And in that moment, Charlotte, too, experienced a falling away; her life fell away, her friends—they fell away. She’d been clinging to them these past weeks, wanting to be like Melanie Trier, like other people. But now she saw, or felt, that this wasn’t possible. She made her choice: Moose, and Michael West. Her secret life. She gave up the rest. The relief was physical, like releasing a long tight breath that had crowded her lungs for too long, letting it go because it was stale, the oxygen was gone. Her uncle looked younger, lean and eager under his slight growth of beard: the boy in the picture again, the water-skier grinning, half submerged. And Charlotte had done it, made him that way again. She was his special student—she felt this. Knew it.