Kay and the boys arranged themselves in the boat, and Mia and Thomas helped them push off. The crunch of sand along the hull, and then they were afloat; in the stern Kay pulled the little cord that dropped the rudder into place.

“Bon voyage!” Mia called from the beach. “Happy sailing!”

A mild breeze lifted them into the bay. Kay negotiated the tiller and mainsheet, clamping the line in her teeth as she adjusted the sail, then tying it fast to its cleat. She peeked quickly over her shoulder; the beach streamed away.

“So this is sailing,” she said to the boys. “What do you think?”

“Will we see any dolphins?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know, honey.” Tiller, mainsheet, rudder, centerboard. What had she gotten them into? She breathed deeply, steadying herself. “There’ll be lots of fish to look at.”

“Dolphins are mammals that live in the sea,” the boy intoned. “They nurse their young, and breathe air, like humans. Dolphins can stay submerged, under the water, for five minutes or longer, and have been known to dive as deep as eight hundred feet.”

“That’s right, honey. Did you read that in a book?”

“Creatures of the Deep.” It was a gift from the boy’s uncle, Kay’s brother, O’Neil. Noah had carried it with him on the plane.

“God,” Sam groaned. “You are so weird.”

“Your brother is not weird,” Kay corrected. “He’s different.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “God, you are so different.”

They skimmed past the cruise ship, its stern high above them, and the name, Windward Princess, painted in black. A vortex of churning water trailed behind it, holding it in place. Once beyond it Kay set the boat to tack, pointing close to the wind, and explained to the boys what would happen.

“Hard a-lee!”

The boom swung above their heads, catching with a firm snap as the sail filled once more with air. A clean tack; she felt a swell of pride. They were running parallel to the beach now, in the shadow of the ship, which stood between them and the shore. On the decks above people were watching them, leaning out over the rails. Some of them waved.

“Go closer,” Sam pleaded.

She pointed the bow tight to the wind; the boat heeled in reply. It was all coming came back to her, the play of the wind and the sail and the hull, how all of it was connected by unseen lines of force. The boys scrambled up beside her as she pulled the mainsheet taught. Above them the side of the great ship loomed, a wall of white steel a hundred feet high. One of the inflatable dinghies zoomed past, and they banged into the chop, spray flying over them like jewels of water.

“Hold on tight, guys!”

They rounded the bow, emerging into a pocket of still air and a view of the beach. Mia was still standing where they had left her, talking to the boy who had helped her rig. Boys, Kay thought-of course she would want to. She’d given her the rest of the afternoon off to talk with boys.

“Who’s that?” Noah asked; he spoke too loudly, uncertain how far to raise his voice over the sound of the water sliding under the hull.

She let out the mainsheet and refastened it in its cleat. “His name is Thomas.”

“Is he Mia’s friend too?”

She looked again. The boy stood at her side confidently, his hands in his pockets. Mia seemed to be laughing; with one hand she reached up and did something with her hair, setting it loose over her shoulders to catch the light. The image caught Kay short, not with alarm but with wonder, the purest amazement at time’s passage. It was as if, at this distance, she could see something she had been unable to discern before. When had it happened? She thought of the skinny girl who had come to them two years before, nervous and tall and poorly dressed, her English halting and full of strange phrases: “Were you born in the hallway?” she asked, incredulously, when the boys had done something careless; or, to urge them on, “Give the iron.” Too ill to pay attention, Kay hadn’t noticed the change. Lying on the sofa after her infusions, or in bed with a basin on the worst days, it was all she could manage to feel a helpless gratitude that somebody was there to help, to love and encourage the boys when she could not. Now she was well again, and Mia was reading Jane Eyre and flirting with a college boy on the beach. Her skinny body and bad clothes were gone. She wore a black bikini and a white cotton T-shirt cropped to show off her slender waist and all the rest, and as Kay watched, Mia touched her hair again, and then, with a slowness that betrayed her thinking, lifted one bare foot and dragged her toe through the sand. When had she learned to do this, to hold a boy’s interest with the smallest gesture? He would ask her, if he hadn’t already: Do you have friends in Vermont? Do you like the cold, does it remind you of Denmark? Do you like these people, the family you work for? When do you get off work?

She drew her gaze away. “Of course they’re friends,” she told the boys. “You don’t want Mia to have friends besides you?”

“Daddy is her friend,” Noah said. “But it’s a secret.”

The boat stopped suddenly. What the hell…? She pushed the tiller this way and that; they were held fast. Too close to the beach, she had run them aground. The lurch of the hull had sent the boys spilling forward. Later, she would remember this moment as almost comical: Kay with her boys alone at sea, the news that was not news, quite, breaking over her at a moment when she was simply too busy to think about it.

“Oh, damn,” she said, and heard the anger in her voice. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Sam’s face lit up with delight. “Are we sinking?”

“No, of course not. We just hit the bottom, that’s all.”

Noah began to wail. “We’re sinking! I don’t want to!”

“Sam, help your brother,” she said crossly, pulling in the mainsheet to find the wind. On the beach, suddenly, Mia and Thomas were nowhere to be seen. Daddy is her friend… She shook her head sharply to return her mind to the boat. “Can’t you see my hands are full? He doesn’t understand.”

“We’re sinking!” Noah repeated. The little boy had begun to cry.

Sam glowered across the boat at his brother. “No, we’re not, stupid.”

“Sam, enough.” She paused a moment to calm herself. “Everything’s fine. We’re perfectly safe. The beach is right there.”

Slowly the boat pivoted on its centerboard, pointing into the wind. The centerboard, Kay thought. She reached forward to find the lever that lifted it into its pocket. She did, and they were free, slipping stern-first away from the beach. When they were clear she put the centerboard back down and pointed the boat once again toward open water.

“Come here, both of you.”

The boys moved to the stern beside her. “Here, Noah. Take the tiller. Feel it? See how it moves the boat?”

With Kay’s hand on his he moved the rudder back and forth; but his heart, she could tell, was not in it.

“I didn’t mean to say it,” Noah said. He looked at her plaintively, his eyes windowpaned with tears.

“It’s all right, honey.” With her free arm she hugged his thin shoulders. “You’re not in trouble.”

She gave each boy a turn steering the boat. So, there it was, and Noah knew. Had she? And did Sam? His silence said he did.

“We’ll make a pact. Everything we do and say out here is just for us. Not for Daddy, or Mia, or anybody. Agreed?”

“Like pirates,” Noah said, his voice gone far away again, to safety. “Argh, avast, blow the man down.”

“That’s it. Like pirates on the high seas. Sam?”

Beside her the older boy looked away.

“Sam?”

“If it’s a secret, you’re not supposed to tell.”

When they returned, Jack was in the shower. His news was good-he was ahead eighteen thousand dollars. He was going to take a nap, he said, and have dinner with them, and then return to the casino to play.

“You just don’t screw around with luck like this,” he said. He spoke to her through the frosted mirror as he shaved. In the room behind them the boys were dealing hands of go-fish on the carpet. “I’m going to pay off the house before I’m through. I tell you, I’m on a roll.”