Dad's voice from in the master bedroom. The door is closed and his voice is low; I can only hear it when he's saying something urgent, and even then I can't make out the words—but Rose sneaks into the bathroom and relays the contents to me by voice.

Just give it some time, he says. Give the claims a chance to clear.

There's a pause. Our loss of Maura's income is temporary. Beat. Could be temporary.

Rose flits back and frowns up at me. "Leen, I don't know about this," she says. "Dad's pretty broken up. I feel bad."

"We're all pretty broken up, Ro. That doesn't give Dad the right to hide money shit from me. If they're going to deny Mom treatment—"

My voice cracks and Rose's face wavers. My eyes read the flicker in her expression as a frame drop, which used to happen all the time before they put towers in the lake. Then my mind revises, parsing the slight tenting of her eyebrows, the tiny flare of her nostrils. Uncertainty; disquiet. Just the way I used to react to her harebrained schemes, that is to say: Should we really—? What if—? But her thorny grin had been the final refutation to my every misgiving; and, in her place, I am not smiling.

"It's not about Mom."

"Whatever," I say. "School. The house. I don't care. I just want to know."

She's obviously about to cry. I lock her eyes and, feeling like I'm about to advance to the semi-finals of the Olympic puppy-kicking qualifiers, clench my teeth and, just like she used to do, say "Rose."

Rose disappears, just like that; but Dad's voice plays on in my ear.

I know what the policy says, he says.

Yes, I understand that you can't overrule it. Can you connect me to someone who can?

I understand, but—there has to be someone who can take this into account. I can't be the first person who's made a call like this. The situation with Maura is bad enough. His voice cracks. How can I tell Eileen and Kieran they're going to lose Rose again?

I put my ear to the door. Dad isn't talking. He's not making any noise at all. I have a horrible thought and almost throw the door open, my mind transposing the horror of Rose on the lake shore to Dad's features as easily and automatically as heartbeat—and then I hear the whisper of a shuddering, indrawn breath that dissolves my phantasmagoria like fog in sunlight.

I don't stop for sandals on my way out the front door, down the footpath whose "stones" are concrete-cast pineapples, out the gate of the low white fence with pineapple silhouettes cut out of the pickets. I feel the pain of hot asphalt on my feet as distantly as gull-scream from the lake sky. There are only a few places Rose can go, or at least only a few I know she does. There is our house, of course, the one we rent without fail, next summer's booking made as soon as this one's ends; there is the knot of dinky streets that constitutes the "neighborhood," every house clad in pastel-painted wood siding with white trim by order of the homeowners' association; there is the ill-maintained boardwalk, grey paint pulling away from wood in ragged strips that widen every year, where my burned soles now pound with an urgency as out of place here as my own rosewood complexion, as the hair that I have at last declined to straighten. There is the path over the dunes, searing in the sun, the more painful for the speed it steals from my stride; and, as always, the frame of the dune grass on the endless blue horizon repaints a blurry grey dawn, eight years old three days ago, pierced by the relentless red and blue of police flashers, swarmed by the muddy shadows of all the obligatory witnesses to Rose on the lake shore.

And there is the shore itself, last in the litany of places where she is not. I stare at the horizon as though she might be there; I let out a long breath, then realize that I desperately need to take another one, that I am panting with the unremembered effort of getting here. But I'm here, and Rose is not. There is nothing to do but sit down in the surf. I do; and my vision fills with a confusing welter of color, my neck jerks with a sudden weight, my arms snap out to encircle a solidity that was not present before. She is here. For now.

I'm seventeen. Rose is fourteen.