She laughs. Who is this man? Is he an academic? Is he flirting? Is she flirting? It’s been so long, Phoebe can’t remember the difference between having fun and flirting. Maybe there is no difference. She lifts up her feet, lets her legs float in the water.

“What about you?” he asks. “How did you better yourself during lockdown?”

She could lie, give him the answers he’s likely been hearing all day, the things she told her colleagues when she got back on campus yesterday. Oh, I wrote a ton during the pandemic. The book is really coming along!

But that is how it happens, she realizes. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she’s spent her entire life just pretending to be great.

“I drank a lot,” she says.

“Did it help?” he asks.

“It helped me not care about the fact that I basically stopped changing my clothes,” she says. “Or that my dissertation was actually a piece of shit.”

She waits for him to break eye contact, to look at his phone, find some excuse to get out of this conversation. But he keeps looking at her, so she continues.

“And my advisor kept emailing me being like, Who cares if it’s a piece of shit! Everybody’s dissertation is a piece of shit. That’s what dissertations are.”

He laughs. “Are you in grad school?”

“I’m a professor.”

“I didn’t know we had a professor in the family.” He looks at her like he’s trying to figure something out. “You don’t look familiar. Are you in the Winthrop family?”

“No.”

“The Rossi family?”

“I’m not actually here for the wedding.”

He looks confused. “I thought Lila said everyone was supposed to be here for the wedding. I distinctly remember that being a very big deal to her.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“So you’re on vacation and you get surprised by a wedding?”

“I’m not here on vacation.”

“This is becoming very mysterious.”

“I came here to kill myself,” she blurts out.

This is the gift random strangers can give you, Phoebe is realizing—the freedom to say or be anything around them. Because who cares? He doesn’t know her, will never know her. He will list all kinds of reasons why she shouldn’t die, and she will tell him that she is not planning to die anymore, and then they will get out of the hot tub and carry on with their lives and never think about each other again.

But all he says is “Shit,” like she stepped in a puddle of mud. It makes what she said sound small and fixable. Like something he understood.

“Perhaps I should have added that I decided not to,” she says.

“That’s actually a pretty crucial detail,” he says. Then he adds, “I shouldn’t joke like that. I’m sorry.”

“No, please. Joke,” she says. “It’s the only part of this that could ever be any fun.”

“May I ask how you were going to do it?”

“Professor Stone, with the cat painkillers, in the Roaring Twenties,” she says.

“Cat painkillers? That’s a little…”

“Cliché?”

“No,” he laughs. “Ineffective. Who uses cat painkillers?”

“Apparently people who are not setting themselves up for success.”

“So, you came all this way to kill yourself with some cat’s painkillers—”

“I mean, it wasn’t just some cat. It was my cat.”

“—and get surprised by a fucking wedding?”

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why I couldn’t do it. That and the lack of room service.”

“Personally, I never kill myself unless there’s room service,” he says.

She laughs—it feels like a cloud slipping out her mouth, floating up to the sky.

“And the air conditioner,” she says, “smelled weird.”

“Say no more.”

Suddenly, it all seems so ridiculous to her. So funny.

“I’m sorry you’ve been in that much pain,” he says. “I know what that can feel like.”

She stares at him. Now she’s the one surprised by his honesty. “Have you ever … tried?”

“Not exactly,” he says. “But I came close. A few years ago, I used to think about it a lot.”

“And now you don’t?”

“Now I don’t.”

“How did you stop?”

“Honestly, I think I just waited. That, and I watched Breaking Bad every night for a month.”

“The therapeutic cures of drug deals gone awry.”

“You joke, but by the end of it, I felt actual relief that I was not Walter White. Like, at least I didn’t shoot myself with my own machine gun after being hunted by my own brother-in-law.”