If she’d had to guess, she’d say it was about eight in the morning, a little later than she normally slept in, on the days when she did indeed sleep in, which had been . . . four years ago, maybe? Life had been pretty much a solid wall of work.

She stretched, flinging out all of her limbs like a starfish, and hesitated before reaching for her phone. She was loath to surrender that fresh, innocent, just-woke-up feeling to reality. And the possibility of a text from Corbin.

She had a few texts; none from Corbin.

Relief lifted her mood again.

From Rachel:

Hurrah! She’d be able to replenish her savings sooner rather than later, if her luck held. With credit cards and another scoop into her savings, she could drop about ten thousand on improvements.

From Eden—a photo of that bottle of pink shampoo. Avalon laughed. From Annelise: a photo of her cat, Peace and Love, upside down in the sun. One from her mom: Let us know if you need anything!

Both excellent ways to start her day.

She texted all of them X’s and O’s and a quick pic of the view from her turret window.

Then she went downstairs, made some tea, ate one of her store-bought muffins, curled up on the giant old sofa in the sunny room with her laptop, fielded a few GradYouAte emails (she’d sent the cheerleader avatar art back to the drawing board, with a sardonic, “Surely not all cheerleaders are blond?”) clicked “like” on a friend’s Facebook photo of her baby with cake smeared on its face, then got sucked into a YouTube video about pangolins. All the while she was aware of a very potent urge hovering on the periphery of her awareness like a teenager outside a 7-Eleven waiting to hit up a grownup to buy beer.

She finally caved to it: she typed “Mac Coltrane” into the search window.

As she’d done at least a half dozen or so times before in her life.

And as with every time she’d done it, her heartbeat picked up speed.

Nothing new was revealed. There was the Mack Coltrane in Nebraska, a smiling professor who was a Sylvia Plath expert. “Maximilian” also yielded exactly nothing beyond the odd mention in old articles about his dad. Lots of those.

His life was pretty inscrutable.

And then a lightbulb pinged on over her head, and she typed in Devil’s Leap, doing the deeper search she ought to have done the other night. She learned that the last known sale price of the parcel at Devil’s Leap was ninety-eight thousand dollars, sold to Graybill Sutherland LLC.

Ah. Mac must have bought it through Graybill. Doubtless he’d had enough publicity to last anyone a lifetime.

She turned toward the window she’d struggled earlier to open a few inches; through it came a grassy-scented breeze and the unmistakable sound of a mail truck trundling down the road. It was about eleven. She decided to go down to the mailbox to see if Enrique had overnighted her anything interesting.

She could feel the house looming behind her as she followed the flagstones down the walk and across the lawn. Maybe not so much looming as . . . peering. In a companionable fashion. Like a loving partner trying to help with the crossword clues over her shoulder, not like some thug hovering behind her at the ATM trying to steal her password.

She slowed her pace when she reached the gate that had clonked her head.

Then stopped.

A man was sauntering up the dirt road parallel to hers, toward Devil’s Leap swimming hole.

Even from a distance she knew instantly it wasn’t Mac. One encounter with him yesterday had reminded her that his presence disturbed the air around her the way bubbles disturbed champagne.

As he drew closer, she saw that this guy was wearing hiking boots with white socks poking out of the tops and a blue baseball cap that said NPR.

And nothing else.

“Morning,” he said cheerily, and touched the brim of his cap. “Nice day for it, huh?”

He sauntered on, whistling something that sounded like that song by The Baby Owls, the one about going around and around in the forest. There was a little spring in his step, a little white cooler in one hand, and a furled striped umbrella and what looked like a rolled towel tucked into his armpit.

She rotated slowly, slowly, slowly, to watch him go.

He had broad shoulders, a big, comfortable hairy stomach that provided a modest awning for his penis, which was nevertheless present and accounted for, unassuming, perfectly ordinary of size and proportion, and minding its own business.

“Morning,” she parroted finally. Faintly.

Though he was already making his jaunty way around the bend in the road and there was no way he could have heard her.

She’d lived in San Francisco a good decade or so, and during that time there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen there. And though it was hardly an everyday occurrence, she was no stranger to naked people cropping up where you didn’t expect to find them. It didn’t really make it any less startling. I mean, you always knew the jack-in-the-box clown was going to eventually pop out of the box when you spun the crank, but didn’t everyone still jump a little each time it did? But no one blinked at anything crazy in San Francisco. And you did get a sense for when something had veered outside the usual tolerable weirdness into the realm of threatening.

This guy hadn’t felt the least threatening.

Frowning thoughtfully, she pivoted back to the mailbox.

And froze.

