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grab it. “A champagne bottle,”
she said. “Somebody littered.” Holding it up to the light, she squinted.
“There’s a message inside, Zach.”
    “Yeah? Open it up and check it out,” he said.
    “No way,” she said. “It might be someone’s private
business.”
    “What? How can you find a message in a bottle and not look at
it?”
    “It’s bad karma to pry into it. I won’t be party to snooping
around someone else’s emotional baggage.” Defiantly, she flung the bottle as far
as she could. It landed unseen, with a decisive plop . “What kind of idiot leaves a message in a bottle in a landlocked
lake, anyway?” she asked.
    “You should have looked,” he said churlishly. “It might have
been important. Maybe it was a cry for help and you just ignored it.”
    “Maybe it was some teenager’s angsty poetry and I did her a
favor by getting rid of it.”
    “Right.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the dock
jutting out into the lake.
    She pulled back. “Wait a minute. Now what are we doing?”
    “I told Wendela I’d take the boat over to the boathouse.”
    Wendela was the wedding planner, and Zach did most of the
videography work for her. In addition, she often enlisted him to do other odd
jobs at events. In a small town, it was a way for him to cobble together a
living, Sonnet supposed. He was talented at what he did; during the reception,
Wendela had told her he’d won some prestigious awards for his work. But like all
artists, he struggled. Awards didn’t translate into a viable income.
    “You’re here as a wedding guest,” she protested. “Wendela
wouldn’t expect you to work tonight.”
    “What, driving a boat is suddenly work? Since when?”
    “You have a point. What is it with guys and boats?”
    “There are some things that cannot be resisted.” He slipped off
his bow tie and opened the collar of his tuxedo shirt, his Adam’s apple rippling
as he sighed with relief.
    Good Lord, had he been working out? She didn’t ask, because
everyone knew that was just code for “I think you’re hot.”
    And she didn’t. How could she? He was Zach—as familiar as a
lifelong friend, yet suddenly…exotic.
    “I shouldn’t have done those Jell-O shots,” she murmured.
Pulling her attention elsewhere, she stood on the dock and looked out at the
moon-silvered water. The sight of the lake never failed to ignite a rush of
memories. She had been here before, many times through the years.
    During her junior high and high school years, when Camp Kioga
had been closed down, she and Zach used to sneak onto the premises with their
friends on hot summer days, swimming and reliving the glory days of the resort,
which dated back to the 1920s. And every once in a while, the two of them would
slip into the boathouse and pretend to be smugglers or pirates or stuntmen in
the circus. Sometimes, even as youngsters, they would fall so deep into the
fantasy that they’d lose track of time. She remembered talking with him for
hours, seemingly about nothing, but managing to encompass everything important.
When she was with Zach, it never felt strange that she didn’t have a dad, or
that she was biracial, or that her mom had to work all the time to make ends
meet. When she was with Zach, she just felt…like herself. Maybe that was why
their friendship felt so sturdy, even when they almost never saw each other.
    An owl hooted from a secret place in the darkness, startling
Sonnet from her thoughts. “It’s getting late,” she said softly. “I’m
leaving.”
    He gently closed his hand around her wrist. “Come with me.”
    A shiver coursed through her, and she didn’t resist when he
drew her close, slipping his arm around her waist and edging her toward the boat
moored at the end of the dock. It was a vintage Chris-Craft runabout, its wooden
hull and brass fittings polished to a sheen so bright it seemed to glow in the
moonlight. The old boat had been used in the wedding, mostly for a photo shoot
but