Her feet touched the bottom. She pushed.
She surfaced into total silence, which was worse than noise. Thirty-some people stood frozen around the pool like a garden of lawn ornaments. The man with the grilled peaches had a peach halfway to his mouth. Ellis's coworkers had stopped talking about hamstrings. Fran, by the cheese table, held a cracker suspended in midair and wore an expression of pure, radiant joy.
Paige stood at the far end with her hand over her mouth.
And at the edge of the deep end, closest of all, was Dorian, crouched now, one forearm on his knee, looking down at her with an expression she could not entirely read. Not mockery. Something nearer to respect, and under that, something worried.
"Hi," he said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said hi in a tone."
Water streamed down her face. Her hair was plastered to her forehead. One sandal had come off and was drifting toward the filter like a small, ashamed boat.
Then Vivian arrived.
She came to the edge beside her son, and Avery watched the beam drain out of her face and something else fill it — not embarrassment, not offense, but a kind of shocked tenderness that was somehow harder to look at. Vivian looked at the water. She looked at Avery. She looked at her wine.
Then she handed the wine to Dorian, stepped out of her low black heels one at a time, gathered the skirt of her dark dress in one hand, and sat down on the edge of the pool. She put her bare feet in the water up to the shins.
"Oh," she said softly. "That *is* cold."
"Mom," Dorian said.
"I'm fine. I'm sitting." She looked at Avery, who was treading water four feet away and wishing she had gills. "I'll wait."
"You'll—"
"I came over to apologize," Vivian said. Her voice was low; it carried only as far as the three of them. "That's all. I've wanted to since March. I didn't think about what it would look like, me charging across the lawn like a bull at a gate. That's my fault. So I'll sit here, and you can stay in there as long as you like, and if you want to hear it, I'll say it. And if you don't, I'll put my shoes back on."
Avery's legs worked under the water. The dress dragged at her. She was aware, distantly, of thirty people pretending not to listen and failing.
From the patio came a sound of purposeful shuffling, and then Harlan Pruitt himself appeared — seventy, broad, with a white mustache and a short-sleeved shirt covered in tiny pineapples — carrying a beach towel in one arm and a bright green pool noodle in the other. He stopped a respectful distance away, like a man approaching a skittish horse.
"Didn't know which you'd want," he said gravely. "Brought both."