chair while I step inside to fetch us two mugs of coffee.

  “How do you take it?” I ask through the open French doors.

  “Normally with cream and sugar,” Katherine calls back. “But today I think I’ll take it black. The stronger, the better.”

  I bring out the coffee and sit in the rocking chair next to hers.

  “Bless you,” Katherine says before taking a sip, wincing at its bitterness.

  “Too strong?”

  “Just right.” She takes another sip, smacks her lips. “Anyway, I’m sorry again about last night.”

  “Which part?”

  “All of it? I mean, Tom is Tom. He’s constantly putting his foot in his mouth. The thing is, he never means to. He’s just missing that filter the rest of us have. He says what’s on his mind, even if it makes things awkward. As for me—” Katherine jerks her head toward the ground below, where she’d dropped like a sack of flour twelve hours before. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “I think it’s called drinking too much, too fast,” I say. “I’m an expert at it.”

  “It wasn’t the drinking, no matter what Tom thinks. If anything, he’s the one who drinks too much.” She pauses and looks across the lake to her own house, its glass walls made opaque by the reflection of the morning sky. “I’m just not myself lately. I haven’t felt right for days. I feel weird. Weak. That exhaustion I felt while swimming yesterday? That wasn’t the first time it’s happened. It always feels like what happened last night. My heart starts beating fast. Like, illegal-diet-drug fast. It just overwhelms me. And before I know it, I’m passed out in the grass.”

  “Do you remember getting home?”

  “Vaguely. I remember feeling sick in the boat and Tom putting me to bed and then waking up on the living room couch.”

  No mention of fumbling around in the kitchen. Guess I was right about her having no memory of it.

  “You didn’t embarrass yourself, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I say. “And I’m not upset at Tom, either. I meant what I said last night. My husband died in the lake. It’s something that happened, and I see no point in pretending it didn’t.”

  I leave out the part about me spending most of my days doing exactly that. Trying to forget has become my full-time job.

  Katherine says nothing after that, and I don’t need her to. I’m content to simply be in her company, the two of us sipping coffee as we rock back and forth, the chairs creaking dryly beneath us. It helps that it’s a glorious autumn morning, full of sunshine and leaves blazing with color. There’s a chill to the air, which isn’t unwelcome. It balances everything out. A refreshing bite against the golden light.

  Len had a name for days like this: Vermont perfect. When the land and water and sky conspire to take your breath away.

  “It’s got to be hard always seeing this lake,” Katherine eventually says. “Are you okay staying here by yourself?”

  I’m taken aback by the question, mostly because no one else has thought to ask it. My mother never even considered it when she banished me to the lake house. That it occurred to Katherine, who barely knows me, says a lot about both women.

  “I am,” I say. “Mostly.”

  “But doesn’t being here bother you?”

  “Not as much as I thought it would.”

  It’s as honest an answer as I can give. The first thing I did after Ricardo drove away, leaving me all but stranded here, was come out to this porch and look at the lake. I thought I’d experience a pileup of emotions. Grief and fear and rage. Instead, all I felt was grim resignation.

  Something bad happened in that water.

  I can’t change it, no matter how much I want to.

  All I can do is try to forget it.

  Hence all my time spent staring across the water. My theory is that if I look long enough, the bad memories associated with Lake Greene will eventually grow dull and fade away.

  “Maybe because it’s so pretty,” Katherine suggests. “It was Tom’s idea to buy here. I was content to rent a different place every summer. Tom was adamant about owning. If you couldn’t already tell, my husband loves possessing things. But in this case, he’s right. The lake is gorgeous. So is the house. It’s funny, when I’m not here, I don’t miss the place very much. But when I am here, I don’t ever want to leave. I suppose all vacation homes are like that.”

  I think of Len and our late-July picnic. Let’s stay here forever, Cee.

  “Should I expect you here for more than just a week or two, then?”

  Katherine shrugs. “Maybe. We’ll see. Tom’s getting worried about the weather, but I think it might be fun to be here during a storm. Romantic, even.”

  “Wait until your sixth day without power. Romance will be the furthest thing from your mind.”

  “I don’t mind roughing it.” Noticing my look of surprise, Katherine adds, “I don’t! I’m tougher than I look. Once, three model friends and I spent a week rafting in the Grand Canyon. No electricity. Definitely no cell service. We ran the rapids during the day, and at night we slept in tents, cooked over an open fire, and peed in the weeds. It was heavenly.”

  “I didn’t know models were that close.”

