"You brought your mother."
"She was already at the restaurant."
"She *interviewed* me."
He winced, which was at least something. "She liked you."
"That," Avery said, "somehow makes it worse."
She meant it more than he could know. She saw him register that — saw a small adjustment behind his eyes, like he'd stepped on a stair that wasn't there — and then his gaze slid past her shoulder, and something complicated happened to his mouth.
"Good news," he said. "She's coming over."
Avery turned.
Vivian Mercer was crossing the lawn. Short grey hair, cut close and sensible. A dark dress, nothing fussy. A small pearl at each ear. She held a glass of white wine in one hand and lifted the other in a wave, and she was *beaming* — that was the only word — beaming the way people beam at airport arrival gates. At Avery. Specifically, unmistakably, at Avery.
Every cell in Avery's body remembered the breadbasket. Remembered *And what does your mother do, dear?* and *Do you want children, or is that rude?* and *Why bread? No, really, why?* Remembered answering. Remembered telling the truth about things she did not tell people, because the woman asked so warmly and so directly that lying had felt like more effort than drowning.
"I'm getting in the pool," Avery said.
Dorian looked at her. "You're wearing a dress."
"Exactly."
She set the empty glass down beside the white roses — carefully, she would later insist; she was not an animal — and ran.
It was eleven steps from the drink table to the deep end. She knew because she counted them afterward, lying awake. Eleven steps across warm flagstone in strappy sandals, past a startled man holding a skewer of grilled peaches, past the little sign that said NO DIVING, which she respected, because she did not dive. She went in feet first, arms up, the flutter sleeves lifting like she'd been caught in a wind, and the last thing she saw before the water closed over her head was Dorian Mercer stepping toward the edge with one hand half out and his face caught perfectly between horror and the beginning of a laugh.
* * *
The water was colder than it looked. That was her first thought. Her second thought was that the dress had become a jellyfish.
It billowed up around her, pale blue and weightless, and for one long second Avery hung in the deep end with her eyes open and her cheeks full of air, and it was quiet. Truly quiet. No hamstring debate. No speakers playing Paige's carefully curated playlist of songs about forever. Just the hum of the filter and the wavering gold of the string lights above the surface, smeared like watercolor.
She thought: *I could stay down here.*
She thought: *You absolutely cannot. You are twenty-nine and you have lungs.*