Sometimes the flare-ups happened in the car. She’d be driving along, and she’d hear their song. “Don’t Stop Believin’” … Journey. Once she nearly ran a motorcyclist off the road, when she was driving home from the plant late at night when the song came on the radio. She’d had to pull off the highway, roll down the windows, and force herself to let the cold damp February air roll over her flaming cheeks and snap her back to reality before she could drive on.

She’d even tried her own version of an exorcism to get over Mason. Three years ago, on the two-year anniversary of their divorce, she’d snuck back to the lake cottage that held so much of their history.

*   *   *

A light winter rain was falling as she navigated the rutted gravel road that led through thick woods back to the lake. Officially the lake’s name was Lake Wesley Forlines Jr., after a local decorated World War I hero. But everybody around Passcoe always just called it Hideaway Lake, because county budget cuts had long ago closed the only public beach and boat ramp. Now the only access to the lake was through the Bayless’s property. Private property.

Weeds and sapling trees had sprung up in the narrow lane, and it struck Annajane that since she and Mason had moved out, the rest of the family had very likely forgotten the place even existed. Maybe, she thought, in one panicky moment, the house had finally succumbed to the inevitable, and simply tumbled all the way to the ground.

But the little stone cottage was still there, nestled beneath the leafless limbs of a huge old water oak. Acorns crunched under her tires as she rolled to a stop a few yards away from the house, and, as she stepped out of the car, she glimpsed the gray-green glimmer of the lake through a raggedy hedge of privet that had replaced the lawn Mason had so carefully cultivated.

Briars caught at the legs of her jeans as she pushed open the rickety cedar gate. Annajane plucked a dried bud from the canes of the New Dawn roses that twined through the pickets of the fence. The rosebushes, two of them, had been a wedding gift from her stepfather, who’d planted them himself, promising that the fast-growing climbers would blanket the fence with carefree pink blossoms within a year. And they had. The rosebushes had survived, even if the marriage had withered.

Annajane frowned when she got to the front door of the cottage. The periwinkle-blue paint she’d coated the old door with only three years earlier was already cracked and peeling. Worse, a rusting iron hasp and shiny new padlock had been fastened to the door. They’d never even had a key to the house when they’d lived there. But now that it was abandoned, somebody had seen fit to lock the house up tight. She tried to peer in through the front windows, but the inexpensive bamboo blinds were drawn, and anyway the windows were caked with dirt.

She walked around to the rear of the house and tried the back door, which led onto a small utility room. The wooden door was spongy with rot, but it had apparently been latched from the inside, and she was afraid if she tugged too hard the whole door would collapse on top of her. Which wouldn’t do. Annajane didn’t want to advertise her visit to the cottage.

So she moved over to the left, to the wide set of triple windows that looked out over the lake. Or at least, they’d looked out on the lake when it was their master bedroom. Now those windows mostly looked out on the tops of dead weeds. A lanky camellia bush partially blocked the center window, but she managed to slither behind it, praying as she did so that no snakes were hidden in the thick carpet of dead leaves underfoot. She grasped the window sill with both hands, grunted and shoved the window upward. She climbed inside.

Instantly she wished she hadn’t. Her muddy shoes left footprints in the thick carpet of dust on the worn wooden floor, and cobwebs festooned the ceiling fan overhead. The furniture in the room, an old wooden dresser, matching mahogany four-poster bed, and chest of drawers of no particular vintage or value, had come from Cherry Hill’s attic. But Mason hadn’t bothered to remove any of it when he moved out. Now a pale green mist of mold dotted the dark varnished wood surfaces. Some kind of animal had been chewing at the bare mattress.

Annajane walked around the room, her shoulders sagging, fingers trailing across the walls she’d repainted three times in one crazy, Quixie-fueled weekend, before arriving at the exact right shade, Benjamin Moore Morning Sky Blue, cut to half-strength.

She shouldn’t have come. She opened the closet, so small they’d once joked that it wouldn’t hold even one of the Bayless family secrets. Not much left there. Some rusty wire coat hangers, a folded green wool blanket on the one shelf. On a hook on the back of the door she found a faded plaid flannel shirt of Mason’s, which he’d worn for yard work. On the floor she spied his mud-spattered laceless work boots lined up companionably next to a pair of her own grungy tennis shoes. Without thinking, Annajane pulled the flannel shirt on over her own denim shirt. She burrowed her nose into the collar, seeking some sense memory of her former husband, of those happy times they’d spent making this cottage their own. Instead, she sneezed violently, expelling a tiny dried-up spider into the mildew-scented air.

Her footsteps echoed in the closed-up house as she walked from room to room. To be precise, the house only had three rooms, the bedroom, an L-shaped living-dining room, the kitchen, and of course a bathroom, which was not much bigger than their bedroom closet.

One by one, she opened and closed the kitchen cupboards. The cabinet beside the stove held a yellowing box of pancake mix and an opened carton of baking soda. Kernels of rice trailed from a sack of Mahatma, where a mouse had nibbled a hole in the plastic bag. The cupboard by the refrigerator held two mismatched coffee mugs and a stack of green-tinted Quixie promotional glasses. Rust spots freckled the fridge.

Annajane stood in front of the window over the sink and looked out at the lake. From here, she could see the weather-beaten dock that stretched out into the water. They’d sunned themselves on that dock, dove naked into the surprisingly cool water on moonlit summer nights, paddled out into the middle of the lake on another night to make a drunken attempt at lovemaking in the bottom of the old wooden rowboat, an attempt that had ended up dunking them both into the lake.

They’d had big plans once: to build a double-decker boathouse at the end of the dock, one with a deck and a screened porch and a stone fireplace up top, for cookouts and parties, with davits below to hold the Sallieforth, a derelict 1967 seventeen-foot Chris-Craft ski boat that Mason hoped to eventually restore to working condition.

So many plans. Once that lake had been a clear blue-green, lapping wavelets against a shore lined with the blue hydrangeas, red geraniums, and drifts of Shasta daisies planted by the original caretaker’s wife. Now weeds and water lilies choked the shoreline and obstructed the water views. She felt a melancholy, as cold and gray as the winter lake, seep into her soul.

Turning away from the window, she wandered into the living room, where the only furniture that remained was a lumpy brown sofabed, handed down from one of Mason’s college roommates. The sofa faced the fireplace, where a stack of half-burned logs perched atop a small mound of coals. The old copper tub on the hearth had once held pieces of kindling, matches, and twists of newspaper. She reached in, found a couple sizable twigs, a long wooden kitchen match, and some yellowing newspaper.

Annajane placed the newspaper and the kindling on top of one of the half-burned logs, lit the match, and held it to the paper until it caught fire. In a moment, the dry sticks were burning merrily. She sat on the edge of the sofa, watching, waiting for the fire to build. When it threatened to die down, she searched around the house until she found an old phone book. She ripped out the pages, wadded them up, and tossed them onto the fire, crouching in front of the fireplace, ready to feed the fire more paper, lest the blaze die down again.