Now that I was under, I also thought about Char, the lines of her dear face and the way that I sometimes caught sight of Lolly Shipley’s baby features in them these days. My years of practicing not looking had been interrupted.

And I thought about how Maddy sometimes looked at me sideways, with a question in her eyes. I had no way to know what Luca had said to her, out there on the swing. Had he told her more than he told the police? He might have. He’d witnessed most of my last encounter with Roux, heard our conversation. He had to know I’d been a client.

Above the water I did not think about these things at all. I was too busy. Oliver was weaned now, and he was walking, too, unsteady and charming on the fat wads of his feet. I was working hard on eating healthily; I’d even asked my meat-and-potatoes husband to try vegetarian dinners with me three nights a week. It wasn’t going perfectly. He only liked it when “vegetarian” meant “swamped in cheese.” Maddy was scoping out colleges, and I was helping; she would be a junior in the fall. At work I was planning the dive trip I was going to lead in Belize come June. Plus, I babysat for Charlotte quite a bit as she learned to be a single parent. I did not have time to think about these things.

But now I was under. I kept my eyes on the shark, and all these things were in me here, down beneath the water.

Last of all I thought of Roux. That winded, sucking noise. Her glossy eyes, gone empty. I wrapped all these thoughts up tight in Roux’s dead arms, and then I let her go. She had such weight, and like a weight she sank.

It would all come back, of course. As would Roux herself. I’d done what I had done, and I would have to live with any hauntings it earned me. Honestly, she was a quieter ghost than Mrs. Shipley. But she would come, carrying home to me all the things I’d wrapped up in her arms.

I would only bring them down again. Open my hands. Let them drift deeper to wait, out of sight but present always. As many times as needed, I would bring them here, and I would let them go.

Maddy tucked her arm through mine, squeezing. I checked my gauges. Eighty-eight feet down, and at this depth we didn’t have a lot of no-stop dive time. In a few minutes, we would need to turn back, make our slow way up the slope, leaving the shark to keep my secrets company.

The bull shark finished her pass and lost interest. She turned away. We didn’t look like anything she ate, and she didn’t care for our noisy bubbles. We stayed vertical, watching her sleek, muscular body undulate and surge. She disappeared into the darkness and the blue. The way everything does, eventually.