Page 94 of Mansion Beach

Nicola’s mom is at the far end of the dock now, calling out something about dinner: Will burgers do? That’s all she has on hand.

They call back to her, using the false happy voices they perfected as teenagers to hide if someone was drunk, or high, or sneaking out to meet a boyfriend or girlfriend. Burgers will most definitely do. Burgers will be perfect.

“I’m sending Felicity down to you! So you need to watch her on the dock!”

“Got it!” they call back. “Send her down!”

In an instant Felicity is there, smelling like chocolate chip cookies and summer and childhood, demanding to go swimming, to go in a kayak, to get a yellow Lab puppy like her friend Sophie has. “I want to run up and down the dock,” she says. “Can I do that? Can I run fast?”

Was it already a year ago that Nicola was on a different dock with Juliana, watching the green light go out on her elusive, impossible dream? Was itonlya year ago?

“Tomorrow,” she tells Felicity. “Tomorrow we will do all of that, except no promises about the puppy. Tomorrow, on flat ground, when we’re not so close to the water, we will run faster.”

Later, when everyone else has gone to sleep, Nicola can’t settle. What David told her about Jack is still roiling around in her head, her stomach, even her heart.

She goes to the bathroom, tiptoeing past the room where Shauna and Jasmine are sleeping and the one where Felicity and David aresleeping. Her mom is down the hall. She fills a glass of water in the kitchen and carries it back to her room. When she’s setting it down she sees that the magazine she bought at the market has slipped onto the floor between the bed and the nightstand. She picks it up and flips through it.

And her breath catches. There’s Juliana.Juliana George, founder of LookBook, takes daughter Daisy for a walk in Malibu,says the caption. Juliana is in sunglasses, her dark hair blowing back from her face, a baby carrier secured to the front of her body, only the back of an infant’s head visible. Behind Juliana extends a vast stretch of the Pacific. Nicola has never been to Malibu or anywhere near it, but the mere name is evocative: she thinks of rum, and Barbie’s pink vacation house, and Joan Didion, and movie stars in in their mansions high above the crashing sea.

Juliana’s photo is on a page with six other “celebrity sightings”; no article, no other details, just the photo and the caption. No mention of a partner. No age listed for the baby, Daisy. Nicola stares for a really long time at the photo, trying to read something into it that’s not there. It’s impossible to read Juliana’s expression. The sunglasses hide everything.