Two more naked-save-for-hats—his the baseball variety, hers a vast, navy straw-and-polka-dot confection she could have worn to the Kentucky Derby—people were advancing up the road, each carrying a beach tote and a cooler and a rolled-up towel. The woman was wearing those expensive, highly engineered–looking sandals favored by women who had said “up yours!” to the tyranny of fashion in favor of comfort, which made Avalon decide they were about her parents’ age.

“Morning,” they sang out happily.

“Hi!” The effort to sound nonchalant sent Avalon’s voice out about three octaves higher. “Where are you off to on this beautiful day?”

She should have anticipated they would stop.

Dear God, where did she park her eyes? On their eyes.

On their naked, naked eyes.

“Devil’s Leap, dear.” The woman gestured. “That’s where the party is today.”

“Party?”

Behind them, a half dozen or so more naked people had appeared, smiling, chattering, and wearing sensible shoes, sun protection for their heads, and nada in the middle. A quick glance told her that no one had subjected their body hair to the kind of rigorous shaping Casey at the Truth and Beauty, for instance, would have applied. No triangles or hearts or landing strips. It was a free-for-all. The same applied to the bodies.

“But . . . isn’t Devil’s Leap Mac Coltrane’s property?”

“Oh, Mac called me yesterday and said we could hold our clothing-optional weekend at the Devil’s Leap swimming hole. Morty’s been asking him for ages,” the woman in the navy hat told her.

Suddenly it aaalllll made sense.

And like a wishbone she was yanked between feeling incensed and thinking it was the funniest, most original damn thing.

Sauntering in the middle of the nude people was a clothed guy who, by virtue of the glorious way the olive-green long-sleeved T-shirt stretched across his chest and the way a pair of soft, old jeans hugged his hips, seemed more naked than all of them.

“Good morning, new neighbor,” Mac said to Avalon. “I see you’ve met Morton and Helen Horton.”

“Not formally.” It felt odd to use the word formal when nearly everyone in this conversation was naked. “Wait . . . your name is Morton Horton?” She swiveled her head toward him.

“It’s a great name, isn’t it?” he said happily.

“It really is.” There was no denying that, at least.

“Mac here is an old national guard buddy.” Morty jabbed a thumb in Mac’s direction.

Avalon pivoted. “You were in the national guard?”

Mac briefly looked cornered.

Morty answered for him. “Heck yeah. Mac was an engineer. You name it, he can build it, fix it, plan it, finesse it, coax it.”

“I can’t build an imaginary school for grownups to play in on their phones or anything,” Mac said modestly. “Just bridges, engines, buildings . . . things like that.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. Unsurprising, perhaps, to know that Mac had spent a little time on Google and was probably up to speed on Avalon and GradYouAte.

“What happened, Mac? Did you lose a bet? Get drunk and enlist? Flee a paternity claim?”

“Is all of the above an option?” he suggested.

She didn’t answer that, because more naked people were filing down the road.

Avalon cleared her throat. “Okay, now, while I’m not remotely a prude . . .” she began brightly.

Morty’s and Helen’s smiles evolved into something indulgent and sympathetic, a touch cynical. Which was when Avalon realized nothing made a person sound more like a prude than saying “I’m not a prude.”

“Pretty uninhibited, are you?” Mac said idly, flipping through his mail as though he was looking for something in particular.

They all waited politely and with apparent benign interest for her answer.

Mac finally looked up, raising his eyebrows coaxingly. His face was solemn but his eyes were full of wicked, insufferable glints.

She cleared her throat. “I think I’m pretty open-minded and accepting. I mean, I went to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco and I saw a guy leading around another guy who was wearing a leather harness, like a pony. No biggie.”

Now they were all studying her a little skeptically, as if Avalon might be an actual perv. Skeptically, and a little pityingly.

“Oh, honey,” Helen said warmly, “that sort of thing is a little outside of our experience. We just take our clothes off. It’s not much more complicated than that. We don’t put on leather harnesses or anything that might go up our heinies or in our mouths and the like. I imagine they would chafe quite a bit.” Helen rotated her shoulder, apparently imagining it. “We’re not crazy about chafing, as you can imagine, which is one of the points of going clothing optional. But to each his own,” she added magnanimously, laying a gently placating hand briefly on Avalon’s shoulder.

Avalon wasn’t crazy about chafing, either. And her nerves were chafing big-time right now. These naked people were very nice. Even though their presence could spell disaster for her plans to sell the house to Rachel.

“Once the renovations on the house are completed, corporate retreats will be held here, and visiting executives may find nude strollers and swimmers a little startling. Perhaps a bit counter to the image they’d like to be cultivating,” she explained, with as much diplomacy as she could manage.

