It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.

“It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”

“Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”

They have been all over the world, Lucy thinks, watching the sea. Yet so little of it has stuck with her. She clings to names, to snapshots and matchbooks, but the many seasons have mingled hopelessly. She used to arrange their photographs according to which bathing suit she was wearing—the polka-dotted one in Cannes, the striped red in Spain. But the sand and water around the bathing suits all look the same.