It had been this way for weeks, ever since he’d recovered from the chemo and radiation, this return to their bodies, to physical desire, that primordial old mammal come roaring and galloping back. On this day they’d thought they had the cabin to themselves. Margot’s brothers had driven into town for replacement pipes to fix the hundred-year-old plumbing, her sisters to the laundromat, the nephews to the next county to buy a used ski boat, and only Hannah and her roommate around somewhere, up at the barn maybe, chasing the elusive cell signal. There’d been nothing to stop Margot and Adam from slipping back to their bunks.

       Afterwards, they felt like teenagers, giddy with the knowledge that they’d stolen another hour, giddy with the proof that their time was not up, not yet. They pulled on their swimsuits and their flip flops and stepped down to the dock, their bodies younger now, the lake their own.

       But no, it wasn’t, not quite. Because the girl was there, Anabella, Hannah’s Venezuelan roommate sunbathing on the blow-up raft, an extravagantly beautiful girl Margot’s sister had taken under wing. Margot knew something of the girl’s story, how her wealthy family had fled the country, how they’d moved in with relatives in Miami, how the living situation had become unsafe. The predator uncle. Margot’s sister wasn’t the kind of person to send the girl back to an environment like that. Who would be? And bringing her on family vacations could have worked, maybe. The problem was her overt beauty, all that exuberant cleavage, the flamboyantly short shorts, the bikini she wore to family cook-outs. From the beginning Margot’s brothers and brothers-in-law had trained their eyes elsewhere: to the cook-tongs in their hands and the burgers on the grill, to their toddlers mashing grapes into the mouths of beer bottles, to the dogs lolling out in the grove, to the graveled drive in the pines, the treetops. Now, two years on, they didn’t just turn their eyes, they turned their whole bodies. The nieces pulled their boyfriends to the other end of the long trestle table, far from the temptation of all that skin. Just yesterday Caitlyn had tried to sound  Margot out. “Don’t you think her bikini top is a little …unstructured?” the nineteen-year-old had asked. Margot could still see the girl’s upturned face, searching out her alliance. But there had been other people around, and Margot had felt herself too old to wade into some kind of mean-girl dynamic. Besides. She didn’t know what passed these days for “too” much” and not “too much.” And technically Anabella was a refugee. Who knew what trials she’d had to bear? And so she’d left Caitlyn hanging, murmured something noncommittal like, “I suppose everything is relative.” And at the time Margot had meant it: a lot of strange behavior could be ascribed to naivete. Young girls had no idea how eye-catching they were. And that was true these days and in her own days and earlier and forever.