“I imagine you’ll work something out with Mac about that sort of thing. You seem like a bright, competent young woman.”

Helen was probably a retired schoolteacher. She clearly had an “accentuate the positive” approach to life.

“That’s kind of you to say,” was all Avalon could manage for now. She studiously did not meet Mac’s eyes. She didn’t need to. She could practically feel the rays of his wickedly amused triumph from where she stood.

“I wish Mac would join us. He’s always good for a laugh,” Morty volunteered.

“Me, I’m a little shy,” Mac said. “I’m not uninhibited like Avalon here.”

Avalon shot him a look that by rights ought to have singed his hair.

He gazed back at her with limpid hazel eyes.

Morty gave Mac a little back thump. “Someday you’ll be my age and you won’t give a crap about what anyone thinks you look like. And that, my dear boy, is called being comfortable in your own skin. Maybe it’s why our skin gets looser as we age. It’s metaphorical. It gets roomier outside because we all feel roomier inside.”

And with that philosophical gem he winked at Avalon and gave Mac another chummy back thump and trundled unconcernedly on down the path, Helen alongside him. She called, “Lovely to meet you, Avalon,” over her shoulder, and Avalon was pretty sure she meant it.

“See you at the meeting, Mac!” Morty called.

What meeting? Smartasses Anonymous?

Avalon watched them until they disappeared around the bend in the road that led to the rock.

Morty’s butt was broad and perfectly square, like the cushions on her parents’ living room sofa, and traced by curly hair all around, like Christmas tinsel around a window. It was a sort of Almond Sunrise. Or Winter Blossom. Helen’s butt was reminiscent of a pair of empty, medium-sized handbags hung side-by-side. Morning Latte, she’d call the color. Or maybe Misty Mocha.

They looped their arms around each other and Helen tipped her head against his shoulder and she laughed at something Morty murmured.

Dozens of conflicting emotions assailed Avalon then. Oddly, the most piercing was envy. And if envy was a stab, then yearning was a pull. She knew she was witnessing happiness and comfort and abiding love and two people clearly meant for each other.

And as she watched them stroll off, she was 100 percent certain she’d never known that kind of love as an adult.

She drew in a breath and tore her eyes away from them.

Right up into Mac’s hazel gaze.

She’d startled him in the midst of some fascinating indecipherable expression.

He hadn’t been watching Morty and Helen.

He’d been watching her.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” she said, finally, conversationally. The nonchalance she delivered that with was a supreme effort.

He tipped his head quizzically. “Up to?”

“I mean, I’ve seen naked people before.”

“Yeah?” He dropped his gaze again and feigned abstraction as he leafed through his mail, flyers and periodicals and bills, from the looks of things, and he paused to frown at a manila envelope. “Have you now? In quantity? Good heavens, Avalon Harwood, what kind of company have you been keeping?”

He kept his face lower, but she didn’t miss his little smile.

“Well, you know how San Francisco is.”

He looked up at her then, and something about the shift in his stance told her he was about to deliver a coup de grace. “I happen to know there are no hippies left in San Francisco. They were priced out. They have to import the weirdos and eccentrics and free spirits now, and they go home to other cities during the day. Everyone’s a workaholic and no one thinks about sex. The Summer of Love it ain’t.”

Damn. So he did know how San Francisco was. Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and all those guys wouldn’t recognize the place today.

“Which is why I’m sure your corporate millionaires and other geeks on retreat here in Hellcat Canyon would find an unpredictable parade of middle-aged nudists . . . refreshing,” he continued.

Mac met her eyes, kapow, the better to savor her reaction. “It might make them nostalgic, even, for that time of free love . . . and so forth.”

This was so brilliantly played she was arrested by admiration. She had every faith it would give way to anger in a second or two.

Because the moment he said “sex” that’s all she was thinking about, and yet she couldn’t quite remember the last time she’d had any of that, the same way she couldn’t remember the last time, say, she’d had a piece of toast, though surely it wasn’t that long ago.

She honestly couldn’t think of a single tech worker she knew who could say the word “hippies” without snorting. Or who would willingly whip off their hoodies to reveal their skinny bodies, untouched by the sun in eons thanks to San Francisco weather and all that work. Let alone whip off their undies in front of their coworkers. It would take an awful lot of alcohol or some truly splendid Burning Man–caliber drugs.

Rachel was pretty cool, but she was a businesswoman after all. She wasn’t going to want a property adjacent to a part-time nudist colony.

Avalon was going to have to keep her from coming out here today. She fidgeted with her phone, clutched in her fist.

Mac’s eyebrows went up, urging her to say something.

“You don’t know what you’re up against, Mac,” she said idly.

“Don’t I?” he said softly, sympathetically.