  “The idea of bitchiness and backstage catfights is mostly just a myth. When there are twelve girls sharing a dressing room, you’re kind of forced to get along.”

  “Are you still friends with any of them?”

  Katherine gives a slow, sad shake of her head. “They’re all still in the game, and I’m not. Makes it hard to keep in touch. Most of my friends I only talk to through Instagram. That’s the weird thing about being famous. Everyone knows who you are—”

  “But sometimes you feel completely alone.”

  “Yeah,” Katherine says. “That.”

  She looks away, as if embarrassed to be understood so clearly. Her gaze lands on the binoculars, which rest on the small table between our rocking chairs. Drumming her fingers over them, she says, “Ever see anything interesting with these?”

  “Not really,” I lie, holding back a guilty blush as I think about watching Boone last night, how good he looked naked in the moonlight, how a bolder, more confident me might have joined him in the lake.

  “So you haven’t watched my house?”

  “Never.”

  Another lie. Because it’s Katherine I’m lying to—right to her face, no less—the guilt that comes with it cuts deeper.

  “Oh, I’d totally watch my house. Those huge windows? How could anyone resist?” Katherine picks up the binoculars and peers through them at her house on the opposite shore. “God, it’s so ostentatious. Like, who needs a house that big? As a vacation home, no less.”

  “If you can afford it, there’s no reason not to enjoy it.”

  “That’s the thing,” Katherine says as she lowers the binoculars. “We can’t afford it. Well, Tom can’t. I pay for everything. The house. The apartment. The five-thousand-dollar wine and the Bentley, which is pretty sweet. We should take it out sometime, just you and me.”

  “Tom has no money of his own?”

  “All of Tom’s money is tied up in Mixer, which still hasn’t turned a profit and probably never will. The joys of being married to a so-called tech titan. He looks the part and acts it exceptionally well, but in reality—” Katherine stops her rant with a gulp of coffee, followed by an apologetic “You must think I’m insufferable. Here I am, complaining about my husband, when you—”

  “It’s fine,” I say, cutting off the rest of her sentence before she can utter it. “Most marriages have their difficulties.”

  “Most? Was your marriage always perfect?”

  “It wasn’t,” I say, looking at the lake, at how the morning light seems to dance across the water’s surface. “But it felt that way. Right up until the end.”

  A pause.

  “Then again, we weren’t married long enough for Len to get sick of me and initiate our inevitable divorce.”

  Katherine turns my way, those large eyes of hers searching my face to see if I’m being serious. “Do you always do that?” she asks.

  “Do what?”

  “Make a joke to avoid talking about your true feelings?”

  “Only ninety percent of the time,” I say.

  “You just did it again.”

  I shift uneasily in my chair. Katherine’s right, of course. She’s pinpointed one of my worst traits. The only person besides Marnie and my mother to do so. Not even Len, who bore the brunt of it, ever called me out on it.

  “I make jokes,” I say, “because it’s easier to pretend I’m not feeling what I’m feeling than to actually feel it.”

  Katherine nods, turns away, looks again to her glass house at the water’s edge. The side that faces the lake is still reflecting sky, although the sun has entered the picture now. A glowing circle right where her bedroom is located. So bright it could blind you if you stared at it long enough.

  “Maybe I should try that,” she says. “Does it really help?”

  “Yes. Especially if you drink enough.”

  Katherine responds with a dry chuckle. “Now that I have tried.”

  I stare deeply into my coffee mug, regretting that I didn’t add a splash of bourbon. I think about getting up to add some. I think about asking Katherine if she also wants some. I’m about to do just that when I spot a gray-clad figure stepping onto the patio outside Katherine’s house.

  She sees it, too, and says, “That’s Tom wondering where I am.”

  “You didn’t tell him you were coming over?”

  “I like to keep him guessing.” She rises, does a little stretch, then comes in for her second surprise hug in two days. “Thanks for the coffee. We should do it again tomorrow.”

  “My place or yours?” I say, aiming for a Mae West impersonation but ending up sounding more like Bea Arthur.

  “Here, definitely. There’s only decaf at our place. Tom says caffeine blunts the body’s natural energy. That right there is grounds for divorce.” She pauses, no doubt taking in the look of surprise on my face. “It was a joke, Casey. To cover up how I truly feel.”

  “Is it working for you?”

  Katherine thinks it over. “Maybe. I still prefer honesty. And in this case, the truth is that Tom needs me too much to agree to a divorce. He’d kill me before letting me leave.”

  She gives me a wiggle-fingered wave and skips down the steps. I stay at the porch railing, watching her cross the dock, hop into the boat, and start the short crossing to the other side of the lake.