She didn’t like that. It reminded her of the times she’d been up against him. And how it clearly hadn’t meant much to him.

“How’s your head, Harwood?”

“Harder and cooler than ever,” she said tersely.

“You have a little bruise. Blue’s not a bad color for you, though.”

“Such a relief to hear I’m not an eyesore.”

It was like a thousand new suns were born in her chest when he smiled slowly at that.

She fought the feeling as if she was actually being sucked into an orbit. She realized that at no point had Corbin ever made her feel as though she could lose herself in him and not even notice. Her boundaries had never been compromised.

“I hear . . . do I hear chickens?” she said suddenly. That muffled, contented little bock bock sound was almost as good as a cat’s purr.

“Those would be my chickens.”

“You have chickens, too?”

“Yep.”

She was silent, and he studied her face as if she herself were the results of a Google search. “You want to pet them, don’t you? You want to pet them and give them names.”

“No,” she lied, swiftly.

This made the corner of his mouth dent.

Though she did wonder why they didn’t have names. Maybe because he ate them.

She was suffused with a million questions, but equally determined to continue proving she did not give a crap about him. But why had he joined the national guard? She was pretty sure that was at least an eight-year commitment, including active and reserve duty.

Her stomach reflexively contracted at the notion that someone might have shot at him, the same way she’d been panicked at the idea of someone taking away his P-29. She couldn’t help it.

“So how’s your brother? Is he a ‘farmer,’ too?” She air-quoted farmer.

It seemed safer to ask about somebody else first, to go at it obliquely. He might slip up and reveal more about himself. He and Ty had been so close.

“I don’t know,” he said shortly.

“What?” She hadn’t meant to sound surprised.

“I. Don’t. Know,” he repeated evenly, slowly, patiently.

But a chilliness had crept into the words.

“But . . .”

He waited.

He didn’t issue the usual “but what?” as a prompt.

She had a feeling they’d be standing here like this until California broke off into the sea if she didn’t speak. The man was nothing if not stubborn.

So she spoke.

“I’ll give you a hundred thousand for your Devil’s Leap land.”

His eyes flared in surprise. And then something very like bald admiration flickered and heated them. They locked gazes. His became a trifle lazy.

“Silly girl,” he said fondly, finally.

WOW.

It was the perfect response. Because it made her want to deck him, and he knew it.

And he knew she knew why he’d said it.

Which is why his smile got a shade more wicked. Daring her to react. Inviting a response he could parry.

Damn, but he was a competitor, in ways both subtle and overt. He always had been, of course. Perversely, it was as invigorating as walking into a blast of cold air whipping off the sea.

It made her doubly determined to win. I’m no hick from the sticks, Mac. I beat you before and I’ll do it again.

A little rustle made her turn toward the bushes. The brown-and-white cat emerged and sat down next to Mac like a spaniel called to heel.

It was all Avalon could do not to drop to her knees and coo at it. She yearned to pet it.

“Hey, cat,” Mac said nonchalantly to it. It was ridiculous, but in that moment it felt like he was actually rubbing in the fact that he had a pet, even if he couldn’t be bothered to give it a name.

“Well, guess I’ll see you around the grounds, neighbor.” Mac turned around.

The cat did, too.

“Oh . . . I meant to tell you. Whatever you do, don’t go up in the attic.”

And with that enigmatic little warning, he strolled off, whistling a little tune.

It sounded like the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

She sent the text immediately. Then she took her laptop out onto the upper story deck to answer GradYouAte-related emails. They wanted her to approve the revised art for the cheerleader module—which was her idea in the first place, just like GradYouAte. She referred them to Corbin.

But all afternoon pale butts twinkled and flashed in her peripheral vision as bathers scaled Devil’s Leap and leaped merrily into the swimming hole, their peens and boobs cheerfully flapping as they sailed down. KERSPLASH! Laughter swelled and ebbed and echoed, voices cheerfully shouted to each other. All those naked people out there were having the time of their lives. Being who they were. Doing what they loved. Absolutely unashamed.

And here she sat, feeling so hollowed out with vague yearning and restlessness it was a wonder a wandering breeze didn’t coax a note from her, as if she were a didjeridoo.

Finally, she gave up, propped her hand on her chin and glumly watched the frolickers. She scratched beneath her bra strap.

All at once it felt like a little lace-and-wire jail.

She scrabbled underneath her T-shirt and unhooked it as if it were an octopus that had her in its death grip. Then with a series of shrugs she wriggled from the straps and yanked it out of her shirt sleeve, no mean feat, and hurled it in a fit of pique across the deck.

Whereupon it disappeared over the side.

Surprise, surprise. She’d overshot the mark.