  When she’s about halfway there, something on the ground below catches my eye. A spot of brightness in a swath of tall grass near the stone wall running along the shoreline.

  Glass.

  Reflecting the sun as brightly as Katherine’s house.

  I descend the steps and pick it up, discovering it’s a shard of the wineglass she’d broken last night. When I hold it to the light, I can see drops of wine dried on its surface, along with a light film that resembles dried salt.

  I scan the ground for similar chunks of glass. Seeing none, I go back inside and drop the shard into the kitchen trash. By the time it’s clinked to the bottom of the bin, a thought occurs to me.

  Not about the broken wineglass.

  About Katherine.

  She texted me this morning, but I have no idea how she got my number.

  The rest of the day passes on its regularly scheduled course.

  Vodka. Neat.

  Another vodka. Also neat.

  Cry in the shower.

  Grilled cheese sandwich for lunch.

  Bourbon.

  Bourbon.

  Bourbon.

  My mother calls at her regularly scheduled time, using my cell and not the landline still stuffed into a drawer in the den. I let it go to voicemail and delete her message without listening to it.

  Then I have another bourbon.

  Dinner is steak with a side salad so I can pretend my body isn’t a complete nutritional wasteland.

  And wine.

  Coffee to sober up a tad.

  Ice cream, just because.

  It’s now a few minutes after midnight and I’m sipping cheap whiskey poured from an unopened bottle I found stuffed in the back of the liquor cabinet. It’s probably been there for decades. But it does the trick, smoothing the peaks and valleys of intoxication I’ve experienced over the course of the day. Now I’m enveloped in a dreamy calmness that makes all of it worthwhile.

  I’m on the porch, snug in a heavy sweater, the blanket from the boat once again wrapped over my shoulders. It’s not as foggy as last night. Lake Greene and its environs sit encased in a silvery crispness that provides a clear view across the water. I take in each house there.

  The Fitzgeralds’. Dark and empty.

  The Royces’. Not empty, but dark all the same.

  Eli’s. A single light aglow on the third floor.

  I turn to my side of the lake. The Mitchell house, also dark, can barely be glimpsed through the trees. I assume that means no midnight swim for Boone.

  Pity.

  I’m contemplating going to bed myself when a light appears at the Royces’. Seeing it makes me immediately reach for the binoculars, but I stop myself before my fingers can snag them.

  I shouldn’t be doing this.

  I don’t need to do this.

  What I should do is drink some water, go to bed, and ignore what my neighbors are up to. Not a difficult task. Yet that rectangle of brightness on the other side of the lake tugs at me like a rope around my waist.

  I try to resist, hovering my hand over the binoculars while counting Mississippis just like I did yesterday with my bourbon. This time, I fall well short of forty-six before grabbing them. In fact, I barely make it to eleven.

  Because resistance also has its drawbacks. It makes me want something—watching the Royces, knocking back a drink—even more. I know how denial works. You withhold and withhold and withhold until that mental dam breaks and all those bad urges come spilling out, often causing harm in the process.

  Not that this behavior is hurting anyone. No one will ever know but me.

  Binoculars in hand, I zero in on the window glowing in the otherwise dark night. It’s on the second floor, coming from the home office where I saw Tom yesterday. Now, though, it’s Katherine who sits at the desk by the window, staring at the laptop.

  Wrapped in a white robe, she looks worse than she did this morning. A pale imitation of her usual self. Not helping is the glow from the laptop, which gives her face a sickly blue tinge.

  I watch as Katherine types something, then squints at the laptop’s screen. The squint grows more pronounced as she leans forward, engrossed in whatever she’s looking at.

  Then something surprises her.

  It’s clear even from this distance.

  Her lower jaw drops and a hand flies to her bottom lip. Her eyes, released from their squint, grow wide. Katherine blinks. Rapidly. A full two seconds of fluttering eyelids.

  She pauses.

  She exhales.

  She turns her head slowly toward the office door, which is completely open.

  She listens, head cocked, on alert.

  Then, seemingly satisfied she won’t be interrupted, Katherine turns back to the laptop in a flurry of activity. Keys are tapped. The cursor is moved. All while she keeps sneaking occasional glances back to the open door.

  I do the same, jerking the binoculars to the right, where the master bedroom is located.

  It’s completely dark.

  I return my gaze to the office, where Katherine spends the next minute typing, then reading, then typing some more. The surprise on her face has dulled slightly, morphing into something that to my eye looks like determination.